Not an apple fan? The thought of owning an iPhone sends you over the edge? Check Sony's answer to the the newly announced iPhone, the C905 Cyber-shot, a slider phone equipped with an impressive 8.1-megapixel camera, GPS, and the ability to geotag any of photos that you take with the phone. Sony doesn't put cybershot on just any camerphone so you know it's decked out. The C905's Xenon flash, image stabilizer, face detection, and autofocus, are some of the highlights.
Everyone seems to be excited by the phone’s use of more biodegradable plant based plastics. But what about all the nasty head penetrating radiation? Of course, the FCC's consensus is that a little Radio Frequency (RF) radiation doesn’t harm the ‘ol noggin. However, some folks like being more safe, than free (read vegans).
Good thing Samsung has equipped the W510 with a user–facing camera, for all our mobile videoconferencing needs, so we won’t have to hold this handset to our heads at all. Nice.
Wait, is a person walking around a busy area videoconferencing really any safer?
Read more!
Competition is the engine of innovation, and Omnivision, seemingly right on cue, has announced their latest innovation that promises to bring an smaller 8MP CMOS camera to our 3G phones.
While Sharp was looking for ways to slim a larger, denser, CMOS camera phone sensor. Omnivision was developing a new way of producing the same size sensor while doubling the image resolution.
Their approach, as simple as it sounds...
was to turn the sensor over. Dubbed OmniBSI, this changed the order of things a bit, making the silicon the first thing the light hits. This subtle switch up optimizes the silicon’s light absorption, giving the sensor better low-light sensitivity, while allowing for larger apertures and thinner cameras.
This isn’t the first time we seen this type of tech in phones, but Omnivision is one of the largest supplier of camera modules to phone makers. Previously, only one or two brands were making these higher resolution modules, and putting them into their own phones. Now with Omnivision no one company will have “the” high resolution camera phone... unless it's huge. Either way, this will certainly level the playing field when it comes to pricing.
Manufactures will get to fool around with these buggers starting in June.
Thursday Sharp announced their tiny CMOS camera module, an autofocus five megapixel camera with an improved signal-noise ratio and the world's thinnest lens element. Meant to be embedded in the next generation of smartphones, these will boost their image quality to something a bit more presentable.
3G phones promise many functions, but adding a camera that produces high quality images and video has been on the wishlist of many gadget freaks for years. Guess we'll have to wait and see if phone manufactures are impressed by the new component option; Sharp is set to ship a prototype form of the cam at the end of the month.
Up until now the convenience of camera phones seems to have outweighed their inability to produce sharp high quality digital photographs. Aggravating and disappointing users even further, these ‘cameras’ perform especially poorly in low-light situations, and often come with paltry LED 'flashes' if any supplemental light is offered at all. They even have garnished their own "Krappy Kamera" category in art competitions.
Kodak, quite unexpectedly, has made huge advancements in changing this dirty little fact of life for camera phone users. Not to say Kodak doesn't have a history of innovation. Come on, their new roll film was all the rage in the 1930’s and the Brownie, fergetaboutit.
Now, the engineers at Kodak were directed to rethink the CMOS image sensor (the small image sensor used in camera phones), and instead of producing weak efforts, they ‘flipped the script’ completely by reversing the way the image sensor reacts to light.
Instead of reacting solely to the light that hits the sensor, Kodak’s new 5-megapixal sensor reacts to the absence of light, a first of its kind. This reversal creates much less noise in the darker areas of photos, while increasing the overall image quality to something closer to a standalone digital camera with a larger CCD sensor.
Before this announcement they were tinkering with the CMOS sensor’s sensitivity or low light capabilities. Kodak has increased this to about 3200 ISO, or faster than the fastest film, unheard of in a camera phone.
This is achieved by adding a panchromatic/clear pixel, in other words, these new pixels register all colors of light in addition to the traditional red, green, and blue (RGB) pixels that are present on every digital camera image sensor. This addition is what allows the sensor to gather more information from lower light scenes.
This all bodes well for camera phone users. These image making phones are usually whipped out in less than optimal lighting conditions; like at bars, cafes, clubs; you know indoors. Now that they are no longer a "Krappy Kamera" who knows, maybe the next Sport Illustrated swimsuit edition with be shot on a camera phone, by me.
<..Via Press Release..>
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