When it came to realizing the full potential of combining cell phones with digital cameras, necessity, as with most things in the world of electronics, was the mother of invention. Back in 1997, Phillipe Kahn’s wife was due to have a baby, and Kahn, a billionaire who founded Borland and other companies, wanted a way to quickly send live pictures of his newborn daughter to friends and family. He had the know-how and the technical means necessary to tether a digital camera to his cell phone, so he used a cell phone to transmit the snapshots; thus, the camera phone as a tool for instant sharing was born.

Of course, it took a while to get from that Frankenphone to the sleek and fully integrated camera phones that fly off the shelves today, and that road was paved with advancements in sensor technology.

Sorting Out The Sensors

In a time when Polaroid is phasing out its eponymous instant film, it comes as no surprise that most of the cell phones available now have digital cameras built into them. But it wasn’t always this way. Pictures capture light, which is transmitted using analog waves, so the biggest challenge facing camera phone developers early on was in converting these analog signals to digital signals a computer could process and store. Sensors called CCDs (charge-coupled devices) are good at doing just that and are used in many standalone digital cameras. There are some downsides to CCDs, however. CCDs have relatively high power requirements by cell phone standards, and three (one to capture each primary color) are ideal for maximum image-capture quality. They also only sense light, meaning they must be attached to an external processor that can edit the image data, so they are a bit too bulky to conform to the razor-thin profile everyone wants from a phone that can be carried in a pocket.

Although a few early camera phones used CCDs, it was CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology invented in the 1960s, but not applied to camera sensors until 1995, that allowed manufacturers to open a viable market for camera phones. Unlike CCD sensors, CMOS integrates the sensor and the image processor together on the same relatively thin chip, dovetailing perfectly with a cell phone’s sleek form factor. CMOS sensors also require less power than CCD chips, making them ideal for use in phones where tiny batteries are responsible for multiple tasks. Nearly all cell phones on the market today use CMOS sensors instead of CCDs.

In 2000, J-Phone (now SoftBank Mobile), a Japanese mobile phone provider, released the Sharp J-SH04, which incorporated a CMOS sensor and became the world’s first commercially available camera cell phone. It had everything a modern camera phone has, just scaled down dramatically compared to today’s devices. For example, the sensor had a resolution of 0.1MP (see the “Resolving Resolution” sidebar for information about megapixels), meaning pictures were 50 times less detailed than those snapped by the 5MP models commonly found today. The small display had a palette of only 256 colors compared to millions that modern displays handle, and it used the same technology pioneered by Phillipe Kahn to transmit the tiny photos over a cell network that operated at a fraction of today’s cell network speeds.

Fast Forward: Today’s Camera Phones

Much has happened in the nine years since Sharp released that first camera phone, and now it’s easy to find camera phones that rival standalone digital cameras in terms of portability, features, and ease of use. Here are a few of our current favorites:

The iPhone. If you are surprised to see a phone with a relatively paltry 2MP integrated camera and no built-in flash on this list, then you need to start thinking beyond the hardware. Camera phones aren’t all that useful unless you can easily edit, share, and otherwise manipulate the images they capture, and even out of the box, Apple’s iPhone ($199 and up; www.apple.com) makes it easy to store, organize, and email photos without the need to connect it to a computer (although you can).

Those are just the basics. Thanks to the App Store, the iPhone lets you do more with your snapshots than any of its competitors allow. There were nearly 600 photography-related apps in the store at the time this article was written, including paid ones such as Tiffen Company’s Photo fx ($2.99; www.tiffen.com), which can apply a number of filters to your photos, to freebies such as Cooliris (www.cooliris.com), which lets you view many photos using a virtual wall that moves as you tilt the device. There are even programs such as Stepcase’s Darkroom (price varies; www.stepcase.com) that use the accelerometers inside the iPhone to detect when it isn’t moving so a picture is taken when there will be no camera shake. Or SnapTell (free; www.snaptell.com), which uses advanced image recognition to let you take a picture of nearly any product and quickly see reviews and price comparisons culled from the Web. With all of these options, the toughest part is wading through them.

The Zine. Commonly known as the Zine, Motorola’s ZINE ZN5 ($349.99; www.t-mobile.com) is most famous for its 5MP sensor and integrated Xenon flash but has plenty of picture-editing capabilities that largely go unsung. There’s an integrated panorama mode that combines several pictures into a seamless whole for stunning landscape shots. The device incorporates Kodak Imaging Science technology that adjusts white balance, reduces noise, and handles color processing automatically. It also uses the same Kodak Perfect Touch processing you can opt for when you develop standard photos to automatically enhance the color and contrast of your shots.

Motorola claims the camera can autofocus in less than a second and that there is no delay when a series of shots is taken, which are both big problems for camera phones that aren’t designed around the camera. It has 340MB of internal storage, and you can add 4GB of removable storage so there is plenty of room to store all of those big pictures. Kodak Gallery Link (www.kodakgallery.com) support is offered so you can upload photos to that service with one click. You can also share pictures via Wi-Fi instead of the cell network, which should be faster in most cases and won’t eat into whatever data plan you use.

The N79. When it comes to digital cameras, a 5MP sensor like that found in the Nokia N79 ($429; www.nokiausa.com) is nice, but even the biggest sensor is worthless unless it has some decent optics to focus light properly. The N79 incorporates Carl Zeiss lenses that are typically only found on decent standalone digital cameras, and that’s not all. Two bright LED lights that require far less power than do other bulbs are used for the flash, improving image quality in low light. Editing software is built right into the phone and can be accessed using the large touchscreen on the back of the device.

The phone supports Wi-Fi for getting pictures onto your PC (or sharing them with others) over a wireless network, and the 50MB of internal memory can be expanded using microSD cards. One of the neatest features is the inclusion of a second .3MP camera on the front that lets you use the N79 as a videophone while still being able to see the person you’re talking to on the phone’s touchscreen.

The Pre. Although it wasn’t quite available at the time this article was written, the Palm Pre (price not yet announced; www.sprint.com), with its 3.2MP camera with LED flash, has some features worth mentioning. Chief among these is the device’s integrated support for DxO Labs image correction, which is one of the most advanced image-enhancement software packages on the market. If this software is implemented properly within the camera, it should allow for crystal-clear close-up macro shots, dramatically improved low-light performance, and perhaps some image-stabilization capabilities.

Much like the iPhone, the Pre has full support for Web-enabled apps, but unlike the iPhone, it can multitask, which may make it easier to snap, edit, and share photos. Wi-Fi supplements the Web access for offloading or sharing pictures, and there’s a very good chance that apps will appear to take care of whatever the DxO processing can’t handle.

The Memoir. This article wouldn’t be complete without mention of the Samsung Memoir ($579.99; www.t-mobile.com), which blurs the line between cell phones and digital cameras to an unprecedented degree. From the front, you would never guess it was a cell phone, as the Xenon flash and slightly raised rim surrounding a large lens makes it look exactly like a pocket-sized digital camera. Behind that lens lurks an 8MP sensor (the largest currently available for mobile phones in the U.S.) that captures enormous still images and doubles as a camcorder sensor for recording up to an hour of standard-definition video.

The camera supports auto-focus and incorporates smile-detection technology so that a picture is only snapped when subjects are smiling, but it unfortunately supports only 16X digital zoom and doesn’t have any optical zoom capability. The back of the device is dominated by a large touchscreen display that becomes a viewfinder in camera mode and offers the same touch-based interface found in modern Samsung digital cameras.

The Big Picture

Exciting as today’s camera phones are, the really good stuff is just over the horizon. Several companies have announced that 12MP camera phones will soon be available, but the best news is that manufacturers are beginning to focus on image quality and boosting camera features instead of simply jamming bigger sensors into their phones. Look for features such as liquid lenses that improve focusing and technology that allows for optical zooming within a limited profile. Optical image stabilization that prevents the blurry images often associated with small cameras should also become more common, and better sensors will allow for better performance in low-light situations. There’s even talk of putting two cameras in single phones to let users snap stereoscopic (3D) images, and camera phones that also capture high-definition video aren’t far off, either.

With highly profitable cell, text, and data plans funding the industry’s pursuit of such technological developments, the possibilities are endless.

by Tracy Baker