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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?"
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...
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
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.
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.