"Time was, if you had a flip phone in one pocket and a compact digital camera in the other, you felt pretty good about your high-tech mojo. Now that new phones with built-in cameras or optional camera attachments have arrived, that confidence may be wavering. Part of you thinks they're overpriced gee-whiz gadgets, but the other part says, "Hmm, am I missing something? Might they actually be gimmicky and practical at the same time?"
Digital imaging is part of the mobile phone's evolution, whether we like it or not. In Japan, one in every three phones now has an embedded camera, according to global research firm Strategy Analytics. By 2007, 147 million of these suckers will be on the streets worldwide. In the United States, several manufacturers, including Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sanyo, and Sony Ericsson, already sell camera phones, and more are on the way....
The first question people ask is, how good a picture can these things take? The short answer: not very. Most camera phones have a maximum resolution of 640x480 and a mediocre fixed lens, so don't expect miracles. I've played around with the Nokia 3650, the Samsung SGH-V205, the Sanyo SCP-5300, and the Sony Ericsson P800, as well as the camera attachments for the Samsung SPH-A500 (Sprint PCS), the Sony Ericsson T68i, and the Sony Ericsson T300. All share the same traits: noisy images comparable to poor TV reception, soft focus, and subpar color reproduction. Still, if everything goes right, you can snap a passable image that a generous critic could argue borders on Webcam quality and has a gritty, of-the-moment look....
The real appeal of camera phones--and I recommend, for convenience's sake, that you get one with an embedded camera, such as Sanyo's SCP-5300, rather than a camera accessory--is the ability to take a picture and immediately e-mail it. You can also turn your pic into a background image, and on some phones, you can even assign picture IDs to phone-book entries so that a face, instead of a number, pops up on your screen when a friend or a business associate calls....
To paraphrase Andre Agassi, who once shilled for Canon that 'image is everything,' image is now in everything." [CNET Electronics]
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