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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.
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 thought that, too... until I read the PC World article... seems that there's been some advances in charging a small xenon strobe that doesn't eat a lot of battery power...
Of course, if you're taking so many flash pics with your phone that you're killing the battery, maybe you should invest in a real digicam...
Here are a few more pictures of the device.
The press release says that the phone is, in part, the result of a collaboration with Pentax, who have some considerable experience in making camera lenses.
If you have a Samsung E700 phone, here's a useful article telling you how to get pictures off your e700. Its free.
n ed/tech_article02.html
http://www.samsungexplore.com/talking/tech_explai
Speaking as a former wireless carrier employee, I can give you a the reason (as explained to me by a tech supt agent when I tried to activate a phone from different carrier for a cusotmer) why this isn't allowed: Every wireless carrier keeps a "master datebase" if you will, of all the Cellular ESNs that are "approved" to connect to the network. The ESNs are supplied to Wireless Carriers by the Phone Manufacturers as production lines go out the door and into stores, so by the time a customer picks one off a shelf, it's ESN is already in the database and thus it can be activated. I did run into a few instances where one of our carrier-branded phones would not active, and once I escalated to Tier2 support they told me that the ESN was not entered into the datebase by the manufacturer (and that it would take about a month to get it done). So I just had to open another box and move on. Honestly, aside from various "security" arguments that the Carriers can pose for this... it does help protect their Bottom Line. Now that you can take any phone number (landline or wireless) to any Carrier (again landline or wireless), the only thing left to help drive profits/customer loyalty is requiring customers to use the "Carrier-branded" hardware which you have to sign on a 1-2yr agreement to get a reasonable price.
I'm studying in Japan this semester, and I've seen tons of phones here far more advanced than those in America. To address your concern, though I don't know about the Samsung camera in particular, alot of the phones here with 1-2 megapixel cameras have flash RAM sockets for storing/retrieving pictures. I would imagine such would be the case for this new camera as well.
And in response to the "it should be imported any time now" comment, I would have to say that's highly unlikely. The phones here that have features we in America wouldn't even dream of. Everyone here has 1-2 mpixel cameras, and some phones even have videophone capabilities; Hell, this one even has a TV/FM tuner built in! I actually held it in my hand, and watched TV on a cell phone. In-freaking-credible. But seeing those kinda phones all over the place here, and nowhere in America, I'd have to say the creation-to-import lag is quite high.
https://myaccount.verizonwireless.com/vzs/customer /ecmx?action=esnChange
With Verizon you can change your ESN on the web. Here's my story, my T730C broke. I didn't get the extra insurance and there are still 4 months on my contract. Motorola's warranty wouldn't cover it either, so I ordered one off of eBay. Its a T730C but the sticker says AllTel. When I went to the Verizon store to switch it, they wouldn't do it because it wasn't a Verizon Phone. Then I went looking on the web and found this page.
Who would have thought... A trimode CDMA phone that works with another company, would also work with Verizon.
If the lighting conditions stink, you can't make a good picture with flash anyway. Even if we are talking about decent stand-alone cameras. I'd rather make a pic with less exposure (more noise), but decent colors and more natural lighting.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Oh, it'll most certainly suck. But one bonus of these tiny, tiny focal length cameras is that one barely needs to focus at all. Hell, it probably doesn't even have an AF system and is set to it's hyperfocal distance in the factory. There would be none of that painful shutter lag so prevalent in digicams.
Sure, no-one with a deep interest in photography will ever use this toy, but for someone who's only ever used a cheap 35mm P&S it'll do the job.
Oh, and offtopic, but if anyone from a camera company is reading this, I want a fixed-focal length P&S with a high-quality 35mm/f1.8 lens with a filter thread, a big low-noise sensor in the 4MP range, a hotshoe, and manual focus/shutter/aperture overrides. Give me that for under $400, in a body small enough to slip into a jacket pocket, and I'll happily buy it.
While Pentax make better lenses than Kodak, when I studied photography at college (quite a while ago) we did resolution tests between various 35mm SLR cameras. While Pentax and Nikon did quite respectably, an Olympus with a Zeiss-Ikon lens was streets ahead, with comparable quality to 2 1/4 inch cameras.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
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.
More information here.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
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