True Color in Real Time: The Challenge of Mobile Imaging

rocannon writes "A mobile phone with a color display and built-in camera - it's the quintessential info-imaging tool. But communicating accurate color at high-speed data rates and rendering color on displays that do not deliver even standard screen color rendition are still challenging. Kodak explains why photo and color science are as important as clock speeds and data rates in this expanding market."

Comments

Mobile camming

[TheSync]

My wife has used a mobile webcam I built from a tablet computer, a USB microcam, using CDPD communications.

One of the biggest problems we found was battery power, always a problems with computers, but enhanced due to the power sucked by the webcam (lots of pixels to move to the computer at high bandwidth, even if they are just to be compressed using JPEG), and the power sucked by CDPD transmission. Of course, the cam was sending out an image every 5 minutes or so, and the camera was "always on."

I think the naysayers on the camera wireless phones are totally wrong. I don't expect everyone to purchase a camera phone, but I think a lot of people (especially young people and several business niches) will. It's really fun!

The uses of a camera phone do not intersect much with a high-quality megapixel digital camera used for "archival quality" pictures. PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...a bunch of friends at a bar (which will totally change Mardi Gras!), to show a potential purchase while shopping, to show a map with directions, to see if you like the night club, or a "hey I'm in Vegas, look" call while travelling.

Re:Mobile camming

[droleary]

PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...

So the market is people who don't really need pictures at all? Good luck with that. It seems to me this "feature", just like text messaging, is being pushed by a culture that just doesn't understand Americans. Just because SMS is all the rage in Norway and the Japan has the highest per capita camera ownership doesn't mean some asshole American like myself simply doesn't want to have just a phone to, you know, fucking talk to people. If you want to have these devices Bluetooth (or whatever) data to each other, fine. But it makes me sick to think where cell phones could be if only they'd focus on the phone instead of trying to make it a GameBoy, too.

Only Sony gets it

[rtstyk]

Out of the Palm based PDAs Sony has the best screen. Someone said here that geeks don't care about what it looks like as long as it can do it. Well I'm not buying this. What it looks like is VERY important. I wanted to by a new PDA but they still insist on 160x160 resolution with sucky colors. Why should I switch from my 2 year old handspring? More effort should be put into the displays everywhere. And not only what they look like but also how they perform battery-wise.