A camera phone is a mobile phone with a built in camera. Even fairly basic mobile phones these days come with a camera. The quality of camera phones still varies, but it’s fairly easy to get a camera phone which incorporates a good quality camera for a reasonable price.
The development of camera phones
When camera phones first came to the market, they were expensive and largely inadequate. A 1 megapixel camera phone could cost up to £300. With one megapixel, a user can expect fairly blurry pictures! The early camera phones could store around 40 pictures.
Nowadays, many camera phones are up to 5 megapixels and can store thousands of images. Some even have flashes for professional-quality pictures. Today’s camera phones have come down in price significantly and many are free with a contract.
All the phone manufacturers including Apple, Siemens, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola now offer a variety of camera phones.
The history of the camera phone
There have been many phones over the years with video or camera capabilities. However, what these phones didn’t have that today’s camera phones do was the ability to share these images and videos. Examples of these prototypes were the Apple Videophone/PDA in 1995 and the Kodak Olympus (actually a camera with phone capabilities) in the early 90s.
In 1997, Phillip Kahn was able to share pictures of his newborn child with friends and family around the world. Instantly.
The camera phone was born. The first commercial camera phones were sold by J-phone in Japan. These phones used CCD sensors, but today’s camera phones largely use CMOS imaging technology. Since the late 90s, camera phone technology has developed rapidly and camera phones are no longer a gimmicky afterthought. Good camera phones combine mobile communication technology and a good quality, useful camera.
The benefits of a camera phone
How people use camera phones
People use camera phones in all sorts of ways. Many save space by leaving their camera at home and use them to take all their holiday snaps. Others regularly take pictures of themselves to upload to face book, MySpace, a blog or other social networking sites.
Many camera phones take professional-quality pictures so they can be used for photographing stock for eBay, for example.
One interesting and well-documented upshot of the camera phone is the rise of the civilian journalist/photographer. Many important events have been captured on camera phones and video phones. Civilians can take instant pictures of events as they unfold, often before the official press even realise an incident has occurred.
Not only do civilians take images using camera phones, but these images are often used by the media as well. This was seen following the July 7th bombings when mobile phone footage taken at the scenes was broadcast worldwide.
Experts predict that camera phone footage will be used increasingly as news footage as more people have a camera phone and will be on the scene of an incident when it happens and as it happens long before TV or camera crews can arrive.
Camera phones are now an integral part of the vast majority of mobile phones and virtually every new mobile phone has a camera built in as standard. |