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Samsung Producing 5 Megapixel Camera Phone
Shippy writes "Straight from Yahoo News on the other side of the pond comes a story about Samsung's latest creation: a five-megapixel camera phone. This is pretty cool considering it's a pretty big jump from the camera phones that are currently available (many max out around 1.5 megapixels). It's expected to be available by the end of the year, but only in South Korea. I doubt it'll take long for a domestic carrier to pick up on this hot new toy." Other readers submitted a closeup picture and the company press release.
...has a charge-coupled device camera and high-sensitivity flash which allow users to take high-quality pictures. It can also function as a camcorder.
One of the biggest problems of camera phones is poor flash (if the phone has one AT ALL).
Until phone manufacturers make phones with a good quality Xenon strobe flash, 5 MP still doesn't mean anything if the lighting conditions stink. (See this month's issue of PC World for a little blurb on possible developments of Xenon strobe flashes in camera phones.)
But that thing looks really bulky. TV Out though?
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Getting philosophical on Thursday morning: At what point does it cease to be a Camera Phone, and become a Phone Camera? 5 megapixels seems like a good place to start. You could definitely use this as your "main" digital camera, and occasionally use the phone functionality, as needed.
For people like me who rarely use a cell phone, and don't really want one, a Phone Camera might be the ideal solution!
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That's starting to look more like a camera with a phone builtin than the other way around. It looks rather big. And it's not really a pretty design either.
According to Engadget where I first read about this a week ago this phone will never be made available here.
Did anyone notice that the phone uses cdma2000. Carriers such as Verizon, Sprint and US Cellular use CDMA so this phone will work in the US. But the last time I tried to hookup a privately owned CDMA phone with Sprint and US Cellular they refused stating that if it didn't have their company name on the phone then they would activate it. I would hat to spend probably a grand (couldn't find the price) on the phone and not be able to use it. Then again, I don't know which is worse, I would hate going with a mobile phone carrier that wouldn't allow me to activate it.
The definition of megapixel is slippery. Sometimes these companies allow for interpolation for some reason (they are liars!). Some camera, such as the Foveon, only have 3.1 megapixels but behave like a much higher megapixel camera. This one I can't tell about what is the reality.
My Nokia 7610 is pretty handy with its 1.3mb camera. It comes in useful for moments when a normal camera isnt feesable or you forget! I for one can't wait to see this on the market.
You can get the pictures off the damn thing.
I recently got myself a Motorola v220. Got a cute little 640x480 camera on it. Only problem is the only way to get the photos from the phone to my computer [or any other storage] is to either buy the 70$ software from motorola [that should have come with the phone] and run windows [something else I don't do] or pay 5 cents per kilobyte to email myself the picture.
So 5M pixel camera is likely to make "slightly larger" files. If I want to pay a couple of bucks to get each photo off the camera this might be a good idea.
Best thing they can do is make the thing act like a usb-disk to get maximum portability.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
And what of battery life? Sure, if you're a regular user, you'll be charging your phone after a day's work, but what if you don't? Most phones these days have anywhere between 2 and 4 hours of talktime. What happens when you throw in a 5MP camera into that equation?
Its not necessarily bad, but the size difference between this product and the current camera-phones makes it more like a camera that one can make phonecalls from rather than a phone that takes pictures.
Sony Ericsson T105.. ;)
I'm one of those "First celly, no bullshit"-types.
They like putting these little rubber pads over the recharge contacts, so you have to remove them before putting the phone on the charger. They aren't connected to the phone, as they easily could be, so they are easily lost. You have to pull them off with a little rubber tab. The tab gets worn out and pulls off, and then it takes some work with a pin or pencap every time you want to remove the rubber pad. And the recharge contacts don't look they would do well in a pocket full of change, lint et cetera.
This is one of a number of reasons I will never own another Samsung phone. They have numerous engiineering features that I find extremely annoying.
...I doubt it'll take long for a domestic carrier to pick up on this hot new toy
Uhhh....where have you been for say, the entire history of the wireless world? Japan and South Korea have consistantly been about two years ahead of the US in this technology. The blame almost surely rests on the shoulders of the carriers, with about 25% of that being the consumers fault. Why would Motorola spend big dollars licensing that tech when consumers are still perfectly happy shelling out $300 for phones with 0.3MP camera's in them? The same argument applies to the rest of the market.
We, the consumers are locked into a rut where we don't quite have the money to start pushing the 6 month product cycle. Until we start upgrading our phone everytime a new model comes out, the carriers are still going to maintain high prices with slow product upgrades. Right now the mentality is that the average cell user signs a year contract and then never upgrades the phone during that year. With no drive to upgrade, there is no drive to innovate. With no innovation, there is no competition. With no competition, prices will stay rediculously high. And we, the consumer, will keep paying $300 for 2 year old technology.
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I thought modern cell phones were supposed to be getting smaller that thing looks bigger than my first (candybar-style) phone from seven years ago.
It would be pretty awesome if it could stream video off a network and into your TV in real time. Or even just to use as a monitor for your recording. (Though it would need some decent storage space.) Looks decent, even if a bit bulky it's acceptable camera size for me. I wonder if it's programmable, just get MAME on it like those DIgita OS cameras could do and you'd have a pretty geeked out hybrid going on. Hell, throw in an mp3 player too for good measure.
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Everyone looks at the number of megapixels, while almost no one ever thinks about the optics. Even if they cram a billion megapixels into that thing, the pictures won't be very good if they're using a tiny little fixed focus lens. Even more so given the likely quality of that lens.
"Quality like a top-end digital camera", indeed.
So is that a Samsung Anycall in your pocket, or are you just really happy to see me?
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its a waste if thats its only selling feature, it would need a decent lens and a flash plus none of this extra crappy software and USB cable you have to buy in order to use it like a camera.
My dad recently got a SAGEM camera phone, it doesn't work with macs and SAGEM have told me they are not going to release anything in the foreseeable future for the mac. Its only good now for showing people in the pub or at work rather than transfering any of the photos off it.
Good job he bought himself a real camera a week before.
Jonathanjk.com
There is a problem with everyone having cameras at all times (on their phones): everything, EVERYTHING becomes a photo moment, with the requisite posing, commentary, and "destruction" of the real connection with whatever you were trying to experience.
Everywhere I go (here in Tokyo), everyone takes pictures of everything, all the time. This turns a simple lunch, night out with drinks, or my wedding party into an extended photo shoot, with everyone taking turns shooting a group photo with their mobile phone/camera. It never occurs to anyone there is this thing called the Internet through which they could share one nice picture among else. *sigh*.
5M pixel cameras will only worsen this problem-- all of those people who (before) only took quick stupid shots because they knew the quality was poor will (now) switch to shooting entire photo albums from the minutae of their sardine-packed train commutes.
There are phones here with TVs in them, but my favorite is the karaoke phone
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... voyeurs that want to take high quality pics of women they'll never get to talk with :(
...on the other side of the pond...
Just FYI, "across the pond" always refers to the Atlantic Ocean.
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Seriously, who else actually needs a camera phone? As if cellphones weren't already sufficiently annoying.
Here are a few more pictures of the device.
A high pixel count is great, but if you want a good picture, you need good optics.
now my sneaky bathroom phone pr0n will be less pixelized!
feh. stuff.
At this point, wouldn't having a good digital camera that included basic cell phone capabilties be smarter?
Putting a camera in a phone is cool, but putting a GPS in a phone would be cool AND useful.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I bet Verizon picks this up.
Of course, they'll reduce the camera to 2.0 megpixels, cripple the OS, and in addition to the half dozen Verizon logos on emblazoned on the phone, they'll make sure there's at least another half dozen built in to the phone, usually doing something incredibly obnoxious, like alternating displays with the clock...
What of the battery life? The 5MP won't matter, since you're burning more juice lighting up that backlit QVGA truecolor monster.
The rush to higher density CCD's is insane.. but it's an easy number people seem to be able to understand. The optical lenses used are often much more important once you go beyond a certain threshold, e.g. 3-4MP. What's next, a 8MP camera phone? Why?
Camera phones have a limited ability to hold focusing and zoom lenses, and the sooner people understand this the better.
..don't panic
That sliding case would sufficiently protect the lens from pocket scratches.
but does it run freebsd?
The end of the article says this:
"South Korea's top mobile carrier, SK Telecom, said it would introduce 10-megapixel camera phones produced by Samsung by the end of this year." If this isn't a mistake then this is quite a staggering rate of change in camera phones.
Not being an optics expert, I still have to wonder whether the quality of pictures from a 5 mp camera will be wasted with the typically small and cheap-looking lenses on these phones.
Is this going to be an issue on these devices, or have manufacturers been able to mass produce high quality optics so that even 16 megapixel cell phones will be affordable and useful?
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Cool, another camera I can't own because I can't take it to work for security reasons. Thanks Samsung!
Speak truth to power.
I coulda sworn I was in the "library" *ahem* reading our local weekly ad paper and saw that Bell World up here in Canada was offering a Samsung camcorder phone. Wouldn't this be the same one? They also said it was a Bell exclusive and that they were the first ones to get it.
problem is you need a sizeable lens to get 5mega pixels worth of image. It'd need something like the colapsed lens of the newer creditcard digicams.
I've got an older 3 megapixel phone - I mean - camera, and at 3 megapixel, my images come out to about 1.5 megs.
If you're going to try to shoot/save/xfer 5 megapixel shots, without forking over bucks to tx them through the air, it's going to need either a usb port, or a memory card to get the pix off the phone. Also, it's going to need a fair amount of memory onboard, so you can shoot more than just 5 pictures and be done.
The problem with the mem card is it's one more item to fall out and get lost.
My 2 on the subject.
Tell me - if you put a black panel against white wall and snap it in the focus - how many _pixels_ would the border be? 10? 20? 100?
BTW - the simple rule is that you need only 1 MP per 10 sq.in. of print for _critically_ sharp images, i.e. those that best of modern printing equipment can realistically produce. For printing in your photolab (moreso inkjet) you can divide that by 4 safely. The question is that all those MPs from the camera are somewhat fake, see above.
PS: What's the matrix size of that phone, anyway?
What about the lens? How many glasses does it have for instance? What's the speed?
Just FYI, "across the pond" always refers to the Atlantic Ocean.
In Atlantic countries that may be true.
Meanwhile in the Pacific "across the pond" means "across the Pacific". That is why Telstra calls their ISP business BigPond.
.
Our ocean is bigger than your ocean.I am sick of seeing announcements for new consumer grade digital cameras with 1 more megapixel than the last one, and no other improvements. And doing the same thing with camera phones is even worse.
I was really pleased when Nokia released the Nokia 1100 phone, no camera, no polyphonic ringtones, no colour screen. Just normal functionality and an excellent battery life (and somewhat strangely, a built in flashlight).
One of the major concerns with cameras in lens size. Small lenses just can't gather enough light, so the gain has to ramped to give a bright enough image, which leads to lots of noise.
Small lenses also cause a lot of edge distortion, and the chances are the lens won't be aspherical, so the chromatic distorion is terrible.
I'm sure 5 MP looks good in the marketing literature though.....
C-x C-s C-x k
Adding a 5mp camera to a telephone has been done mainly for marketing reasons. People who don't know anything will see the bigger number and think that it's better. The problem is, you need VERY decent optics to take advantage of a sensor with a 5 megapixel resolution. The TINY lenses that you will *always* get in a camera phone (unless you want your phone to be the size of a brick) will never be able to do justice to a 5mp CCD. Apart from anything else, a lens that's only a few millimeters across cannot gather enough light to let the camera expose the picture for a short enough time for it to still be sharp at that resolution. What I'm trying to say is, your pictures will have camera shake nearly all the time - even when a normal camera with a decent lens wouldn't have even used it's flash.
Basically - don't bother spending money to get a phone with 5mp instead of 1mp. 1mp is fine for instant snaps to put on your blog, but you're never going to want to print out your holiday-of-a-lifetime photos taken on a telephone with a 5mp camera coupled with a 3mm plastic (or glass if you're lucky) lens. Especially if said lens has been in your sweaty pocket for a few months and smashed against the tarmac a few times!
If you want decent photos, get a decent camera with a decent zoom lens.
Don't try and take photos you want to print out with your telephone! That's NOT what telephones are for - contrary to popular media hype.
I recommend http://www.dpreview.com/ for reviews of digital cameras.
It doesn't matter how many billion mega-pixels there are if you're shooting through a dirty, smudged, tiny piece of glass.
I opted for a lower megapixel (6.4) SLR rather than a higher MP compact camera, so that I could experiment with filters, and different lenses. I'm not saying that my pics are any better, mind you.
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I'd say the whole goddamn camera phone is going to suck.
The tendancy: ALL camera phones are going to suck. Digicams will suck less. DSLR's will suck just a little. Expensive DSLR's will suck a tiny bit. DSLR's with expensive optics won't hardly suck at all.
What's the point of making a big ass 5MP file when the optics AND the sensor (size) sucks? Planning on blowing that up to 8x10 and framing it? No one does that with point-n-shoot pictures (or, I hope not). People are FAR less inclined to print digital pictures, much less ones from their phones. Therefore, 5MP is simply a marketing thing.
Yes, I am a camera snob. That doesn't change the fact that a cheap camera phone with cheap glass and a tiny sensor is going to make crappy images with chromatic abborations, sensor noise, etc.
Go to www.bhphotovideo.com some time and check out the Canon or Nikon lenses. You can quite easily drop the equivalent of the cost of several laptops into ONE lens. Not a camera - a LENS. The reason: cheap lenses are inexpensive. Good lenses are expensive. There is no current way around that - only compromises.
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I read in the newspaper before that it has 6 megapixels.
Well, for one printed media is faster than the web with news.
Given the prevalence of camera phones in Japan, does anyone there try to ban their use in places like washrooms, change rooms, movie theatres, etc? Is it even possible to get a "pure" cellphone (no camera or fancy extras) in Japan these days?
Eric
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Speaking from a purely film camera perspective, since I've not yet bought a digital
I recently upgraded to an SLR from a little point-and-shoot camera because I routinely exceeded the capabilities of the lenses in certain contexts (zoom, low light, fast motion) and it was really annoying me.
The difference in optics between a 35mm SLR and a 35mm point-and-shoot is huge. Unless they've come up with some really awesome optics, I'd be surprised if the camera-phone can gather enough light to be good enough.
When I buy a digital camera, it will be a single-purpose device, not some amalgum of things. Then again, I'm probably not their target market anyway.
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If I had a 5-megapixel camera-phone, there'd be two things I'd worry about: 1. Vibration- It always seems I can't keep my hands still when I photograph, and I can't imagine using a monopod or even a tripid with a cellphone. 2. Flash- It always takes a lot of battery, so I can't imagine the life would be very long. 3. Zoom- You're not going to have a very good zoom on something fitting in your pocket. Of course, with a camera phone you're not trying to take good pictures, just those spur of the moment ones before I get the good one out.
Even if it is 10 MP. If you have 5 MP and a crap lens with small aperture, little or no zoom, made of plastic, one or 2 elements, your pictures will still be crap.
A phone does not lend itself to a good 3X lens because of the bulkiness, complexity and cost of such a setup.
The only good news here is that the price of 5 MP CCDs is dropping to the extent that they made their way to phones.
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Ya know, with 5mp, suddenly a decent-looking digital zoom (when the output stays 640x480) becomes possible. You can't zoom optically in something this small, but you sure can digizoom it. Even with cheesy optics, that's got to be a selling point.
After all, it'll be a while before we regularly trade 2Mb photos with our pals on their cellphones with 120x240 screens.
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SPH 2000 That's a picture that comes from theis link: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200407 /200407110024.html
Design is not the greatest (though personally, I still like it better than Nokia's phones) but it's an interesting approach to the idea.
PS yes I am aware that this phone's camera is only 3.2 MP, but it's the 3xOptical zoom plus the size of the lens that interests me.
For a 5 megapixel camera, you'd think that someone would take a higher resolution snapshot, Jesus H. Christ.
I assume that this means 5 million picture elements. Arranged in some sort of rectangular pattern.
But does it mean 1600 lines of 3000 pixels in each line? And if so, what is the resolution of each pixel? Is it 24 bits per pixel? That is, 8 bits of resolution each color red, green, blue ( or the equalivant three primary colors for recording images rather than generating images) like VGA? Or is it 4 bits per pixel with a predefined palatte of color shades?
Before everyone jumps on my case and calls me an idiot, a moron, 'go back to AOL, shit-for-brains', ect..., let me just say that I don't trust anything that the consumer electronics industry advertises any more in its product spec sheets. I just don't believe anything that they say. It's worth it to be called an idiot by thousands of geeks in exchange for a single nugget of real and valid technical expertise on a new digital consumer product.
I pick up the newspaper every Friday and there's this big beautiful 4 page color advertising insert from Fry's Electronics. And every week they feature portable CD players and point out the fantastic tech specs with bullets. Stuff like the 1-bit Digital-To-Analog convertor internally!! So much more advanced over anything that you can get anywhere else!?!
Just because a product is released in Korea, doesn't mean Samsung will try to sell it in the United States. Cell phones are HUGE in Korea, some people switch phones every few months. IMHO it is very unlikely that we will see this phone in the US.
Many people seem to think that MP is directly proportional to image quality. Not so. The MP is part of the equation, but mostly tells you how big your pictures can be (print sizewise). The real quality lies in the image processing capability, the size of the CCD, and the kind of lens that the camera uses.
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Other Slashdotters have rightly pointed out that this is approaching the absurd, given that the camera has a) a weak flash; and b) very little glass (small and likely low quality lenses).
It should also be noted that the CCD is probably pretty tiny, too.
Question: What do you get when you combine low-to-moderate ambient light levels with a poor flash, a fairly small aperture lens, and a tiny, overdriven CCD with miniscule pixels?
Answer: Crappy images. I shudder to think how noisy those pictures are going to be. Sure, you can average groups of pixels--say, in 2x2 blocks--to smooth out the noise, but then you're back to a 1 megapixel camera anyway.
The press release meanwhile states that the phone will "take the same quality pictures one gets from a top-end digital camera." Idiots. I bet it drops calls, too.
~Idarubicin
Seriously, the most important part of a camera is the lens. A phone camera would be obvious. The lens will be relatively large. It's location will be optimal for taking pictures. The phone functions will be squeezed around it. This is still a camera phone. Despite the megapixels, the lens is tiny. The camera functionality is squeezed around the phone functions.
It is closer then earlier versions though. It looks like one should be able to hold the unit properly when taking pictures. You will have have to becuase with so many pixels and such a small lens, they are not going to get much light.
...easy, really ;-)
Um. Who cares? I don't want a telephone that makes toast, or takes pictures, or washes my dog. I just want to call people, and have other people call me. And maybe some people *do* want to make toast with their phone. But, really, given the circumstances, wouldn't 1 or 2 slices be enough for most people?
It's an interesting idea, and might lead to something high-quality, but current implementations just plain suck. The Sigma SD9 and SD10 DSLR bodies are interesting prototypes (that for some bizarre reason are commercially sold), but the sensors inside them are certainly nowhere near the quality of a homemade Canon CMOS or Sony-manufactured Nikon/Pentax CCD sensors.
SAMSUNG's Press Release makes no mention of Bluetooth. Bluetooth has never been offered on a SAMSUNG handset, looks like this will never change.
People who are saying negative things about this phone, don't worry, Samsung won't bother wasting resources on exporting the phone to the states.
Most people who are complaining about the size of the lens and that one cannot get clear, quality pictures from a camera-phone have never even seen or used these recent models. For those of you who will say, "I don't even need to try it out to know that this camera will produce crappy pictures", no you do not know. I have used several models that precedes this new 5MP phone, and they have great picture quality (even when you print them). The 3.2MP phone is the predecessor of this new model, and it has great picture quality and great features on the phone. Let me just say that I was so impressed by that phone, I purchased one and brought it back to the states.
The reason phones here in the states are so crappy is because of the mentality of the public. When something new comes out, they first criticize it to death before even trying to accept it or even try it out.
Another reason awesome phones cannot be exported to the states is because there's no set standard in the states. There's GSM, TDMA, and several varieties of CDMA. When these corporations get their heads out of their greedy asses and try to acheive a uniform standard, eveyone will benefit.
For there to be advancements in technology, someone must make that bold leap and actually try something new. Innovation isn't accomplished by sitting around and thinking about taking the next step, one must actually take the next step.
And that's what Samsung and other companies like it are doing.
Hey, it beats carrying a separate phone, digital camera, and an mp3 player. I only have so many pockets on my pants... heh.
People who are saying negative things about this phone, don't worry, Samsung won't bother wasting resources on exporting the phone to the states.
Most people who are complaining about the size of the lens and that one cannot get clear, quality pictures from a camera-phone have never even seen or used these recent models. For those of you who will say, "I don't even need to try it out to know that this camera will produce crappy pictures", no you do not know. I have used several models that precedes this new 5MP phone, and they have great picture quality (even when you print them). The 3.2MP phone is the predecessor of this new model, and it has great picture quality and great features on the phone. Let me just say that I was so impressed by that phone, I purchased one and brought it back to the states.
The reason phones here in the states are so crappy is because of the mentality of the public. When something new comes out, they first criticize it to death before even trying to accept it or even try it out.
Another reason awesome phones cannot be exported to the states is because there's no set standard in the states. There's GSM, TDMA, and several varieties of CDMA. When these corporations get their heads out of their greedy asses and try to acheive a uniform standard, eveyone will benefit.
For there to be advancements in technology, someone must make that bold leap and actually try something new. Innovation isn't accomplished by sitting around and thinking about taking the next step, one must actually take the next step.
And that's what Samsung and other companies like it are doing.
Hey, it beats carrying a separate phone, digital camera, and an mp3 player. I only have so many pockets on my pants... heh.