Remember when camera phones first came out? They were low resolution, the pictures had bad colour reproduction and the idea that they would one day replace your compact camera was laughable.

In the years since then, the quality has improved dramatically. Now you have cameras wedged into phones that only a couple of years ago, you’d have been happy to have in your compact camera. That goes for everything from megapixel count - anything from 5 up to 20 - to the inclusion of a flash that makes it easier to take photos in less than ideal light conditions.

For quick photos, your smartphone has probably replaced the compact camera, but there are times when you are still forced to carry it.

Necause one area where the cameras in phones still fall down is in zoom. Digital zoom, by and large, is fairly rubbish. What you really need to get close to the action and still retain a decent level of quality in the picture is optical zoom. However, that means trying to graft a zoom lens on to a camera, which inevitably makes it bulkier than you’d like.

The compromise? Nokia reckons it has the answer in the PureView camera in its new Lumia 1020, a 41 megapixel camera that allows you to take a high quality picture and uses digital zoom that it claims is equal to a 3x optical zoom that you'd find in a normal camera. Cutting it down to the facts, what it means is that you won't notice a major degradation in image quality when you zoom in.

The secret is in that 41 megapixel sensor. Most people, quite rightly, would look at the figures and think such a high pixel count is overkill for a smartphone camera. And it is, if the camera was delivering you images at that resolution and expecting you to somehow find a way to share them. But the 1020 doesn’t quite do that.

When you take an image, it will create two versions: a 5 megapixel one and a 38 (or 34, depending on the aspect ratio of your shot) megapixel high resolution file. The 5 megapixel version is for immediate sharing - uploading to Facebook, emailing to friends, putting on Twitter. The other photo is kept on the camera as an archive if you like. What it means is that you can go back to that photo at any point, crop it, zoom in, all without it looking like a pixelated mess.

It takes data from several pixels and combines it into one, so it reduces the pixel count on the image, but not the detail.

It’s all done through Nokia’s Pro Cam app, which is the better of the three camera apps on the phone. There’s the Smart Cam app too, which allows you to create drama shots and animated photographs, or remove a moving object or two, but the Pro Cam is by far the better photography app. It takes a few seconds to load and can be a little sluggish, but once it gets going, it’s almost worth the effort.

It’s also the app that loads when you hit the camera button, which is helpful; otherwise, the presence of three different camera apps can get a little confusing - adnd that’s before you get into the panaorma or cinemegraph app.

Pro Cam gives you full manual control over setting such as ISO, white balance and shutter speed, and does it in an easy to access way.

There's a Xenon flash to give you a bit more light, without the blue hue that smartphone LED flashes give off. And there's image stabilisation too, to reduce shake.

And Nokia has included things you never thought you’d need in a smartphone camera. For example, if you zoom in to take a photo and then decide immediately after that maybe that’s a bit too close, you can zoom out on the captured photo and restore it, even though you may have thought that additional area was lost to the camera.

Battery life, meanwhile, is respectable. That’s a thumbs up for Nokia, because there’s little point in creating a good camera for a phone if the battery doesn’t last long enough to use it in anything but short bursts.

Of course there are downsides. The camera comes with a price - a lens that adds a bit of bulk to the rear of the phone, rather than the simple, sleek back of the rest of the Lumia range. So when you place your phone on a flat surface, there’s a bit of wobble.

But it’s a minor quibble if you want a really good camera.

One area where Nokia needs to rethink things is the storage. The Nokia 1020 comes with 32GB of internal storage, 7GB of space on Microsoft’s SkyDrive for free..and that’s it. You can’t expand the storage with a memory card, which is a shame, because if you take a large amount of photos - and this phone certainly encourages you to - that space is going to be eaten up fairly quickly. And that’s before you take into account the high definition video you can shoot on the 1020. The free SkyDrive space just doesn’t cut it; besides which, you need to use a USB cable to get at those 34 megapixel high-res images. So that’s a negative point.

Camera aside, the Lumia 1020 is as solid a Windows Phone as I’ve seen. There’s nothing too startling about the software, but nothing overly frustrating either, if you’ve become used to the quirks of Windows Phone 8. It’s got office, One Note and Internet Explorer, along with Nokia goodies such as Nokia Here Drive + and Nokia Music.

The 1020 may not be the phone that convinces the Windows Phone haters that the platform is worth investing in, but that would be a tall order for any device. It may, however, sway one or two people off the fence towards Microsoft and Nokia.

This won’t replace your digital SLR - there’s no beating some good glass, and the 1020 hasn’t quite mastered interchangeable lenses - but it might give your compact camera pause for thought.

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