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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?"
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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*
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 #!
Because you (or at least a huge % of "they") are going to buy a phone anyway that's how.
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.
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.
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.
you don't have to use it as a phone, dude.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.