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Liam

Simplicity

One of the key features to the camera phone is its' simplicity. Turn it on, point and shoot. No focusing or setting of program modes. No lens caps to remove. Just taking pictures.

I remember on a trip to Europe almost 10 years ago, I left my SLR and lenses at home, only bringing my Olympus XA. What a great camera. Too bad it uses film :-)

Sony-Ericsson s710a cameraphone

I have not cared much for Sony-Ericsson mobile phone products; my wife has a T616 that is extremely annoying. On tuesday, I got a chance to look at the new Sony-Ericsson s710a cameraphone.

The form factor is perfect. When closed it looks exactly like a digital camera; it swivels open to reveal the keypad. When the keypad is revealed, the screen orientation changes from landscape to portrait.

It's resoloution is good enough for a 4x6 print -- 1.2 megapixels. It accepts a Memory Stick, which allows pictures to be easily transferred from the phone.

Too bad it costs so much.

Why a camera on a phone?

The benefits of a camera on a phone only make sense when you change the context in which you use a phone. For those who see the phone as purely a voice communication deveice, it is often percieved as a useless, gimmicky add-on. I would argue that the point of a camera phone is not to replace a digital camera, but to capture images that otherwise would have been missed.

I wear my phone on my belt, and do not remove it till I go to bed. Some of the best pictures that I have taken were sitting at the dinner table. With 2 young boys, there is always something entertaining going on.

Camera phone shopping

If you considering a camera phone, there are some factors that you should take into account, and some that appear to be important, but may not be.

• image quality - if you are plannig to do anything remotely serious with your photos, do some investigation on the internet and judge the quality of the photos
• memory card - I will never buy a camera phone that does not have removable storage. Most camera phones require either that an expensive cable be purchased, or that pictures must be mailed from the phone to get them off. Even if your phone has Bluetooth, mobile carriers are intentionally "crippling" phones to prevent photos from being transferred in this way. Unless you have a plan to specifically cover this in your contract, you pay for every photo that you send from the phone. Being able to save your pictures to a memory card and transfer them with a flash card reader allows you to bypass the carriers and their transfer charges. This will become even more important as camera phone resolution increases. The pictures will be getting larger, and they will become progressively more expensive to "extract" from the phone.
  

My Nokia 3650

I have owned this phone since July of 2003. I have taken hundreds of pictures. While there are some color issues with the pictures, they are excellent overall. I have had some of the pictures printed to photographic paper, and the results have been suprisingly good.

My wife has the Sony-Ericsson T616. While a much more compact phone, the pictures are of low quality and lower resolution that my Nokia 3650. About all they are good for IMHO are phone wallpaper.

No more hosting

I decided to let my hosting contract drop...I wasn't doing enough to make it worthwhile. My idea for this blog is to look at the camera phone market, and address it from the perspective of picture quality. All the phone manufacturers have camera phone models now, but very few of them appear to take picture quality seriously. Adding more resolution doesn't always help. A high res crappy picture is not any better than a low res crappy picture.

Liam at Carolina Mudcats game

Liam at Mudcats game