Slashdot Mirror
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?"
So, when do we start seeing phone with camcorder?
I think that alot of young people would opt for the camera phone, and therefore not spend the money on a point in shoot.....and a phone. But, I think that our older generation would most definently prefer the standard point and shoot camera seperate from their cell phone. I see it as a decreased market, but not a dead one.
My name is a variety of floral rose, and no, it's not blue
In many places providers have been moving to flatrate, so they better haul ass and make sure they've got 3G (or at leat 2.5G) and the backhaul to carry this off. That and there's the small matter of porn as well...
The Mothership
With the introduction of higher resolution phones like this all over the place what are the privacy implications people face? 7 megapixels is quite clear indeed, and depending on the zoom (if any) you would be able to take some very intense candid photos. Also, as previously mentioned on slashdot, photographing sections of books or magazines in stores could grow in popularity. Depending on memory in the phone, one could walk into a store, snap photos of all the interesting articles of numerous magazines and then leave with a fantastic digital reproduction. So many evil intentions with these things...
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
What?!? A new product thats much better than the last generation of the same product?? Holy cow: maybe that Moore guy was onto something... (as in the law, not lard-assed docu-comedy director).
=U= "Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you"
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.
What people don't realize is that the optics are just as important as the megapixel count. I'd take a two megapixel camera with a nikon lens over a 7 megapixel camera phone any day.
Now they will ask you to check your cell phone at the ticket counter when you go into the movie theatre.
Cleara
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.
I know very little about digital cameras. I've never been much of a picture-taker, and the last camera I bought (a fairly nice, though entirely unprofessional, one) has sat in a closet for years, if I still even have it. I'd never buy a phone for the camera feature.
However, with the typical day-after-Thanksgiving sales tomorrow, one of the local superstores has HP's entry-level model, the Photosmart 435 3.1 megapixel, for less than $50. I'm going to pick one up. It's certainly not the best, but it's a camera, and it'll shoot 4x6's just fine.
The point is, I don't care about a feature, and I don't look for a phone that'll minimize the number of gadgets I have---especially since I don't even know if I'll use a digital camera. This won't be the beginning of the end of entry-level digital cameras, because the entry-level ones are the ones people get when they don't even know if they want one. This could be the end of gadget-lovers buying them. This could even be the end of the "high-end entry-level" position.
But some people will just want an entry-level camera, without paying for a cell phone.
Christian Jones
Medicine. Mathematics. Mediocrity.
7MP might sound like a lot, but I have a hard time believing that it would look as good as a 3 MP point and shoot.
Its the lens!
While your phone can get smaller and smaller and still function as a phone - not so with a camera. Bigger lenses have better optical quality and larger sensors give better detail. Further, if I can carelessly shove it into my pocket, its unlikely the lens will even stay clean.
I don't think we'll see the day when phones are compared based on image quality. (...but I'm not betting on that...)
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Because people are stupid and can't understand more than a single simple measure for a camera (or any other piece of technical equipment) the camera with the most megapixels wins. This is what sells these ridiculous camera phones despite the fact that you don't need more than 2 megapixels for an A4 print and most of these camera phone snaps won't be shown at higher than 320x240 res anyway.
Those phones have shitty lenses too, so the results are crap anyway. Sigh.
I hate cellphones too, and do not own one. I hate the phones, I hate the pricing, I hate the services, I hate the companies involved. ... however, curious little devices like the Nokia 6820 are starting to woo me towards the dark side. As data fees continue to decrease, Mobile Internet is starting to become attractive.
Bastards!
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
what would really impressive me is if LG came out with a phone without a camera at all. I would kill for a black and white razor phone without a camera (i know i know its motorola but still)
Yeah! I know what you mean. I had one once.....people kept 'phoning me! Seriously anoying :)
Really dislike telephones. An I on my own?
Have Fun
Jo
... are great for entry level photographers, some of whom have no need for a mobile phone, with or without a colour screen.
"I smell regulation time!"
If people could excercise some self-control? You wouldn't be smelling anything.
Has anyone checked the current cell carrier-imposed limits on MMS messages? Last I heard it was something below 200KiB (and probably as little as 75KiB). Now, unless you're taking a picture of an evenly-lit solid white wall, there aren't many seven megapixel images I can think of that will crunch down into 200KiB.
So unless the cell carriers are going to allow the phone to hook directly up to a PC (fat chance; they can't bill for that), seven megapixels seems a trifle huge for a phone.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Really, the way people seem attached to their cellphones, I'm surprised Samsung isn't working on a way to hardwire the thing to someone's head. I really doubt if anyone would be able to take the phone away from their ear long enough to take a picture.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
...a lot of it is about the lense.
For example, my 1 megapixel v710 looks like complete ass. Its photos are dark and worst of all very, VERY grainy.
DigiCams still have another 3-5 years left in'em.
I think there needs to be a new spec for camera phones.
Number of photos transmittable/cell phone battery charge.
At 7MP per pic, even on the fastest of cellular networks, how long would it take to transmit the entire picture to another cell phone?
(I'm assuming "thumbnails" would be transmitted to other phones, but still...)
Obviously the phone won't be as good as a dedicated camera with a proper lens.
At the end of the day though they may be "good enough" for most purposes that the extra expense and hassle of carrying around a seperate low(ish) end "happy snap" digital just doesn't seem worth it. I wonder how close we are to that now. I know the camera in my Nokia 7250i is pretty much useless but I'm sure there are better camera phones these days.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
What would really be cool is if they could split the camera off from the phone and just sell both separately. For instance without the components necessary for the phone to function, you could add more sophisticated photography features like a bigger lens or a more buffer space. I see a big marketing opportunity here.
When you are putting a tiny, sub-optimal lens in front of a CCD the size of your fingernail, then trying to fix 7,000,000 pixels on it, your image is *going* to look like crap. For best image quality, you need to funnel as much light onto each pixel as possible. That means a larger lens, a larger CCD, and a smaller pixel count. That's why broadcast television cameras are so large.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
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.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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 Wow - that's gotta be the observation of the centry.
Of course they wont - it is like saying that a laptop can never take over the Ipod even though the laptop might have a cutting edge audio-subsystem built into it. Where is the slashdot i used to read and enjoy?
are we seeing what will be the death of the entry level point and shoot digicam?
How exactly does a device that likely costs upwards of $200 and packs an anual fee of upwards of $600 cause the death of a camera I just paid $150 for?
Talk rates and text messaging packages don't cut it for providers of cell services. This genre has been relegated to commodity status and is only profitable when oversold (sell "packages" where users will rarely tap peak usage).
Camera phones provide the necessary excuse to bill a per-packet rate to subscribers who want to push giant images to their IM friends. Upping the pixel density pads thier resource model.
This is not a leading-edge technology enhancemment on handheld devices, but rather a method to improve the billing cycle returns.
Don't get me wrong, it's nothing untoward, we all need to make a buck, but please don't try to sell it as a significant technology push. In fact, bragging rights go to the first one to provide it.
one better than mcleodeight
Even with the new megapixel phones, the picture quality is crapola. They need a 10-fold increase in the quality of the lens/optics before they start ramping to 4, 5 or 7MP.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Sucks being a geek.
*Sigh*
Those are all good points. But I would still prefer a 7 megapixel phone to VGA phone!
But I suspect a camera will always take a better picture than a telephone. For the same reason, I go to a restaurant to eat great food instead of catching a plane.
you had me at #!
for those photo bloggers.
I'd take a 4M pixel phone, with 256M of memory, and decent optics. I think the industry needs to make decent 2-4M pixel camers first, and sell a bunch. My Sanyo has about a 1.2M pixel in it and the pictures are, well, just this side of crummy.
My camera phone has a 5MB memory integrated and no expansion. Verizon charges $.25/picture to send it and locks my phone so I have to use their service.
So here we get a phone that takes pictures that are hundreds of times the size of a normal phone. Are the carriers going to charge extra to email them, seeing as data rates are so high?
It's entirely true. People whine all the time these days about what the world "owes" them and how everything they don't like should be illegal. When really, they should just be living their own lives and letting others live theirs. Modern society has gotten pathetic with political correctness, censorship, and supression of individual liberties.
I would gladly accept a lower resolution on my camera phone if the lens would be better. There's no way they're going to sell me an N-megapixel camera on my phone until it comes with a decent lens. My 4 year old Olympus digital still takes pictures that look better than ANY camera phone I've seen, and that's all because it has a decent lens. The problem with the camera phone industry is that it is suffering from the same problem as the CPU industry was - for CPUs it was all about MHz, now it's all about megapixels.
"then you shouldn't have worn a skirt.
If you wear clothing that is open to the world, then you have no right to complain about people looking through the natural opening. If your goal is to hide your underwear from the world, you should wear clothing that doesn't have openings through which your underwear can be seen."
Yeah! It's all your fault I can't control myself.
If they ship it with a dinky lens, the exposure times will be too long for a handheld device.
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.
This just means those naughty upskirt pictures will be better quality.
Uh yeah, that's from There's Something About Mary. Adams is Adams, and Farelly is Farelly, and never the twain shall meet.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Do you call a lot of people while shaving?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
That would be cool, because you could shoot film-quality photographs at poster size if you wanted.
I can't wait until the first gigapixel camera. Which reminds me of the time an old friend of mine and I were talking about computers. I had a whole whopping 150 megs of hard drive space. Your cheapest computer today comes with more megs of RAM than that. He was a hard core computer geek, though, and he had around 300 megs of hard drive space. I thought that was a ridiculously large hard drive. It seemed like an endless amount of space that would never fill up completely. Anyway, he told me about this guy who had a "gigabyte", pronouncing the first "G" in "gigabyte" like the "G" in "giant"... Nobody pronounces "gigabyte" like that anymore. I was like, "What the hell is a gigabyte?" He said something along the lines of, "I don't know, but it's a LOT of space!" I was like, "Holy shit." Nowadays the cheapest hard drive has like 20 gigabytes, and most computers come with at least 40. And that space fills up so fast with applications and junk that it's not enough. I can't believe that shit.
So I can't wait until the first gigapixel camera. Shit, you'll be able to shoot a 60' by 40' photograph and get film-quality results. We could send that thing to like Mars or something.
. . . service providers keep trying to charge to transfer pictures from the phone to the computer by forcing you to e-mail them to yourself.
I'm not satisfied that they've got the 'phone' right, yet. I mean, seriously, until I can make a CLEAR call, and communicate with some semblence of quality, I don't want them cramming more shit into my phone. Having one is bad enough, but that's for work purposes, mostly. I'd rather not have them try to make two devices, and fail to do a quality job with either.
Now, I will admit that I would be highly interested in a camera/phone/PDA, that can take photos, store images/information/phone clips even on an SD card, or xmit wirelessly across a network (PAN, WAN, whatever), but I think the techology is pretty far away to make a decent device that can do that.
Informatus Technologicus
This is great news. I can't wait for this technology to come to the States in 4 years.
the funny thing is that it took years (6, infact)for the mainstream cameras to develop the regular point and click digital cameras. but the newer phone cameras are there within a year, if I am not wrong! well, must be an awful feeling in the gut for the guys who spent a bomb on that *latest* cameraphone with a 1.3 *megapixel* camera!
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speaking of 7 megpixel cameras - wonder where will they find the space to fill in all those photos ? an average 7 megapixel photo will be at least 4-8 mb! and with current memory rates - is quite expensive to lug a 7MP cameraphone! here are a few links that show the megapixel stuff for the un-initiated:
http://www.megapixel.net/cgi-bin/f
http://www.photo.net/equipment/digi
http://www.pixagogo.com/tutorials/dig
i bet the camera phone wouldnt have the features that regular point and click has. here's a link to the samsung 5 MP camera:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0410/041020
but what really matters is the sensor sizes on the camera. if you take your time to check this it would be well worth it!
http://www.photo.net/equipment/digital/senso
a camera is not always abt MP its the same argument as in computers - again - Mhz doesnt always matter. AMD beat intel hollow with thier lower clocked CPUs. the quality of pixels matters. (although having more pixels does help.) the camera is always a package - lens, cmos, sfware. i wonder if the cell phone companies will leave us with a phone-camera or will they end up with a camera-phone! time will tell!
you don't have to use it as a phone, dude.
To the vast crowds of whiny would-be photographers bleating about how the lens on a camera phone is so much crummier than the one on a digital camera, I would like to say 'No Shit, Sherlock!'. :"Make phones bigger and heavier by fitting more batteries and sockets! The western world is overweight and drives everywhere. We don't need to design phones to be so tiny that we sacrifice use time or keyboard operability FFS! "
The phone manufacturers are competing on pixel count at the moment (because it is easy to measure and quote), when they all get to a few megapixels then they will compete on visual quality and you will see better lenses.
I will be glad when they put hard disks into phones so i can use it as data transport.
Oh, and while I am ranting
I feel better now.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
... I think that 5 megabit pixel will be the norm in five years... with some models including built-in software to automatically correct distorted images due to dirty lenses (remember that the "eye" of such a cell phone will be very exposed to potential physical damage, dirt, etc.
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
The problem with the majority of camera phones right now is that they use CMOS sensors which SUCK. The reason they use them is because they are cheaper and consume less power. The Motorola V710 while 1+MP, uses a CMOS sensor and that's why the pictures are terrible. I saw a post on a message board that had a ton of pictures taken with a LG VX-8000 (soon to be released). The phone features a 1.3MP camera with a CCD censor. The pictures are absolutely stunning for a camera phone and will be more than acceptable for a lot of people. I'd post a link to the thread but all the images on it are dead. If I can find more I will post them and I think that most of you will be pleasantly surprised.
Megaplixes has become the "goodness" number for people and there's little that can be done about it. People want a simple number that can sum up how good or bad something is as compared to other things. IQ, horsepower, MHz, all the same thing. People latch onto a number and try to use it as a general purpose rating.
Not supprising, either. Optics are comlpex to explain. I can't give a single number that tells you if it's better or not. The closest thing is bigger, but people don't want a big lense.
So you are going to see this continue. Companies will release cmaeras with absurdly small lenses and absurdly high MP counts since that's what people want.
There will be some sort of wireless networking capability in most future digicams, I think. It may be Bluetooth or 3G. Bluetooth, working in conjunction with a regular cell phone, I think is very likely.
Do I really need 300hp for my commuter car?
... 3GHz for my word-processing
... 7MP for my camera phone
Marketing guy: Of course!
People have latched onto megapixels as the "goodness" rating of a digital camera. More MP = more good in their mind. So, the phone companies are jumping on board and releasing higher MP cameras. It'll sell.
The thing is, you don't need to wait until someone-else to design one for you. You can do it yourself.
The world of electronics has changed. You no longer need to do everything from scratch. The supply-chain of the eletronics is such that there are modules available - and all you need to do is to find a way to put them together.
If you are interested, read the EDN-type of trade magazines for more info.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Not the same at all.
People get LOOKED at all the time. It's just a fact. They don't get RAPED all the time. Rape can be helped. You can't help looking at someone.
If a girl wore shorts, then complained guys were looking at her legs, what would you say? Yeah... wear long pants.
I remember reading a story about some skateboarders travelling to Beiruit and not getting in trouble for skating, but getting in trouble for filming (the Hizbollah would confiscate their cameras but not their boards). No, public filming for private use is here to stay as I doubt any of our governments (as in Westernized governments, I'm assuming of /.'ers) would do something so Orwellian.
Privacy is and shall be no more! (I guess that's my point?)
Parallel to this will be an increase in interest in retaining privacy in private areas (think jammers, scramblers, encryption, and all the counters and counter-counters to that). Why, I even read what you wrote before you posted it with my VanEck-phreaking-unmanned-aircraft. You should invest in a TEMPEST helmet before someone sells your deepest sexual fantasies on DVD on a NYC streetcorner with Mandarin AND Cantonese subtitles...
[pink beam of light]
I can respect what you say, but the vast majority of people just want a simple decent resolution camera that they are practically guaranteed to have on them at all times.
Now, for all you non-photo people out there, a cellphone is probably the electronic device you are most likely to carry around with you everywhere. I know that instead of a new digital camera, I'm looking for a camera phone now, so that its one less device I have to carry around with me.
And as the file size increases, and as the prices on wireless internet transfers drop, a camera with the ability to send pictures to a home base wirelessly is going to start being in big demand since you won't have to buy massive memory cards for it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Has anyone checked the current cell carrier-imposed limits on MMS messages?
The last time I sent one (2 weeks ago?) it was 90KB.
So unless the cell carriers are going to allow the phone to hook directly up to a PC (fat chance; they can't bill for that)
Huh? I wouldn't even consider buying a phone (especially with a camera) that couldn't be connected to a PC. In fact, I don't think I'd be *able* to do so even if I wanted to. If it doesn't have Bluetooth and/or IR, chances are it'll have some custom data port that connects to a serial or USB port.
Maybe the situation's different where you are (I'm in the UK), but charging just to directly connect two pieces of hardware together? Beyond the cost for any physical connector, what possible justification could there be?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Insightfull my ass,
Do you think it is perfectly legal or moral to dive under a girls skirt to take a look at her panties (or to check if she wears any)?
Using a camera doesn't make it any more legal or moral....
I've hoped for many years we would see something like this... I don't think they should be putting cameras in phones rather phones in cameras. I'm not to bothered now I can put a 1gig SD card in my camera but I wishes for a long time I would be able to send the photos on my camera straight to my ftp or something, esp. whilst on holiday. Why should I carry a two cameras around with me? (one on my phone, which is rubbish, and a decent kodak 3megapixel one with 4xZoom.)
"... are we seeing what will be the death of the entry level point and shoot digicam?"
Not anytime soon. There are still people that just use a phone for calling people. Not to make a sandwich with.
All these features (for which you have to pay a small fortune, just for the data transfer if you use the phone for these things) are wrecking the batteries. I hear people that have to recharge their phones every other day, and in the manual is stated that it is not a luxury to buy a new battery every 6 months !!
I have a phone (ericsson T39m) that does what it is supposed to (phonecalls, sms) and it does it very well. I recharge it maybe once a week and the battery is as old as the phone (almost 3 years).
I don't need my phone to sound like a hifi stereoset and don't have to watch video's on it. Sure... in 10 years lots of people might have those all-in-one gadgets and they could be very useful indeed... but as long as there are enough people who just want to buy stuff that they actually use, there will still be a market for 'just phones' and 'just cameras'. Even though the manufacturers are pushing the 'multi-functional' down our throats.
I have posted a comment like this in the past, but it's more relevant here:
Adding a 7 megapixel camera to a phone 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 7mp CCD or even a 5 megapixel CCD for that matter. 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 7mp 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 7mp camera coupled with a 3mm plastic (or glass if you're lucky) lens. Especially if the aforementioned 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. Lens sizes for cameras with more than 1 megapixel should be measured in CM - not in MM!
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/ [dpreview.com] for reviews of digital cameras.
The trend is obvious: it's towards MORE single-function devices, not fewer, multifunctional devices. Personally, I own a digital SLR to use when I want to take photos, a cell phone for when I want to call people, a laptop for work, a desktop for gaming, a PDA for taking notes, a scanner for scanning documents, a watch for keeping time, an MP3 player for listening to music on the go (or I did until I lost it) a stereo for listening to music at home...
Read Adam Smith, 1776. If a system (say, a worker, or a device, an organism, or whatever) is specialized to do only X it will do it better than if it has to do X, Y, Z, and Q simultaneously. In general, the technological trend is towards functional specialization, not multifunctionality. Sure, there are exceptions (Swiss Army Knives and Leatherman tools) but my money is on specialization, not generalization. That, and I'm incredibly skeptical of whenever someone predicts the death of some technology. I remember in the nineties when everyone was predicting the imminent demise of the desktop computer...
how about making an add on unit that basically comprises a higher quality lens. the cell phone provides all the smarts/memory/control/display and the standard cheapo lens for everyday use but when you go on vacation you bring along the extra lens unit and snap it into place. you can now take better pictures and still benefit from the phones' ability to upload the pictures to friends/mblog/storage.
I don't get it.
;) Until someone can produce an affordable 7 megapixel+ 19" monitor within a few years and prove me wrong. I really wish they would!
If you want to view your photos on a screen, the maximum resolution you would need is 1600x1280, which is 2 megapixel. 98% of people will probably never print out their pictures at a size more than about 8"x6". But I've got a 5mp and a 6.3mp (EOS 300) digital camera, and both cameras produce pictures which are INCREDIBLY sharp when printed out at that size. Ie, so sharp that it's difficult to actually see all that detail with the naked eye. So why would you ever need 7+ megapixels in a consumer camera? All it does is make the picture files really big and the noise level for low light photographs quite high. 7mp cameras would only be necessary if you need extremely high res pics for printing at sizes around A4 (US Legal-ish) or above.
I reckon 6 megapixels should be enough for anyone
then you shouldn't have worn a skirt.
Welcome to Japan. It's weird, but it's common to see women wearing skirts (sometimes while outdoors) even during the winter - especially where I am where we get craploads of snow.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
These guys don't get it... I mean, let's keep "purpose" on the top of the list! I don't need a 7MP camera phone with a fixed focus lens, crappy digital zoom, no manual modes (aperture, shutter, exposure bracketing, et. al.). Heck! I don't need a camera with my phone! Phones are meant for voice communication, so it should be good at what its purpose is! If camera phones begin messing with the entry-level camera market, most people will have to get an annoyance with their cameras: a cell phone! Well, I doubt this would ever be the case because of the reasons I stated before... We can rest assured that people with real photography needs will stick with real, full-fledged camera.
They probably glanced at nyud.net and thought they saw nyud.info
"HEY, EVERYBODY! I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO!"
Yeah, that one.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
If your goal is to hide your underwear from the world, you should wear clothing that doesn't have openings through which your underwear can be seen.
I deal with that issue by the simple expedient of not wearing any (with the exception of when I'm on stage).
I suppose anyone sneaking up from behind who has become confused by the skirt and the ponytail is in for a rude awakening though.
KFG
Just as well my phone can transfer stuff to the PC with bluetooth then isn't it !
The cell carriers are going to allow the phone to hook directly up to a PC (fat chance; they can't bill for that),
Sure they can. $30+ for the cable and $20 for the software that is inexplicably sold seperately. Sprint does it this way at least.
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This is just a marketing trick, the only thing you get from a 7Mpixel camera phone is large crappy pictures instead of small crappy ones. 7 million pixels would demand larger optics than what I think is possible to cram in to a reasonably sized mobile phone.
So, 30 KB is the max size that anyone really can expect to receive per message. In addition, there is a size restriction on the image size for MMS messages (that should adhere to the conformance document):
Seems like it's time to update our standards and move along.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
Megahertz sell computers, and megapixels sell cameras; this shouldn't surprise anyone here.
/cranky after just waking up
Just so long as these marketing cretins don't forget that some people JUST WANT A FREAKING CELL PHONE and don't need cameras and milk steamers and tazers built into their phones, I couldn't care less about what crap parents buy to appease their children.
It's like having a 30" dick. Not even impressive. Just gross.
despite being tech savvy, i always have and always will refuse to subscribe to cellular service for various reasons. i know im not alone.
I was the same way for a long time. Actually, I had cell phone in the early 90's. Cool for a while, then just got plain annoying. Ditched it for my work pager in '95.
However... I have a kid now. It got a certain point that not having a cell phone handy was just plain incovenient. And the first time your school calls because he accidentally eats something with peanuts (and triggers a violent allergic reaction), you're happy that your cell phone gets you out of that office meeting.
Now, unless you're taking a picture of an evenly-lit solid white wall, there aren't many seven megapixel images I can think of that will crunch down into 200KiB.
The noise that tiny, little CCD will produce will make very sure that the image won't compress well, no matter how perfect your wall is ;-)
7M CCD.. imagine the size of your files when you send these to your friends. In the UK it costs about 30p (50cents) for each photo you send by MMS. If you send a pic from a 7M pixel camera by accident.. whoops.. huge phone bill..
I've been lucky enough not to be in a car accident yet, but I always keep a single-use camera with flash in the car just in case. I suspect one of those would make much more credible pictures than a camera phone with a tiny lens and no flash. It's also less likely that the battery will be low at a critical time.
You have no to tell people in a public place that they can't look at certain things.
Rape involves touching someone, which is a violation of their freedom if done against their will. But in a public place, you have the right to look at anything that's being displayed for public viewing.
If a person is walking around naked (voluntarily) in a public palce, you have the right to look at them. If they didn't want someone looking at them naked, why did they go out in a public place?
Similarly, if you wear a skirt, and thus display your panties to the world (from the right angle, anyway), what right do you have to tell people that they can't look at you from a certain angle? None.
Looking can not and should not be a crime.
Of course it's not legal to lift up a girl's skirt without her consent (nobody actually made the statement you seem to have a problem with), because that involves touching her or her clothing, which you would need permission to do. However, you don't need permission to look at someone. If she's wearing a skirt and walking on a glass floor in a public place, why should it be illegal for you, standing below, to simply look up?
It's an evil society that makes looking a crime. That's one step away from 1984.
If they voluntarily wear clothing that, when viewed from certain angles, reveals things that they don't want others to see, then they made a poor choice of clothing. If, for some reason they care so damn much about concealing themselves, then they're wearing the wrong clothing. If, however, they don't care, then they should continue to wear clothing that's open to the public.
Personally, I don't think they should care. What are they so sensitive about? Most women who are secure with their sexuality don't care if bystanders catch a fleeting glimpse up their skirt. The age of puritanism is over, folks.
What gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't look at in a public place? Why should people have to control themselves when they're doing nothing wrong?
You do not have the right to exert control or force over the life of another person. By telling someone that they can't look at something, with an implicit threat of force (imprisonment), you are exerting control over that person's life.
Are you going to make it a crime for your eyes to accidentally intersect with someone who doesn't want to be looked at? What about people who don't want their hands looked at, but go out in public without making any effort to conceal them? Should you throw people in jail for looking at those people's hands, even if they have no way of knowing that the person doesn't want his/her hands looked at?
It's sheer insanity.
You wonder if these will start getting banned in all types of public areas
This is already the case around here (Ottawa, Canada). Many fitness clubs in the area prohibit bringing cell phones with cameras into the locker rooms.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I'd take a phone with NO camera, NO games, NO PDA functions, NO mp3 player, and NO radio, if the thing consistently sounded like, and was as reliable as, a land line.
Heck, as long as I'm on this rant, here in the US we have no competition between the service providers. Thanks FTC, for allowing 2 of the existing big 4 to merge. The 7000 being laid off thank you as well. If Cingular, Sprint, and T-Mobile can each afford to put a retail outlet in every strip mall in America, they're obviously making way too much money, and could easily afford to give us unlimited use (including text messaging, data, etc.) for $25 a month.
Sorry for the off-topic rant. I feel better now.
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Welcome to Japan. It's weird, but it's common to see women wearing skirts (sometimes while outdoors) even during the winter - especially where I am where we get craploads of snow.
Isn't it also the country where you can walk down the street and see a vendor with his table set up on the sidewalk, selling ziplock baggies containing a pair of panties, and a photo of a Japanese girl wearing (usually just) those very same panties?
Creepy.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
The Kepler space probe will watch one piece of the sky constantly for five years to discover planets. It will use the transit method, i.e. looking for the dimming of stars when the planets cut in front of them. Maybe one in two hundred planetary systems would be oriented correctly to see transits. These in turn may on only happen for a couple hours every couple decades. However, if you watch several hundred thousand stars with a 350 megalpixel camera for five years, you'll porbably catch many of these. Plus a ton of asteroids you never knew were there.
But honestly. .
I think this is great!
It means that the idiot cell-phone market, (and yes, I'm talking about YOU), is going to drive down prices on actual cameras.
I'll be happy when I can pick up a solid multi-megapixel camera for a instamatic prices.
The health of the economy is entirely a product of public perception. A mass hallucination controlled by the media. --So quit loafing about and start picturing something other than what the fucking pundits tell us! This whole dropping dollar thing sucks, and it sure isn't my fault. If Bush's handlers, (and their handlers) succeed in destroying the dollar to create cannon fodder for their asinine military, how the heck am I going to be able to get a hundred dollar camera with lots and lots of megas?
Come ON people! I want to shoot pictures of red-eyed puppies and nerdy friends making dumb faces in front of national monuments!
-FL
...will come when phone manufacturers realize what a flash is and why a camera intended to take snapshots of your friends when you are partying is useless without one.
Camera phones will never take over DSLRs or serious digital cameras
yeah, just like that stupid personal computer the HP guy said I wouldn't want thirty years ago.
I go to a restaurant to eat great food instead of catching a plane.
Who would go to a restaurant to catch a plane?
:-)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I've been waiting for a phone that can be a high-quality camera at the same time. This phone is not the one, due to the fact of the poor optics. This is the first phone in an entire generation of high MP camera phones. It's a rare day that someone releases the killer app on the first try. In fact, I've never seen a high-quality version 1 of any product. The market will ensure that subsequent 'versions' of high MP camera phones will produce greater quality pictures. So I agree that there is 3-5 years left stand-alone low-end dig cameras. Physics be damned, subsequent versions of high-MP camera phones will have the quality issue figured out by then. hehe I'll be able to have a sweet new high quality cam-phone AND a new President. Woo hoo!
I live in a more rural area, so I don't have to worry about evading giant tentacles or anything of that nature. I think someone I know did see one of those picturebooks of Japanese women's hands in one of the bigger stores around here that you see in J-List ads on Something Awful.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
We've all been talking about "convergence" for years, and how every device (maybe every particle ;) will have an IP# (and maybe a webserver :). So now "cameraphones" are displacing lower-quality standalone cameras - the "phones" are just the way to converge cameras with everything else, putting them on the Net. "Entry level digicams" aren't "dying", they're evolving into the ubiquitous networked devices we've been predicting for years.
--
make install -not war
This misses the point though, because you cannot print it on a full page without grain.
Think of it this way... have a big light in one room, open the door to another and - without flash - take a picture (in the room without a light on).
Now, in the same scenario, close the door so it's only 1/4 of the way open. Take another picture.
The first picture things will probably look decent, on the second you're losing detail and probably getting static.
Why, because not enough light is entering the room to produce a good picture. A 4MP camera with good light adjustment is going to have a picture just as good as a 7MP, because the 7MP is just giving you higher-resolution static. Light is your photo, as it's really a refraction of light that you're capturing. Less light=crappier picture.
Now think along the same lines but with the barrel/lense of the camera. You're getting the same amount of light, but trying to divide it among a great space. Result, the picture looks just as craptacular at 7MP, and as far as printing it's not really any different than resizing up a 4MP picture.
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.
I would have loved to have had one of these in College. I hated taking notes off the chalkboard in classes with lots of symbols like Heat Transfer & Diff. EQ. Taking notes with a laptop just isn't practial although I don't know much about the new webpads.
With something like this I wouldn't have to keep going back & forth between my notes & the chalkboard and could have paid more attention to what was being discussed.
I am as much a gadget guy as the next, but I choose not to use a camera phone--no matter how cool or useful they are. My job requires me to visit many facilities where cameras are not allowed because of the customer's proprietary processes and technology. Because I choose not to use a camera phone, my phone is not taken away from me for the duration of my visit. Now, I don't know how many people are in that same situation, but I venture to say I am probably not the only person. Of course there is the question does the average person really know how to tell a non-camera phone from a real one? My guess is no. Oh well.
I doubt it seriously, camera phones have shitty lenses and I doubt they put in a decent lense. I myself have a seperate digital camera, seperate dv camcorder which has a snapshot mode I will not use, and a cellphone. Since I don't picture blog I see no need for a crappy image taking device that uploads to web pages, and those that do blog as such will not care for a huge quality 7mp image to be sent up the cell network.
Its a useless marketing gimick folks
My wife and I spent $400 on top-of-the-line LG phones 4 years ago only to find out that over 1/2 of the features the phone advertised were "not yet implemented". How screwed up is that?
Personally, I won't trust that company again. What a rip-off.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
You should hang up your
"Camera phones will never take over DSLRs or serious digital cameras..."
Again, you clearly have not learned from the past. Need I point you to a list of classic historic quotes where people said silly things like this and were made to look foolish by gigs of RAM in desktop machines or even "desktop" machines themselves!? Why would anyone carry around a DSLR or SLR when they can have a single device which serves as a communicator, a information holder, and a full-service camera?
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
plus your eyes have a long "exposure" (although it's not synrconous... this allows for a compromise of quick motion detection plus fine-detail resolution in dim light)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
of course, the quality of software bundled varies from network to network.
I would be surprised if it didn't in most camera phones here because most people would be too stupid to know any better, and they'd complain if the email was too slow.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have a 4MP Pentax Optio 43WR that absorbs battery power like a chamois absorbs water simply because there are a lot of power hungry components within it. I can't imagine a device, which has to power a 7MP sensor along with receiving and transmitting cellular signals, being remotely energy efficient. I can appreciate combining two devices for practicality, but this does not seem practical to me. I mean, why not build an MRI with a rice cooker in it?
Think for a second; if someone built a phone inside a digital camera you'd be like, "This is fukin' retarded." So why in the hell would someone buy a 7 megapixel camera inside a phone?
My phone (in Japan, though) can record directly to an SD card. A 256MB card gets me ~80 minutes of 320x240 pixel MPEG-4 video (Sharp V601SH). The video bitrate is about 440kbps.
However, the downsides are:
- Battery life. Recording and encoding video (and showing it on the screen) sucks a lot of power.
- Lens quality / resolution. Although it has an auto-focus lens, a person 10-20m away comes out as an unrecognisable blob about 10 pixels tall.
- Light balance. The camera software has trouble compensating for an overexposed target (at the centre of the image).
If I want to take decent home videos, I'll go out and buy a camcorder. That can't beat the convenience of a phone and camera the size of my palm.
First your post is mostly wrong. Here's the deal.
First the smaller the size of the sensor area (all the pixels) the easier it is to make a good lens. Making flat field lenses is hard, so making lenses that gather light unifromly and in focus over the entire sensor is hard. So in this sense smaller is better.
Second, the smaller the pixel, all else being equal, generally the lower the noise level and thus the better the signal. Many forms of noise scale with pixel area so smaller can be better as long as the same number of photos hit both sensors. The catch is the "all else being equal". There tends to be more dead area per pixel are as you make the pixels denser. Those are lost photons. Also if there is leakage due to pixel crowding that's worse too.
So what it comes down to is photons per pixel. This has nothing to due with pixel size directly. A more powerful lens of the same diameter can concentrate the same number of photons in to the smaller sensor area.
However as you make lenses focus tighter the abberations tend to rise. At some point the lens becomes so curved it cannot feasibly become more curved. You can hold this off a while by making the lenses out of exotic high index materials. But by and large yo never see anything better than F1.
Those small lenses can gather as much light as a larger lens. Sometimes this can be an illusion however. A large lens run through a small iris may be gathering less light than a smaller lens with a big iris. Besides limiting light the iris changes the depth of field and corrects for abberations that affect the sharpness of the focus. The ultimate camera is the pin hole lens which has a tiny diameter, and because the depth of field is practically) infinite needs no lens and has no distortion. But it also gather almost no light.
So anyhow it's possible to make a dense array that is sharp but you have to work at it. But you dont lse light as you say until you are pushing F1 on the lense.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Is it just me or are CellPhones now reaching "Feature Bloat"? Seems like it is getting more and more difficult to get a Cell that is JUST a cell phone!
Am I the only one who wants a cell to only make and receive calls?
---START SIG It is better to know that you have lost than to NOT know that you have won! ---END SIG
Think about this: ideally, a "cellphone" for me would be a tiny box that has only three things:
- a battery (can't do without it)
- a GSM tranceiver (to talk to the outside world), and
- a Bluetooth tranceiver (to talk to the "world" that lives in my pockets anyway).
It won't do anything else, but will do these basic functions right!Now, this thing, I can just leave in my pocket. As for: (a) Talking? A small, cordless headset (w/ voice dialing and a voice interface for the common functions). I carry one anyway. (b) Keypad? A small PDA (to control the more advanced functions, say SMS and web-browsing), which has a screen already. I carry one anyway (when I need it). (c) MMS w/pictures? (not that I ever send any of these, but anyway) I carry an ultracompact digicam (Kyocera SL400R) anyway, when I want to take pictures. A Bluetooth interface shouldn't be that hard. (d) More serious stuff? Well, every laptop now has Bluetooth, pretty much. The phone can still stay in my pocket and double as a GSM modem.
If you think this is far-fetched, check this out:
Nokia Wireless Image Headset
Now, this, I can carry only when I need the "extra" functionality!
As for Bluetooth cameras, well someone has thought of it already:
Concord Bluetooth Camera
But it still needs to go some way towards miniaturization (which should be doable).
So: Do one thing and do it right! If modularity works for programs living in a PC, why not for hardware that lives in my pockets? Seems possible to me with the "new" technology. Just my 2c...
You missed it, dude. Radioshack, yesterday. :P
fucking pr jerks didn't publish a flier.
[http://www.livejournal.com/~dejaflynn contains my decompensation for said action, and details.]
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'