How the Camera Phone Changed the World

theodp writes "Ten years after the amazing Philippe Kahn married a cell phone and a digital camera to capture the birth of daughter Sophie, Slate takes a look at the impact of the camera phone, the gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on. 'With this kind of device,' Kahn told Wired, 'you're going to see the best and the worst of things.'"

Comments

HOWTO: Improving a crummy cell camera

[dino213b]

I think many people have a problem with the cell phone camera quality: If manufacturers bother putting a camera on a cell phone, they may as well have decent quality, right? Well, one thing that is overlooked with these cameras is the possibility of digital (panoramic and frame) stitching.

By using OSS such as Hugin and Enblend one can increase the resolution of images, add to the field of view and basically achieve the following results:

- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/bedroom .jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/diversi ty_of_books.jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/room33. jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/jsd-van .jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/car.jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/car3.jp g
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/ariz.jp g

Slightly wider shots:
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/livroom 1_corrected.jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/par-ph0 _corrected.jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/pan-ph1 _corrected.jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/grandca ny_corrected.jpg
- http://www.cardope.com/misc/razr_panoramic/dd_corr ected.jpg

Please note that some of these processed images have not been color corrected with enblend - otherwise they would have turned out much better.

Re:What?

[lukas84]

Megapixels is only half of the quality discussion.

A good camera has optical zoom, a bigger ccd (a bigger ccd at the same megapixel still gives a better picture), autofocus, etc.

Implementing this in a cell phone requires space.

911

[deviceb]

Pertaining to this topic..
911 calls in NYC will activate the camera on mobile phones so people can send video of the emergency as it happens.
CNN usually gets images or video from peoples phones within minutes of the incident happening. The 911 people down in NYC just want the same data feed for emergencys..

I definitely agree.

[Explo]

I'm personally pretty sick and tired of the use of megapixels as indicator for the quality of digital cameras and cameraphones. I pretty much bet that my older P&S digical camera (Canon Powershot G3) absolutely trounces any 4-megapixel camera phones in image quality, despite being released in 2002. It's even worse than the use of mega/gigahertzes and MIPSes for computer performance; the optics, size of individual photosites and other factors just have so much impact for image quality that it's downright silly to use a single figure to evaluate the image quality.

The above does not mean that I'd want phones with camera to disappear from the face of Earth; if the image quality is sufficient for somebodys needs, it's fine for me. I'd just like people to have some more informed bases for comparisons.