'bout freakin' time SOMEONE said it. Now hurry with the HD camera phones LG, Sony, Samsung, Apple, HTC and everyone else not mentioned here. I'll take a optical zoom in mine thankyouverymuch!

Ambiguous Blob 2.0

Sounds great to me! This will lead to one less device we all have to carry. In fact, we could all become paparazzi with on the spot high quality (that lens is sweet) pictures and low grade HD video if cameras phones like this become the standard. I wonder if HTC and Apple are interested in competing in this segment of the market?

ChristianD

Sounds interesting.

Evangelion

the fact that it suchs an extremely common feature to have cameras cellphones says to me that eventually they will eventually develop ways to cheaply put decent, high quality cameras into cell phones.

as for things like hd movies and various other multimedias, i say "no duh." eventually, EVENTUALLY the goal with tech is to bring all your digital devices into one portable system. this however, is a while away. however, the idea that ssds will get so small, powerful, and cheap (and at the same time, wireless internet going the same way) that you are able to watch streaming HD video on your cellphone with little to no lag is bound to happen.

i just rechecked the article and saw that i've gone a bit off topic. my bad (shrugs) what i staid is still applicable though.

basically, if they can get tech that is small, cheap, and high in quality, why not stick in a cell phone? as long as it doesnt go too off base (and at this point i dont really see how it could, since every basic thing that people normally do on their computer, they are now doing on their cellphones) then providers will in all likelihood stick it in there and see how the consumers react to it.

jrghoull

i am still looking for a 3-5x zoom with no shutter lag on a camera phone...

taking_this_easy

And i thought my LG DARE took pretty decent pics. An 8 mp with advanced optics?! We all know this will be priced so far out of reach for the average consumer nobody will get it, but it's good to dream. I see an 8 mp camera phone accessable to everyday people in 6-8 yrs

soulweaponry

@soulweaponry: 8MP of shit is still shit, even if the optics are decent. What matters is sensor size; if they've made the sensor bigger, then great, but that's going to make the lens and the whole phone bigger.

Of course if they've just basically made a camera and stuck a phone in it then eh, well that's fine I guess, but it doesn't seem like that would make for a nice small phone.

Ignoring this particular announcement, in general if it's a small phone then the camera sensor is going to be smaller than a normal compact digital camera and so quality will always be worse compared to compact cameras released at that time. However, as sensor quality (relative to size) improves in general, it could mean that phone cameras can become adequate... maybe. There are some physical limits, I think, with the really tiny sensors.

This is just speculation but personally, I wonder if they couldn't make improvements in image quality by reducing the megapixel count. If you have a lot of pixels on a sensor, surely that means there is probably space wasted in 'gaps' between the pixels that aren't accepting light. Using fewer larger pixels could improve quality. My phone has a 2 megapixel camera but the images are utterly worthless at that quality (even in bright sunlight) and are usually piss-poor even if you reduce it to quarter-area; I wonder if using a high-quality, genuinely 0.5MP sensor might mean it would produce better 0.5MP images than you can get out of it by just resizing.

quen

The Megapixels are irrelevent, but the lens is quite nice for a mobile phone. It would appear that my sucky iPhone camera's days are numbered. You can gloss over MMS, Copy and Paste, and Buggy software, but a picture is worth a thousand words and it doesn't take a genious to differentiate a good picture taking phone from from a crappy one.

ChristianD

@ChristianD:

Christian, I agree. I would have thought that Apple would come up with a better cam on the iphone. It's really poor.

silverghozt

I'll wait until Canon and Apple unveil the 'iPhone Ansel'

The Chad

Hmmm. I don't know. Its all about the lens in the end, and there is now way you can fit an f1.2 50mm prime in your pocket.

SunetraKolemerit