photoblogography - Just some stuff about photography

camera phones

, Monday, July 28, 2003
For some time I've been wondering when the worlds of consumer digital cameras and camera phones will collide. When will consumers realise that (a) it's quite nice to send photos from where ever you are, immediately, but (b) the quality they'll get at present is awful. Camera phones basically ship with very poor quality VGA (at most) sensors, which are pretty much useless for anything other than MMS. However, at some point resolution improvements will become a driver for boosting upgrade desirability, and resolution will creep into the low end digicam range (1 - 2 Megapixel). At this point will we see "name" camera manufacturers such as Nikon, Fuji and Canon appearing in the cellphone market ? Actually one company is already there - Sony - but Sony has a lot of irons in the fire (and another - Panasonic... maybe a vanity camera phone with a Leica badge ?). The camera and Bluetooth equipped Sony Clie PDAs, associated with a small but well designed Bluetooth cellphone, would in my opinion make a nice combination. Then again SonyEricsson have the P800 ... a phone which manages to pack a lot of average to poor functionality in a fragile and clumsy form factor. Any what about adding Bluetooth and a TCP/IP stack to a Sony digicam (actually I though this had been promised long ago...) ? Modularity seems way out of fashion at the moment. And at the consumer level at least, there doesn't seem to be any truly satisfying way (yet) to send photos on the move.
Posted in on Monday, July 28, 2003 at 10:55 AM • PermalinkComments ()