Sony Ericsson Claims 20MP Photography, HD Video Recording in 2012 Phones

At the behest of Sony Ericsson, the newest, dumbest megapixel war is officially upon us — and this time it’s in mobile phones. In an ambitious presentation about the future of handset technology, the company made a point of throwing out a target for 12-20MP for it’s phone cameras, along with the capability to record HD video, to be met in 2012. We’ve seen that compact HD video recording is attractive and plausible, but years of relentless digital camera advertising has taught us that tons of megapixels does not a decent camera make.

While a megapixel pissing contest may be an effective marketing strategy, it’s doubtful that it’ll be most conducive to higher quality photos — the biggest weaknesses of current phone cameras have nothing to do with pixel count, but crappy CMOS sensors and dumpy little lenses.

This declaration was buried in between a few other predictably optimistic projections: LTE connectivity at 100Mbps, 1GHz CPU speeds and 1024×768 screen resolution. Interesting numbers for sure, but they don’t really much vision for what such a device might actually look like. [TechOn]