A hotly contested arms race in the mobile world is the number of megapixels in a phone camera. This has generally tracked the megapixel race in the stand-alone digital still camera market.
The fact that people always carry their phones makes them an extremely popular device for spontaneous photography. Hence, back in 2005, Nokia became the worlds largest digital camera manufacturer.
But how many people use the camera in their phone for serious photography, and what do they do with the images? Print them? Blow them up to a poster size?
Not at all often in either case would be my guess, much less so the poster option.
Conventional wisdom on digital still cameras says that anything above 6 megapixels is comfortably capable of producing a 10″x8″ (large size) print.
Viewed on a TV or monitor, the number of pixels displayed is much lower (around 1-4 megapixels) – and when only viewed on the phone or camera itself, typically around a quarter of a megapixel. Past a certain point, what determines image quality far more than the number of pixels in the sensor is the quality of the optics (i.e. lens) and the image processing algorithms applied to the output from the sensor.
Many professionals are perfectly happy with the images produced by 6-10 megapixel digital SLR models.
When squeezing a high resolution sensor into a small device the individual pixels need to be made smaller. Smaller pixels mean less light getting to each one and the result is much noisier images in low-light conditions.
So if you like to take pictures indoors, or on a night out, then a really big megapixel number on a phone camera probably isn’t a good thing for you.
Also, there’s usually limited room and budget for really good optics in a small device. For that reason, most phone cameras have to do without an optical zoom. More megapixels also mean more processing and thus more battery usage, as well as larger file sizes which mean more storage required and greater time to transfer. None of these are good things for the typical user.
So, with all of this well known by mobile device manufacturers, why do we continue ever upward in the race for more megapixels, with the likes of the Sony Ericsson Satio at 12.1 megapixels?
It should be noted that the engineers at Sony Ericsson (some of whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Stockholm last week) appear to have done an excellent job with the optics and the software supporting their sensor, such that one detailed review claims it has “potentially the best camera ever fitted to a phone”.
That said, it clearly suffers from low-light noise, and the default image capture setting is actually 9 megapixels, not 12, suggesting that they aren’t really all needed most of the time! The major reason for adding more megapixels is the “more=better” algorithm in the mind of many consumers when it comes to the numbers on the box.
What does all this have to do with Symbian? Well, to the extent that the platform could define software for the camera sub-system, should it be optimized for a pragmatic megapixel range and an attempt made to educate consumers about the pros and cons of technology choices?
Or, alternatively, should the OEMs that use that platform to build products decide what they think they can sell and drive the architectural requirements and consumer messaging accordingly?
Since the platform is primarily driven by OEM contributions, the latter seems much more likely than the former. However, different OEMs may have different product plans and policies in this area which are likely to lead to some fragmentation. Is this an area where fragmentation is inevitable and if so, how does that affect application developers and the services they can offer to end users?
