Mintmaster
Veteran
You're making poor assumptions again. It's Nokia's chip, so they can write drivers for it if they want. BSI sensors usually have DSP built into them, since they're CMOS, so if Nokia wanted to do any processing in hardware, they would.The Lumia 1020 doesn't have the custom ISP from the 808 Pureview, so the integrated ISP from MSM8960 is probably just using a 1920*1080 grid of single 1.1um pixels with no oversampling.
Reviews are also saying that the Lumia 1020 is very slow at taking pictures, a lot slower than the 808, because apparently the oversampling is done on software after the picture is taken.
Again, Nokia suffering from Microsoft's inability to provide support for several hardware combinations in WP8.
It's almost guaranteed that Nokia did this for cost and algorithmic flexibility reasons.
Simple downsampling needs less than two ops per pixel and the MSM8960 should be able to do 5B+ instructions per second with the parallel nature of image processing. I think it's more than likely just poorly optimized coding of fancy algorithms, since image quality was the #1 priority for launch.
EDIT: Take a look at dpreview's Lumia 808 review:
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/8083837371/review-nokia-808-pureview
The Pureview downsampling gave less sharp images than downsampling the 38MP photo in Photoshop.
At 38MP, shot to shot delay was about 3 seconds for the 808. It's 3-4s for the 1020. So not much was lost. My guess is the bus transferring the data is the limitation.
Also, your theory of using single samples for 1080p video would result in horrible aliasing.
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