An Olympus spokesperson has criticised Nokia’s 41MP smartphone, dubbing it as “utter nonsense.”

In an interview with TechRadar, Olympus’ UK national marketing manager Mark Thackara claimed cramming so many pixels into a smartphone was an ineffective way of getting around photo cropping.

Dedicated cameras feature optical zoom, which allows them to zoom in without compromising the megapixel count. Smartphones cameras on the other hand employ digital zoom, which simply crops the image to provide the illusion the camera has zoomed in. To circumvent this issue, smartphones have been upping their camera’s pixel count, which brings us back to Nokia’s 41 megapixel 808 Pureview.

“It sounds like utter nonsense,” Thackara said. “The size of the lens means that the overall quality of the image will still be restricted.

“It is difficult to say too much without seeing the results though,” he admitted.

“Let’s have a shoot-out under a number of different conditions and see which one wins – let’s try it out against a half decent camera.”

More people are relying on the cameras in smartphones, resulting in lower sales on introductory cams.