PluggedIn: Camera-Phones Double as Photo Albums
story.news.yahoo.com
Tue Aug 13,10:55 AM ET
By Edmund Klamann
TOKYO (Reuters) - If you sit down to lunch at a Tokyo restaurant and a business associate offers to show you pictures of her toddler, chances are she'll reach not for an envelope of photo prints, but for a mobile phone with a built-in camera.
Camera-phones may still be a novelty in Europe and are just starting to hit U.S. stores in time to be widely available for the big end-of-year holiday selling season.
But in Japan, mobile phone companies have already ushered in their second full generation of products, many with features more resembling a portable photo album than a phone.
In addition to tiny cameras and full-color screens, the new phones offer digital zoom lenses, fancier microchips for sharper, higher-resolution pictures, and enough memory to store hundreds of photos.
Analysts and industry executives here predict such features will prove irresistible to American and European consumers as Japan's electronics makers push their photo-enabled handsets overseas.
"It's often said that Japanese love cameras, but Europeans and Americans in particular see family photos as something special, even putting them up in their cubicles at work," said Gartner Japan analyst Nahoko Mitsuyama.
"Theirs is a culture that puts a high value on photos, and if that can be tapped into, I think there'll be demand for these products outside Japan as well," she said.
Splashy U.S. billboard ads from wireless phone-making joint venture Sony Ericsson ( news - web sites) seek to simplify the potential appeal of the camera phones for American consumers with the pitch: "See someone you like. Save them for later."
JAPANESE DEVICES
In Japan, J-Phone, the third-largest mobile operator, which is run by Japan Telecom and Britain's Vodafone Group , launched the world's first mobile phones with built-in cameras in November 2000. The service has spurred a jump in its wireless subscriber market share as some 6 million customers have signed up to date for its "sha-mail" picture service.
The battle was joined in June by Japan's dominant mobile carrier, NTT DoCoMo ( news - web sites) Inc. , which had dragged its feet on photo phones in hopes consumers would leap-frog to its pricey third-generation service that offers fast data transmission and live video.
"Three-G service is expensive, the phones are bulky and the battery life is short," said WestLB senior analyst Kun Soo Lee, explaining why consumers have not embraced the third-generation service.
DoCoMo's "i-shot," a simpler digital picture service that competes with J-Phone, has helped DoCoMo halt a slide in customers.
In April, No. 2 Japanese carrier KDDI Corp.'s wireless operator "au" also launched its first camera-phone, which remains its best-selling handset.
The companies' latest generation of camera-phones takes the technology a step further.
DoCoMo and J-Phone have launched camera-phones with slots for memory cards such as Sony's postage stamp-sized Memory Stick Duo for storing photos.
Some models, also offer higher-resolution cameras with more than 300,000 pixels. That's nearly three times the number of electronic picture elements built into prior models. Others include tiny flash attachments.
Japan's lead in camera-phones, analysts and executives here say, reflects not just a cultural affinity for photography, but Japanese firms' efforts to develop the complex chips, tiny lenses and color screens needed to make the handsets attractive.
Gartner's Mitsuyama notes that Sharp Corp. , currently the market leader in camera-phones, is also Japan's biggest maker of liquid crystal displays.
CHEAPER, BETTER
As technology improves and the market grows, competition will heat up among chip and component makers, and non-Japanese giants like Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology are joining the fray.
This can only be good news for consumers, with image sensors and other key parts set to keep getting cheaper and better.
What stands out in the latest crop of Japan's camera-phones is their increased sensitivity in low-light picture-taking situations. The technology underlying this is the charge-coupled device, a semiconductor chip that acts as the electronic film in most digital still cameras but had been considered too pricey and power-hungry for cell phones.
Camera-phones traditionally used image sensors made from much more common complementary metal oxide semiconductor chips, the type of microchip used in computer memory and the microcontrollers found in all sorts of everyday electronics.
So-called CMOS image sensors are more prone to electrical interference and less sensitive to light than CCDs are. The result is often pictures that are coarse and blurry, and if taken indoors, too dark to see clearly.
CCD prices have plunged in price and, as a result, Japanese consumers are increasingly using their photo phones to display pictures as well as to send them to each other. |
