The megapixel war is on, but it's not where you might expect it – among high-end camera phones.
With the 8-megapixel phones slowly filtering onto the scene, cell phone manufacturers are trying to do for photography what the iPod did for music: take it everywhere, just in a slightly lower-quality package.
It's nothing consumers haven't done before. It used to be that if someone wanted to listen to music on the go, he or she had to lug around a pile of extra cassettes or CDs. Then came the iPod: Thousands of songs could be stored on a single device that would fit in your pocket. The quality wasn't great, but no one seemed to mind. In fact, compressed, so-so-quality mp3 files and tiny, white earbuds became the norm. Music didn't have to sound good anymore – it was convenient.
Music has become simply a backdrop for our daily lives, and a dropoff in sound quality has become an acceptable tradeoff for convenience.
Now cell phone manufacturers are trying to do the same thing: make consumers accept decent quality snapshots in exchange for great portability.
Phones with 8-megapixel cameras are already in the works from LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, and many have advanced features like Xenon flashes, manual ISO adjustment and face-detection – all of which would have been completely unheard-of in a phone just a year or two ago.
Last week, an ad campaign set to run in men's magazine FHM for the Sony Ericsson C905 phone was revealed. It's the standard “busty woman holding the phone being advertised” photo, but with a catch: The full-page photo was shot using the camera phone being displayed in the ad.
British website Marketing Week reports that Sony Ericsson is claiming this as the first-ever ad shot with a cell-phone camera, and writes, “It aims to show that the C905's camera is as good as an ordinary digital camera.”
The 8.1 megapixel camera crammed into the C905 is certainly a step in the right direction, but don't expect to replicate the photo in this ad with every shot. Marketing Week also explains, “Bauer Media, the publisher of FHM, says it developed the idea of . . . of testing the camera for a photography shoot, and bought in a fashion photographer to take the pictures.”
Just because a camera (or a camera phone, for that matter) has a lot of megapixels, it doesn't mean it will make you a better photographer. The photo in this ad was illuminated by studio lights that probably cost more than the phone itself, and it was shot by a professional photographer who likely spent hours retouching it in Photoshop afterward.
A camera phone does not encourage this type of thoughtful approach to photos at all. It screams to hurry up and take the picture so you can get back to calling or texting your friends, surfing the web or checking your e-mail. With so many other features beckoning for your attention, it seems unlikely that anyone will bother to take the time to carefully frame each shot, consider shadows, or any of the other things professional photographers do each time they snap a photo.
So if the phones from LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson are any indication, more megapixels are the future of cell phones. Consumers seem to love the idea of “one device to rule them all,” as shown by the explosive popularity of the king of all-in-one, Apple's iPhone, but what they're really getting may be compromised versions of each device in exchange for convenience. If we don't want to lose our appreciation for quality in photography like we have with music, we can't let quick, decent-quality snapshots from camera phones replace the thoughtful process allowed by high-quality, dedicated cameras.
[camera phone picture courtesy Flickr user Travallai]
0 comments:
Post a Comment