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Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.The days of tiny, fuzzy photos taken with camera phones may soon be over.
Cellphone makers including Nokia Corp., Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics Co. have begun upping the specs of phone cameras, offering higher-resolution, 3.2 megapixel photo sensors, built-in flashes and advanced lenses made by top-brand companies like Carl Zeiss Inc. After years of missteps, the wireless carriers also are finally making it much easier and cheaper to share pictures.
The upgrades in quality and service are likely to accelerate a trend of ditching cameras altogether -- just as many cellphone users no longer find it necessary to have a land-line telephone. For some consumers, especially young ones, camera phones are the main way to take pictures.
For handset makers, cameras are a big step in taking the cellphone beyond talking and texting to become the all-purpose device to replace music players, personal-digital assistants, camcorders and laptops.
Sarah Mink, a 16-year-old high school junior from Boston, has owned a compact digital camera for several years. For the past nine months she has been leaving it home and using her Verizon camera phone, shooting and sharing hundreds of pictures a month. "I even send my friends pictures when I'm trying on clothes in a store," she says.
Verizon Wireless became the first U.S. carrier to offer a 3.2- megapixel camera phone -- nearly five times the resolution of most current models -- when it started selling the Samsung A990 last summer for $250 with a service package. More recently, Nokia and Sony Ericsson (a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson), have begun marketing 3.2-megapixel camera phones that can work on Cingular and T-Mobile networks. U.S. carriers aren't yet offering the new Nokia and Sony models at a discount, meaning prices currently are around $400.
Market researcher iSuppli, of El Segundo, Calif., estimates that 74% of cellphones sold in the U.S. this year will be equipped with cameras, and 13% of them will have 3.2-megapixel sensors. Phones offering even better resolution are now available in Europe and Asia, with Samsung offering a 10-megapixel model in South Korea.
Until recently, camera phones haven't been very good at either of the main reasons people take photographs: preserving memories or sharing them. Most camera phones had less than one megapixel of resolution -- resulting in grainy shots -- and no flash or focus capabilities. They could only store a few dozen shots, and many phones couldn't move pictures to printers or PCs without going through the wireless network. Until 2005, pictures often couldn't be shared between different cellular carriers because of a lack of standards.
Confusing pricing structures -- some carriers based charges on an image's size rather than a flat rate per picture -- were another deterrent.
Now, even traditional camera makers see the pattern changing. "You will take some of the point-and-shoot market, and it will shift to the cellphone," says Brian Marks, general manager of Eastman Kodak Co.'s mobile-photography business in Rochester, N.Y. Kodak and other camera makers are supplying technology and components to cellphone makers.
Angela Granfield, an office manager for a construction company in Medfield, Mass., says her boss previously used a digital camera to take pictures of damage in apartments to show to building owners. Last year he started using a new Motorola phone so he could immediately send the pictures to her before his crews started repair work.
"If customers complain, this helps explain why it costs so much," she says. Ms. Granfield says that nowadays, her company uses the digital camera only when it is creating a new brochure.
The photo industry also is trying to make it easier to turn cam- phone images into prints. Kodak now equips all of its self-service printing kiosks with the capability to download images from camera phones using wireless Bluetooth technology, a standard feature of many cell phones. It has developed software that analyzes the picture quality and recommends a picture size that won't look grainy, even if the camera phone has low resolution. Fuji Photo Film Co. says it has signed deals with some cellular carriers to make it easy for customers to email images and pick up Fuji prints at nearby Wal-Mart Stores Inc. or Walgreen Co. stores. Fuji says that fewer than 3% of the billions of images taken with camera-phones right now get printed, so any increase would be significant.
Online, Kodak has signed a deal with Nokia under which some Nokia phones automatically connect to Kodak Gallery, an online picture- sharing-and-printing site. Photo-sharing site Shutterfly Inc. just announced a deal with Verizon that lets customers snap a picture and with a couple of clicks create a postcard for $1.99 that will be sent to an address entered by the caller.
Last year, carriers started simplifying the process of transmitting photos. T-Mobile says it has reduced to just four keystrokes the process of taking and sending a picture to a select circle of friends called "My Faves," down from 20 keystrokes when it introduced picture messaging three years ago.
Cellphone makers have even been introducing some photo innovations ahead of traditional camera makers. Sony Ericsson's K790a phone has a "best pic" feature for action photography that deals with "shutter lag" -- the delay in capturing shots after the button is pressed in many digital cameras. The new feature continuously saves images, and stores four frames before and after a photographer pushes the shot button.
Some phones have picture stabilization to offset shaky hands and software that automatically eliminates red-eye. Nokia has introduced LifeBlog software that automatically organizes pictures by dates in personal-computer albums.
Carriers are especially interested in the video capabilities of many newer camera phones.
Unlike digital-camera makers, "carriers have the ability to monetize video," says David Burmester, associate director, messaging category for Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC. Verizon allows customers to store as many as 75 pictures or 15-second videos free on its Pix & Flix Web site. Friends who download the videos pay as much as 25 cents for the privilege.
While camera makers will always be able to make dedicated devices that can take better pictures, the camera phones are already proving more than adequate for everyday use. Bob Goldstein, a digital photography veteran from California, goes as far to predict that camera phones eventually will make traditional cameras obsolete. "There's a generation of kids who don't own wrist watches because they have the time on their phones," he says. "The same thing will happen with cameras. Someone will say, 'Are you gonna buy a camera?' And they'll say, 'What's that?'"
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