Nokia 9 PureView camera night mode in doubt due to "camera subsystem design", says company

The Nokia 9 PureView is the world’s first smartphone with five cameras. Even before it arrived, the numerous leaks had already positioned it as a camera-oriented phone.

The Penta-lens camera system works simultaneously to capture RAW images with up to 240MP of data and an impressive field of depth that goes up to 1200 layers, things you won’t find in any other smartphone.

But even with all these goodness, the Nokia 9 PureView is still not the perfect smartphone camera out there. Matter of fact, the phone lacks a feature that is hard to miss on major high-end phones of today – a dedicated night mode in the camera app.

The camera night mode feature was originally slated to arrive as part of the update to Android 10. But when the OS rolled out earlier this month, the feature was MIA.

As usual, concerned Nokia 9 owners asked the company about the availability of the feature and a Nokia Mobile representative responded on Twitter and said it was coming soon.

Nearly two weeks later and nothing to show off, another concerned Nokia 9 owner asked company CPO Juho Sarvikas about the dark mode status and to everyone’s shock, he implied that there won’t be such an update for this device.

Hi dOrso, due to the camera subsystem design, we can not leverage “low light algorithm” on top of the fusion of that the system already does. In other lighting conditions, if you get a .jpeg result you don’t like, keep .dng (raw) capture on and revisit it in Lightroom.

Ignoring the photography jargon in Sarvikas’ response, what is obvious from his statement is that there won’t be a dedicated night mode in the Nokia 9 PureView camera app for low-light photography.

Instead, the company recommends using the Adobe Lightroom application to improve the photos captured in low light as a workaround, but of course, people are not happy at all.

So there will not be any camera update for N9… ??.. disappointed..
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This is indeed very disappointing. The auto mode in dark lighting is almost unusable. Especially if you for some reason mistakenly (why would you use the flash in dark setting?) use the flash.
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What a waste of good hardware, love the phone, but this is a deal breaker, you cannot complete with the likes of Apple, Google or Samsung without it, on a “Flagship” phone no less, it’s embarrassing. Should have waited to use the Pureview name on a proper phone, back to Samsung.
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In other words, they won’t even add night mode to Nokia9 or improve slow camera processing after taking photos. What a disappointment. This was my last Nokia.
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We will keep an eye on this story and let you know in case HMD has a change of mind and decides to push the camera night mode feature to the Nokia 9 PureView. Meanwhile, stay tuned to our Nokia section for more coverage.

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