Slashdot Mirror
The Nokia 7650 Cell Phone w/ Integrated Camera
Unstrung writes "Nokia has just started shipping, in Europe, its first mobile phone with a digital camera onboard, unleashing on the unsuspecting continent a device with roughly the same mischief-making potential as the office photocopier - but in a package you can take to the bar on a Friday night." It's 640x480, and doesn't look clunky. In short, me want.
This has already happened. Many really major, really spontaneous news events are now caught by amateur photographers, tourists, or anyone who happened to be in range of any kind of camera as a news event was breaking nearby.
I think of the Concorde crash in France, for which most of the really spectacular (albeit morbid) images of the event were captured by people passing by in cars. By the time the professionals got there, they managed to capture the "huge blackened crater" shots that are all we see from most plane crashes. (I do not mean to minimalize the loss of life from this event - plane crashes are very tragic and horrific in nature. I know, because I had to attend a closed casket funeral for a personal role model as a result of one)
The World Trade Center disaster pretty much cemented this phenomenon. As a direct witness of that horror, I think it was very important that there were hundreds of thousands of still and video images taken from countless angles of the destruction of the Twin Towers. This was a disaster affecting many people, and it was quite symbolic that the disaster was witnessed, captured, and expressed by common people through modern photography - alongside the shots that the major news groups and nearby professionals obtained.
Photography is expression, and group expression can be a powerful thing. The proliferation of cameras throughout the world - with all combinations of small, cheap, fast, disposable, easy to use, flexible, high quality, and accurate - is something that contributes to humanity much in the way the printing press did. Or as we hope the Internet does.
There will still be room for professionals. For one thing, we don't want random tourists in the White House or at the Kremlin to take pictures of important meetings and speeches. Also, we don't want the only pics of someone's 74th home run coming from a 640x480 cellphone shot. Finally, future brides-to-be will probably not let you cheap out and have Uncle Mort take the wedding pics.
(I can see Rob Malda talking in a whiny voice: "But Kathleen, honey, it's a 4 megapixel! And it has a timer! Please?")