Camera Phone

A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture either still photographs or video. Since early in the 21st century the majority of cameras and of mobile phones in use are camera phones. 1 Most camera phones are simpler than separate digital cameras. Their usual fixed focus lenses and smaller sensors limit their performance in poor lighting, and most have a long shutter lag and no flash. Many lack a USB connection, removable memory card, or other way of transferring their pictures more quickly than by the phone's inherent communication feature. Some of the more expensive camera phones have only a few of these technical disadvantages, which in any case have not inhibited their widespread use.

The camera phone, like many complex systems, is the result of converging and enabling technologies. There are dozens of relevant patents dating back as far as 1956. Compared to digital cameras of the 1990s, a consumer-viable camera in a mobile phone would require far less power and a higher level of camera electronics integration to permit the miniaturization. The CMOS active pixel image sensor "camera-on-a-chip" developed by Dr. Eric Fossum and his team in the early 1990s achieved the first step of realizing the modern camera phone as described in a March 1995 Business Week article. While the first camera phones, as successfully marketed by J-Phone in Japan, used CCD sensors and not CMOS sensors, more than 90 of camera phones sold today use CMOS image sensor technology.

Over the years there have been many videophones and cameras that include communications technologies. None of them had focused on the integration with the wireless Internet which would allow instant media sharing with anyone anywhere. Such experiments included, for example, a device that was known as the Apple Videophone PDA in 1995. 2 There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 1990s. 3 There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997.

On June 11, 1997, Philippe Kahn instantly shared the first pictures from the maternity ward where his daughter Sophie was born, with more than 2,000 family, friends and associates around the world. A sharing infrastructure and an integrated cell-phone and camera combo augured the birth of instant visual communications. 5 6 . Kahn's picture is the first publicly known and shared picture.

In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras. However, the Kyocera system was designed as a peer-to-peer video-phone as opposed to the Sharp project which was initially focused on sharing instant pictures. That was made possible when the Sharp devices was coupled to the Sha-mail infrastructure designed in collaboration with American technologist, Kahn. The Kyocera team was led by Mr. Kazumi Saburi. 7

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.