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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?"
<whispers> there's real people out there, dude...</whispers>
The Mothership
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.
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 #!
Imagine being photographed in the changing rooms of your local gym or pool. I've heard that many gyms/pools have outright banned all phones in their changing rooms. Or imagine using the public facilities (Americans are embaressed by the word 'toilet') and having a camera-phone quickly stuck over the door of your stall.
Why is this all of a sudden a big deal when you put the camera on a phone? Small, very concealable cameras have been available for quite a long time.
Or try similar scenarios with children for some pedophilia-phobia (pedophobia?).
Yeah, because you can't take pictures of kids with a regular camera...
Imagine someone re-programming your phone so that it takes a photo every x minutes and secretly sends the images to someone.
You will have to worry about this in the future just as much as you will have to worry about somebody using your cell phone for voice recording. But they can do that right now... Maybe the paranoid just need a shutter on the camera and a physical mute for the microphone. Maybe you should go work on that mute button right now, eh? :p
This works better than a hidden camera because you trust your camera-phone. You own it, so you control it. Don't you?
You own the phone but have no control over the software running on it. The more processing power you put on a phone, the more complex the software will get. The more complex the software gets, the more bugs there will likely be.
I don't think anyone should be scared of their phone though... If someone wants to snoop on you there are currently much better ways than your cell phone. I'll bet the people who are paranoid about camera phones are the same people who think all the current security at airports "makes us safer" and isn't just there to make the sheep feel like the government is doing something :p.