What is a Camera Phone?
A camera phone is just a mobile phone that has a camera included with it. It is able to take still photographs. Some camera phones also have the capability to record video. As mobile phone manufacturers looked to differentiate themselves in the 1990s and become more competitive they worked to bring additional features such as picture taking to their mobile phone devices. In 1993, Daniel Henderson developed the first wireless picturephone prototype which became the predecessor to the camera phone. (This prototype was actually provided to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2007). Kodak, Olympus, and Canon introduced several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability in the nineties. In 1997, Sharp and Kyocera were running 2 competing projects with mobile phones with integrated cameras. Sharp introduced J-SH04 which was the first commercial camera phone with infrastructure. It had an integrated CCD sensor with Picture-Mail in Japanese infrastructure which was developed in collaboration with Kahn’s LightSurf venture. Camera phones were introduced into North America in 2002. Sanyo launch them with Sprint wireless and deployed over 1 million camera phone with PictureMail infrastructure again which was developed and managed by LightSurf. The CMOS sensor was really the enabling technology for mass production of the camera phone.
Camera phones just make common sense and are part of a natural trend with convergence of features into an all in mobile device. They have been popular with consumers from the very start and more and more mobile phones include them. In 2003 more cameraphones were sold worldwide than stand-alone digital cameras. In 2006 more than half of the world’s mobile phones had a built-in camera. At the beginning of 2009, the world installed base of cameraphones was 1.9 billion.
Major manufacturers:
- LG Electronics
- Motorola
- Nokia
- Samsung
- Sanyo
- Sharp
- Siemens
- Sony Ericsson
- Toshiba
Major manufacturers of cameras for phones:
- Aptina
- Magnachip
- Omnvision
- Sharp
- ST Micro
- Toshiba
A camera phone is a type of mobile phone that is equipped with a small digital camera. Camera phones began to emerge in the early part of the twenty first century, and were originally quite expensive. Improvements in the technology coupled with popular demand made the appearance of mobile phones equipped with cameras ubiquitous. Some wireless phones have cameras with excellent resolution, allowing the user to take a crisp, high quality picture. A camera phone usually houses the camera interface at the top of the phone. The user aims the camera phone at the object which needs to be photographed and pushes a button on the phone to take the picture. Usually the picture appears immediately, and the user has the option to send the picture to another individual with a camera phone, email the image, save the picture, or throw it away if the picture came out poorly. Most phones include enough memory to store a reasonable number of photos. Camera phones represent a major advance in visual commu
For those not “in the know”, the definition of a camera phone is simply a cell / mobile phone that has a built-in camera. Most camera phones contain few if any features that digital photographers are used to, such as mode settings (night, landscape, portrait, etc), a zoom lens, flash, white balance adjustments, ISO sensitivity tweaking, and the capability of taking multi-megapixel pictures. However, all of this is changing with newer technology. Some camera phones store pictures in memory built into the cell phone while others support add-on media. Without add-on media support, most camera phones can take very few pictures before you have to delete some to take more. Why should you care about a camera phone if the pictures don’t turn out as well as those taken from a compact, prosumer, or digital SLR camera? * It’s much easier to carry a cell phone around with you than most digital cameras, and people are more used to carrying around a phone than a camera. Camera phones are great for t
