Camera Phone - History

History

The camera phone, like many complex systems, is the result of converging and enabling technologies. There are dozens of relevant patents dating back as far as 1956. Compared to digital cameras of the 1990s, a consumer-viable camera in a mobile phone would require far less power and a higher level of camera electronics integration to permit the miniaturization.

The CMOS active pixel sensor "camera-on-a-chip" developed by Dr. Eric Fossum and his team in the early 1990s achieved the first step of realizing the modern camera phone as described in a March 1995 Business Week article. While the first camera phones, as successfully marketed by J-Phone in Japan, used CCD sensors and not CMOS sensors, more than 90% of camera phones sold today use CMOS image sensor technology.

Over the years there have been many videophones and cameras that have included communication capability. Some devices experimented with integration of the device to communicate wirelessly with Internet, which would allow instant media sharing with anyone anywhere. For example, in 1995 Apple experimented with the Apple Videophone/PDA. There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 1990s. There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997.

On June 11, 1997, Philippe Kahn shared instantly the first pictures from the maternity ward where his daughter Sophie was born. He wirelessly transmitted his cell phone pictures to more than 2,000 family, friends and associates around the world. Kahn's wireless sharing software and camera integrated into his cell phone augured the birth of instant visual communications. Kahn's cell phone transmission is the first known publicly-shared picture via a cell phone.

In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras. However, the Kyocera system was designed as a peer-to-peer video-phone as opposed to the Sharp project which was initially focused on sharing instant pictures. That was made possible when the Sharp devices was coupled to the Sha-mail infrastructure designed in collaboration with American technologist, Kahn. The Kyocera team was led by Mr. Kazumi Saburi.

In 1995, work by James Greenwold of Bureau Of Technical Services, in Chippewa Falls, WI, was developing a pocket video camera for surveillance purposes. By 1999, the Tardis recorder was in prototype and being used by the government. Bureau Of Technical Services, advanced further by the patent # 6,845,215,B1 on Body-Carryable, digital Storage medium, Audio/Video recording Assembly.

Cameras on cell phones proved popular right from the start, as indicated that the J-Phone in Japan had more than half of its subscribers using cell phone cameras in two years. The world soon followed. By 2003, more camera phones were sold worldwide than stand-alone digital cameras. In 2005, Nokia became the world's most sold digital camera brand. In 2006, half of the world's mobile phones had a built-in camera.

In 2006, Thuraya released the first satellite phone with an integrated camera. The Thuraya SG-2520 is manufactured by a Korean company called APSI and runs Windows CE.

By 2007, the first cell phones and other consumer products appeared using the Tardis technology to make the move from still cameras to full motion video.

In 2008, Nokia sold more camera phones than Kodak sells film based simple cameras, thus became the biggest manufacturer of any kind of camera.

In 2010, the worldwide number of camera phones totaled more than a billion, and sales of separate cameras began to decline.

By 2010, most mobile phones, even inexpensive ones, were being sold with a camera. High end camera phones usually have a good lens, high resolution, but a small sensor.

Twelve-megapixel camera phones have been produced by at least two companies. To highlight the capabilities of the Nokia N8 (Big CMOS Sensor) camera, Nokia created a short film, The Commuter, in October 2010. The seven-minute film was shot entirely on the phone's 720p camera. A 14 megapixel smartphone with 3x optical zoom was announced in 2010.

In 2012, Nokia announced Nokia 808 PureView. It features a 41 megapixel 1/1.2" sensor and a high resolution f/2.4 Zeiss all-aspherical 1-group lens. It also features Nokia's PureView Pro technology, a pixel oversampling technique that reduces an image taken at full resolution into a lower resolution picture, thus achieving higher definition and light sensitivity, and enables lossless zoom.