Camera

Camera 

   
A camera is a mobile phone which is able to capture photographs. Most camera phones also record video. The first camera phone was sold in 2000 in Japan, a J-Phone model.

Mobile Camera

    Most camera phones are simpler than separate digital cameras. Their usual fixed-focus lenses and smaller sensors limit their performance in poor lighting. Lacking a physical shutter, some have a long shutter lag. Photoflash is typically provided by an LED source which illuminates less intensely over a much longer exposure time than a bright and near-instantaneous flash strobe. Optical zoom and tripod screws are rare and none has a hot shoe for attaching an external flash. Some also lack a USB connection or a removable memory card. Most have Bluetooth and WiFi, and can make geotagged photographs.

    Some of the more expensive camera phones have only a few of these technical disadvantages, but with bigger image sensors (a few are up to 1"), their capabilities approach those of low-end point-and-shoot cameras. In the smartphone era, the steady sales increase of camera phones caused point-and-shoot camera sales to peak about 2010 and decline thereafter. Most model lines improve their cameras every year or two.

     Some smartphones only have a menu choice to start a camera application program and an on-screen button to activate the shutter. Others also have a separate camera button, for quickness and convenience. A few camera phones are designed to resemble separate low-end digital compact cameras in appearance and to some degree in features and picture quality, and are branded as both mobile phones and cameras.

     The principal advantages of camera phones are cost and compactness; indeed for a user who carries a mobile phone anyway, the addition is negligible. Smartphones that are camera phones may run mobile applications to add capabilities such as geotagging and image stitching. A few high end phones can use their touch screen to direct their camera to focus on a particular object in the field of view, giving even an inexperienced user a degree of focus control exceeded only by seasoned photographers using manual focus. However, the touch screen, being a general purpose control, lacks the agility of a separate camera's dedicated buttons and dial.

   camera phones can share pictures almost instantly and automatically via a sharing infrastructure integrated with the carrier network. Early developers including Philippe Kahn envisioned a technology that would enable service providers to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo."The resulting technologies, Multimedia Messaging Service and Sha-Mail were developed parallel to and in competition to open Internet based mobile communication provided by GPRS and later 3G networks.

    The closed sharing infrastructure was critical and explains the early successes of J-Phone, DoCoMo in Japan, Sprint, and other carriers worldwide.

     The first commercial camera phone complete with infrastructure was the J-SH04, made by Sharp Corporation, had an integrated CCD sensor, with the Sha-Mail (Picture-Mail in Japanese) infrastructure developed in collaboration with Kahn's LightSurf venture, and marketed from 2001 by J-Phone in Japan today owned by Softbank.

     The first commercial deployment in North America of camera phones was in 2004. The Sprint wireless carriers deployed over one million camera phone manufactured by Sanyo and launched by the PictureMail infrastructure (Sha-Mail in English) developed and managed by LightSurf.

    Users of early camera phones were held captive by the MMS business model. While phones had internet connectivity, working web browsers and email-programs, the phone menu offered no way of including a photo in an email or uploading it to a web site. Connecting cables or removable media that would enable the local transfer of pictures were also usually missing.