Oh, three cameras isn’t enough to stuff inside of a smartphone? Well, then, how about five? That’s what Nokia did with the 9 PureView device, which has two color cameras and a trio of black-and-white sensors, all of which fire for every shot. You don’t get five separate levels of zoom or anything like that. Instead, the device snaps five simultaneous shots and then mashes all that image data together to make one really sharp image that’s loaded with detail. The monochrome sensors help with things like contrast and sharpness at object edges. It also helps keep highlights from blowing out and shadows from going pure black (which is called “clipping”). Those extra cameras can also help with capturing things like depth information for faking backgrounds blur.

The initial test images I’ve seen actually look a little too sharp, which is to say that the edges are so defined that the pictures can look harsh. But, surely users will have options for tweaking the look of their photos down the road.