Ari Partinen has vast experience in mobile imaging

May 9, 2014 09:50 GMT  ·  By

Finland-based camera design engineer and photo enthusiast Ari Partinen has joined Apple from Nokia, where he perfected the PureView cameras on the latter company’s smartphones. Lately part of the Lumia range, the PureView camera technology is renowned for its high-quality camera, and Apple seems to be interested in bringing some of that oomph over to its own smartphone line.

Formerly Senior Lumia engineer at Nokia, Ari Partinen has just confirmed to his relatively few Twitter followers that he’s embarking on a new mission that will take him to Cupertino, California. After mentioning only the location of his upcoming workplace, he quickly returned to clarify that he is indeed taking up a job at Apple.

Partinen will start working for the iPhone maker in June, and he will most likely join Apple’s hardware engineering team with duties involving the iSight camera on the expensive smartphones.

His specialty is field of mobile imaging and he’s currently working with “image quality characterization and tuning on camera module level.”

He states on his LinkedIn page, “My current position has given me a good understanding of camera component production and quality control on global scale. I have also comprehensive knowledge about Image Quality testing and tuning on ISP level from very successful Nokia 808 PureView and Nokia N8 projects.”

“I have worked with mobile imaging starting from camera module production all the way to the final image quality tuning and verification so I have very good overall understanding about the mobile imaging business. I have also worked several years as a commercial photographer so also high end imaging is familiar for me,” he adds.

Partinen’s resume speaks for itself, so it doesn’t really matter what company he’s coming from. His current employment status still says he’s on Nokia’s payroll: “Lumia Photography Lead at Nokia.” However, that title will soon change to something that will reflect his new position within Apple.

Apple was so far known to be planning minor improvements to its iSight camera for the upcoming iPhone 6, but considering its decision to recruit the highly-experienced PureView imaging expert, we may be in for a surprise.

The Cupertino giant has been reluctant to increase the pixel count on its iSight imaging sensors, preferring to tweak the optics (lenses) instead, while also enhancing the aperture to allow for more light to pass through. PureView technology, however, relies on high-resolution sensors with on-chip processors that perform image scaling with oversampling to enable improved digital zoom. The technology also leverages high-resolution Zeiss all-aspherical 1-group lenses.