I listened today Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki giving a speech on the future of cameraphones at the SHOK Summit event in Helsinki. Vanjoki is Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Markets unit at Nokia, and he had a quite provocative message to tell.
According to Vanjoki, camera phones will in a couple of years kill off the DSLRs, providing the same image quality in a very small package. He promised 50 megapixel sensors and high-quality lenses in a package as small as the nail of the little finger. And also HD video will be available, to be shown on a monitor or tv attached to the camera phone. Vanjoki hinted towards a new kind of software providing unparalled photographic output from a mobile phone.
Vanjoki made several jokes, for example he pointed at the professional photographer who was taking photographs of him, and predicted that everyone will be able to take such photographs with their phones, no need for big lenses any more. He also had stories about Nokia's discussions with Kodak and Carl Zeiss in the 1990s - neither of the companies believed it possible (or useful) to have a camera in a phone.
Update: Further thoughts on the matter.
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Even if the guy's crazy optimism on the improvement of sensors turns out to be right (why should it? it doesn't look like tiny sensors actually improved significantly noise-wise in the past years), the fingernail size would still mean tiny optics. I wonder how you can create great photos with those.
Well, I think you can take a great photo with any photographic device, including a cell phone, independent of lens and sensor. Will it be the same photo as one taken with a Canon 1Ds Mk3 and a great lens? Of course not. But within the limitations of the common computer or phone screen, where most photos are now viewed, Anssi Vanjoki may be close to right.
Vanjoki's speech generated quite a lot of publicity here in Finland. Many are speculating what he was really doing - was it marketing or does Nokia have some new innovations (nanotechnology perhaps) which will reinvent the field?
The title of the presentation was "A camera - A phone - A revolution". So there may be more than marketing here. In any case, for most people a camera phone is plenty enough for taking photographs.
Vanjoki is quite good in making speeches and contacting to his audience, I must admit.
However, the next presentation was about health and wellbeing, and the presenter pointed to Nokia for making people too fat: spending time with ICT devices and not getting exercise.
If I was with Nokia, I'd be whistling in the dark, too. Very loudly.
Putting 50 MP on a chip the size of your pinky fingernail is physically impossible with today's silicon technology. The photo sites would be less than a micron wide. You would not be able to capture enough photons to provide usable dynamic range and the images would be noisy as hell. Either Vanjoki is talking about some as yet uninvented technology or he is blowing a large amount of Marketing smoke out of his a$$.
To the non-believers - remember (or realise?) that the technology you hold in your hand today is actually not new; most of it has been around for 5 - 10 years, it's just taken that long for it to get to the point where you and me and anyone who isn't Mr Gates can afford to buy it and own it.
Nothing stands still, in any discipline, and who are we to say that 'this is impossible'.
There are all kinds of physical limitations, of which some may be eliminated by a completely new kind of technology. This probably applies to the noise levels of small sensors, perhaps to a revolutionary degree.
But on the other hand, control of the depth-of-field, that is only achievable with big enough lenses. Although - what about having lots of small lenses instead, somewhat similar to what insects have, and joining the images in software?
Oops, the TOP reference must have produced a nice spike in your stats. Even I see a slight increase today, just from being in your blogroll :)
As to the question, I think there are two types of photography: As done by people who take photographs for taking photographs, and as done by people who simply want to document part of their life. The latter type is done with whatever takes pictures, and that is the type that currently is covered by P&S cameras, and that is the market segment that will be greatly cannibalized by future phones.
There is no need for images taken by a phone to be of DSLR quality. As long as they are as good as what came out of P&S cameras a few years ago, say in the 6 Mpx era, it absolutely suffices.
From a photographer's POV it does not matter any more than particular types of pencils (or word processors) matter to a poet. It's a different market.
Yes, already well over 1000 additional visits...
Indeed, a photographer's tool is quite different than an ordinary person needs. However, I don't know what will happen to the profession of photographers in, e.g., journalism when cameras become ubiquitous. A thousand monkeys...
Cameras ARE ubiquitous, but the papers don't hunger for what the masses provide. No, I don't think it makes so much of a difference.
50 mp from a camera the size of my pinky nail? This person is ignorant of the technological barriers involved ie. diffraction, quantum mechanics of photons, and more.
Captain, I canna change the laws of physics!
@Andreas: Unfortunately it seems that the media is using more and more amateur photographs, often with such a low quality (but zero price) that it hurts the eye.
Nokia today announced the N8, which seems to have some of the stuff mentioned by Vanjoki (HD videos etc.), although it falls much short of the specs he was promising. The "large sensor" refers to those in compact cameras.
Nokia press release: "The Nokia N8 introduces a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor that rivals those found in compact digital cameras. Additionally, the Nokia N8 offers the ability to make HD-quality videos and edit them with an intuitive built-in editing suite. Doubling as a portable entertainment center, people can enjoy HD-quality video with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound by plugging into their home theatre system."
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