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7 Megapixel Camera Phone
Alex writes "It looks like LG Electronics are planning a 7 Megapixel Camera Phone which to me seems like overkill - but it must be making a few of those digital photography manufacturers pushing out point and shoot digicams a little nervous. Camera phones will never take over DSLRs or serious digital cameras but are we seeing what will be the death of the entry level point and shoot digicam?"
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From the article "'LG Electronics' spokesman comfirmed Thursday, "LG is considering the development of 6- or 7 -megapixel camera phone with Japanese companies including Canon." LG does this pretty often... I would be surprised if they have done anything more than blueprinting at this point. The company I work with deals in their products, and quite often they annouce the product like three or four years before they even have a working prototype...
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There's moore than one...
Nothing to see here, Samsung already has a 5-megapixel digital camera available.
And it has a sliding cover ala the Matrix phone to boot.
The fact is that in order to improve the quality of a digital photo, the CCD or CMOS must be enlarged. The smaller the area of the sensor is, the more crowded it becomes for each photosite.
Have you ever taken a digital picture with some bright point in it and seen a white stripe from that point up to the top of the picture? That is a CCD photosite area getting overloaded and spilling over into adjoining areas. It NEVER happens with film because film does not rely on electricity to save the image.
The way to avoid this and other digital 'noise' is to put more space between each photosite, which of course requires either less photosites (like cutting sensors by 1/3 by using Foveon) or increasing the sensor area.
If you want Foveon, you will be paying out the nose for it.
If you want a larger area, you had better be prepared to upgrade the lens as well as the camera body. Thicker body and wider lens, IOW.
A phone has a limited amount of volume that it can grow to. Current phones may seem small, but operators are loath to accept larger phones. So even though this LG phone may sport 7 megapixels, it is unlikely that it will be rendering pictures with any sort of acceptable quality.
7 megapixels of noise is still noise.
The problem is not about taking pictures of girls wearing skirts. Its about people using there phones to take pictures "inside" their skirts. If this happened to be your daughter who was getting pictures taken of would you be very happy as a parent? To me this is a serious privacy issue and not something to be laughed at.
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It's not going to cut it anyhow. Pushing more megapixels into a camera dosen't mean shit if it's sensors can't get a decent amount of light. Lenses be damned, because the sensor on this thing will fit inside a cheerio, therefore it's not going to collect enough light, therefore they've got to amplify the signals, therefore it's going to be noisy as shit.... You're going to get one remarkably large, and obnoxiously noisy picture, of overall lesser quality than a 1 megapixel phone with a sensor of comparable size... Regardless if the lens is a piece of plastic, or if it's some priceless artifact that was carved from a diamond found in a piece of angel shit.
Great.
Heck, much over 5MP in a snapshot camera is worthless, for that matter. You will see NO gains.
But, I have absolutely no doubt that people are going to jump all over this, regardless of the cost, just so they can say to their dipshit friends "hey dude, I've got a 7mp phone, and look at my 180x200 OLED display it in all of it's glory", while they prostrate themselves at his knees begging him to shovel more shit into their brains.
Seriously, folks. We've hit the barrier in what increased megapixels--at the cost of the size of sensors--can do for us, that is. If they're made any smaller, all they're going to be good for is receiving UV light, and I know how well I can see UV, if you get what I'm saying.
Right on. I would add to this that the quality of the CCD and the image software makes a huge difference as well. I recently bought a Casio z40 and while I love it for the features the images are not nearly as good as my old Nikon 950. Dark noise, sharpness and "bloom" are all much worse in the 4MP Casio than the 3MP Nikon.
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For example, Nokia 6630 records QCIF (174 x 144) video "up to 1 hour". I assume you need large enough RS-MMC. While camera phones, because of their small size, cannot compte with quality of compact cameras or DSLRs, they have the (dis)advantage being always with you.
If we speak about "real" camcoders, I like to have one with 100 GB 2.5 inch laptop drive. I think it will cost about the same as MiniDV casette unit and would be much more convinient than cassettes. I know there exists some camcorders with fixed storage, but their optical quality is not good.
Like all current high-res camera phones, it will likely have a 7MP mode which saves only to the memory card, and a low-res mode (320x240 or maybe 640x480) which can be sent by email.
I don't know about the current crop of American camera phones, but Japanese camera phones can automatically downsize your pics when you email them.
Besides that this is a troll I just thought I should point one thing out. In Japan (and many other countries I presume) a skirt is part of the school uniform. As such they don't really have the "option" of wearing one or not.
you don't have to use it as a phone, dude.
Not necessarily - 7MP of itself is enough to show detail with very good clarity. However, the system is only as good as its weakest part, and if the lens is still 3-4 millimeter plastic then all the pixels in the worls won't improve the image. I have a Canon G3 with is only 4MP. However, we did some A3 blow-ups of photos at work and mine blew away comparable camera, and some shots from 6MP cameras. The reason was the G3 has great glass - and is both good at resolving images, and being an F2.0 lens can use an acceptably high shutter speed in normal lighting conditions. In order for more pixels to be any use in resolving the image, the glass has to be good enough to be able to capture it in the first place!
just a couple of corrections, the Canon 1Ds is 11mp, not 8.
The Canon 1Ds Mk2 is 16.7mp which is a bit more potent.
The only competitor to the 1Ds at the moment is the 14mp Kodak slr/n & slr/c - Nikon is taking a while to catchup and is releasing their 12mp (though 1.5x sensor) in janary.
Indeed, at lens size needed for 7 megapixels, they should be talking about a camera that has an integrated phone in one corner, instead of the other way around...
Of course it might be that it's only 2 megapixel camera that interpolates to double resolution or some other marketing gimmick...
Birders use a digital camera/spotting scope combo to get increasingly good pictures of distant birds. This is digiscoping. A device that allowed that same clarity and to send pictures to your mates would have great appeal. Send two: 1) here's a stupidly rare bird I just found; 2) here's me scaring it away so you can't see it. Well, when I said mates . . . A guy in Finland (where else, eh?) is already starting to do this with his 3G phone and the results are starting to impress. I don't deny the lens issue among others, and this isn't a replacement for high-end cameras, but don't write off the potential value of a hig-quality phone/camera combo for some pretty geeky pursuits.