Nokia and Carl Zeiss announced on Wednesday that the two companies will extend their exclusive partnership to design high-end smartphone cameras. The partnership, which first began in 2005, will continue for an undisclosed period of time. The extension comes just as Nokia announced that its high-end PureView 808, featuring Carl Zeiss optics, will begin rolling out this month.

Zeiss has a long history of making high-end lenses for photography, as well as microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific applications. The first fruit of its partnership with Nokia was the N90 smartphone. Most recently, Zeiss aided in the optical design of the N8, N9, and PureView 808 flagship smartphones.

The PureView 808 couples a high-resolution lens with a large, 1/1.2" 41 megapixel sensor. The resolution exceeds that of even top-end digital SLRs available today, but largely relies on the high pixel count to produce 5 megapixel images with increased sharpness and color accuracy with reduced noise. However, Zeiss optics are capable of producing sharp, full-resolution images in bright light.

"Carl Zeiss was a crucial partner in the creation of the first PureView experience," Jo Harlow, executive vice president of Nokia Smart Devices, said in a statement. "The benefits of our ongoing collaboration will be more PureView innovation and further advancements in smartphone imaging in the coming months and years."

While the PureView 808 runs Nokia's now deprecated Symbian mobile operating system, Nokia has said that it will bring the PureView technology to future Windows Phone models.