Nokia hopes high-performance cameras will give its smartphones the edge

Nokia raised the bar for camera smartphones with its 808 PureView smartphone. Nokia 808 PureView was the first smartphone in the world to pack in a 41-megapixel camera sensor. Now, the Finnish smartphone maker is planning to raise the stakes of the game a notch higher.

As per a news report by Bloomberg, Nokia's venture- capital arm is plans to invest in Pelican Imaging, a California-based startup that has designed an 'array camera'. Array camera comprises of multiple small cameras, which are organised in an array. With the help of this approach one can pack in larger number of megapixels in a small area.

What makes Pelican Imaging a good catch for Nokia is the fact that the company has also mastered the software that helps in binding these multiple resulting images together.

Smartphones of today are getting slimmer by the day and with the help of this technology one will be able to fit in a great megapixel camera without the bulge.

Under its Lumia series, Nokia is already offering Nokia Lumia 920, which comes with a 8.7-megapixel PureView camera. Additionally, there are rumours of a 41-megapixel Windows smartphone being in the works. With the help of Pelican Imaging proficiency in its smartphones, Nokia can hope to push the envelope even further.

The first most obvious thing that Nokia can achieve through Pelican Imaging expertise is to make sure that its high-end camera smartphones are lighter and slimmer than its current range of smartphones. The company can then also work at getting the smartphones with good camera to be more economically priced and thus make a mark in emerging markets such as India and Philippines.

This is not the first sizeable investment that Nokia is doing in the smartphone camera sphere. In July last year, Nokia had taken over Scalado, which is an imaging-software maker In the last year, Nokia had also invested in InVisage Technologies Inc. and Heptagon with the objective of giving it an edge on this front.

Nokia seems to be pretty aggressive in making sure that it is offering a good camera experience to its smartphones users and this could well shape up to be a good differentiating factor for the company as it struggles to compete against Apple and Android smartphones.