A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture either still photographs or motion video. Today more than half of all mobile phones in use are camera phones.
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 the 1960s.
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 image sensor camera on a chip developed by Dr. Eric Fossum and his team[citation needed]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 include communications technologies. None of them had focused on the integration with the wireless Internet which would allow instant media sharing with anyone anywhere. Such experiments included, for example, a device that was known as the Apple Videophone/PDA in 1995 . There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 90s 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 instantly shared the first pictures from the maternity ward where his daughter Sophie was born, with more than 2000 family, friends and associates around the world. A sharing infrastructure and an integrated cell phone and camera combo augured the birth of instant visual communications.
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.
The first commercial camera phone complete with infrastructure was the J SH04, made by Sharp Corporation, had an integrated CCD sensor, with the Sha Mail (Picture Mail in Japanese) infrastructure developed in collaboration with Kahn s LightSurf venture, and marketed from 2001 by J Phone in Japan today owned by Softbank. The first commercial deployment in North America of camera phones was in 2002. The Sprint wireless carriers deployed over one million camera phone manufactured by Sanyo and launched by the PictureMail infrastructure (Sha Mail in English) developed and managed by LightSurf.
Like most complex technology based systems, there are several patents and technologies relevant to aspects of the camera phone. The advent of the CMOS sensor is an enabling technology for mass production.
Camera phones can share pictures instantly and automatically via a sharing infrastructure integrated with the carrier network, thus negating the need for connecting cables or removable media to transfer pictures. Some camera phones use CMOS image sensors, due largely to reduced power consumption compared to CCD type cameras, which are also used. The lower power consumption prevents the camera from quickly depleting the phone s battery. Images are usually saved in the JPEG file format, and the wireless infrastructure manages the sharing. The sharing infrastructure is critical and explains the early successes of J Phone and DoCoMo in Japan as well as Sprint and other carriers in the United States and the widespread success worldwide.
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.
The camera feature proved popular right from the start, as J Phone in Japan had more than half of its subscribers using cameraphones in two years. The world soon followed. By 2003 more cameraphones were sold worldwide than stand alone digital cameras. In 2004 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 2008 Nokia sold more cameraphones than Kodak sells film based simple cameras, and thus Nokia is now even the biggest manufacturer of any kind of camera. As a direct result of the rapid popularity of cameraphones, two of the four giant cameramakers, Minolta and Konica have quit the camera business altogether. At the end of 2008, the world installed base of cameraphones was 1.9 billion.
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