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50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future
wiseandroid writes "It's not even a year ago that the HTC Dream G1 became the first Android enabled phone to be released publicly (on October 22nd, 2008) and now we have listed more than 50 Android phones expected in the near future." Of the 51 phones on this list, 12 (from nine manufacturers) are currently available.
The newly released (in the US) HTC Hero has a 5 megapixel camera (http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/specification.html). I just got the Hero and it takes surprisingly good pictures in low light too. The screen lags quite a bit behind what the camera is seeing, but I'm told that Android 1.6 is supposed to fix that (whenever HTC gets around to releasing the update). ---Alex
Photographing documents is always terrible with phones because they have no variable focus. So they use a pinhole camera for infinite focus, but it fails at less than about 3 meters.
I always thought that a camera specifically for scanning documents would be great on a phone. They could have two cameras, one with infinite focus and one for photographing documents up-close.
You could attach an apropriate lens in front and get the same result I guess.
You're barking up the wrong tree if you want a "very good camera" in a mobile phone, it just can't be done, the optics aren't good enough.
For reference though, an 8MB camera in a phone is likely to be *worse* than a 5MP one, which in turn will be worse than a 3MP one (which is about the optimum).
More pixels in such a small area == less light falling on the pixels == higher sensitivity pixels == worse signal to noise ratio.
The result of that is that phones with high resolution cameras have to apply a noise reduction filter, which is essentially just a blur, and none of these cameras can manage a sharp focus.
The new Android SDK attempts to solve this problem by allowing developers to specify screen size profiles. Check out the blog post.