The Hindu : National : Samsung's camera-phone completes click-talk convergence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 24, 2004

National

National

Samsung's camera-phone completes click-talk convergence

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, OCT. 23. It's the technology equivalent of the tail wagging the dog: A year ago, the cameras that came bundled with mobile phones were mostly low-resolution accessories whose pictures were okay for posting on website — and little else. Serious shooters — even the average amateur who wanted to have postcard-sized photos for the album — found the camera-phones virtually useless for printed output.

But this week's announcement by Korea-based Samsung has turned the entire business of cameras latched on to cell phones, upside down. The S 250 mobile phone comes with a 5 megapixel camera and an enhanced liquid crystal screen capable of handling 16 million colours — compared to the average phone screen's quarter million. The number of pixels makes the camera better than almost all digital cameras available today — up to semi-professional standard. As a thumb rule, good quality glossy prints require photos to be saved at 300 to 500 dots per inch. That means that with 5 megapixels, one can print the pictures taken with the S 250 as fairly large blowups. Since such large picture files eat up a lot of bytes, the camera comes with a built in 92-megabyte memory. This is also good for up to 100 minutes of video footage.

The shutter speed too is comparable to professional cameras — 1/1000th of a second.

The photo-taking feature which was jointly developed by Samsung with the Japanese Asahi Pentax company gives the feel of a regular digital camera when the phone is `stretched' open.

The price being quoted in Korea this week is one million Won — equivalent to $830 or Rs. 40,000.

Two other Korean players — LG and Pantech — followed the Samsung development with announcements of their own imminent 5-mega pixel camera-phones. Maybe it's time to think of them as cameras — with a phone thrown in.

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