Brett Parker wrote:
Bah - just get a seperate camera - for anything that you actually need the quality for a phone camera is never going to cut it. Phone and PDA merge is almost logical, phone and camera merge is getting a bit silly.
Agreed re: quality, but having a great camera at home isn't much use when you want to take a photo away from home! And actually, the quality of the photos I got out of my N82 were vastly superior to the quality of the photos I got from my £100 Kodak 7MP camera (note: I know that's not a "decent" camera to compare with). The only thing missing is optical zoom, and that's where a high MP count can help: you can cut the 2MP image you want out of the 5/8/12MP image you took and get more-or-less the same effect as with optical zoom.
Also, the phone camera takes decent video footage, something the digital camera never did. The audio quality is much better (but then phones tend to have decent mic's), and the frame rate is much higher (but then, the phone has a much faster CPU than the camera did).
I honestly do not miss the digital camera - the phone battery even lasts longer than the digicam did, and because I use it a lot more (it's always with me so I can) I am better at using it than I ever was with the "proper" camera. (It's quite handy to take a photo of the specials board in a restaurant so you can choose from it at the table!) Geo-tagging of photos is also a potential benefit of linking to the phone (not one I've really used yet but think I might).
However, I did a lot of research before buying the phone and the N82 was a damn good camera(-phone). Compared with it's N95 cousin it was considerably better, despite them both having 5MP (and presumably identical) CCDs. The optics are better, the flash is better. This is why I won't actually pick a phone/camera just from it's MP rating. However, the manufacturers trying to take a lead in the photography side are doing more than just increasing the MP rating, and I have to say I would really like one of the forthcoming Samsung 12MP with 3x optical zoom models (yes, it still makes calls!)
For my money, the logic is that modern phones have decent CPU, storage, and battery management, at a high unit price. A decent camera benefits from all of these features, but my network won't subsidise it (and I do need a phone anyway, so having one with a decent CCD or not isn't going to make a hige difference to the price).
Bizzarely, I've never taken to sync-ing contacts to my mobile and doing other PDS tasks from it (diary etc). Perhaps because the N82 is pretty rubbish at that (esp when I can't link to it from my Linux box).
Adam Bower wrote:
I'd rather have a 2MP camera in a phone than 5 or 8... as you shrink sensors (well, increase the density of the light detector thingies) they create a lot more noise and make the picture look crap (generally).
Agreed in principle, but see the optical zoom replacement argument above.
I'd rather they put in a decent lens in with a low megapixel sensor and a good flash (something missing from many cameras on phones) instead of letting marketing get in the way who just want bigger megapixel numbers as it looks good in the press.
The N82 has xenon flash and decent (by these standards anyway) lens. Modern 5MP phones tend not to have - they're reserved for the top end where the top end keeps moving. Some of the newer phones have much wider angle lenses too, so you don't have to get so far away from something to take a decent picture.
I know I'll not win many people over with any of this, but I honestly believe that anyone who would only budget £100 for a digital camera could do much worse than add that to their phone budget instead (and do some research before parting with it).