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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?"
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.
APERTURE!!!
... dont they get it??
Who needs megapixels wghen the 80% of the pixels are grainy??
What these cameras need is higher aperture
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 #!
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.
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.