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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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
davejenkins.com |
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