The way these cameras work together is, conceptually at least, a lot like traditional HDR modes. Instead of one camera stitching together multiple exposures, though, the Nokia 9 collects and combines image data from each of those five cameras to produce more nuanced photos. In case you're not so great at math, that's a lot of information to process at once — we're talking between 60 and 240 megapixels of data per photo, all of which gets churned into a single file. (Since this is a phone for people who really care about photography, you can naturally also save all your images as RAW files.) The other benefit of having all these cameras is that, together, they produce a much more sophisticated depth map of whatever's in your frame, so you're given options to very minutely tweak the level of bokeh in your photos once they've been captured.

I'll be honest: the conditions on the day I tested the Nokia 9 PureView were pretty lousy. Clouds were hanging low in the sky and rain threatened us for most of the morning, leading to lots of distinctly gray images. Even so, I was impressed with the clarity and nuance in most of my shots — they were detailed to the point where I kind of got tired of seeing my own pores. Aside from stitching that image data together, the Nokia 9 didn't seem to unnecessarily saturate my photos like other smartphones tend to, either. That's not to say you won't find bright colors here; it's just that they never feel out of touch with reality.