Standard for camera-phone image quality to come soon
This sample shows what buyers might see on the box when trying to evaluate mobile-phone camera quality. (Credit: I3A)
Let's say you're trying to decide whether to buy a new mobile phone and you like taking photos. The Google Nexus One's 5-megapixel camera has 56 percent more pixels than the iPhone 3GS's 3.2 megapixels, but it's clear the camera isn't 56 percent better.
Now let's say it's 2012 and you're trying to decide whether to buy an Apple iPhone 4GS or a Google Nexus Three. You might be able to make a better choice this time.
That's because the International Imaging Industry Association, a consortium involving more than 30 companies, is working on a test that will use a five-star rating and a basic accompanying chart to judge image quality.
It may seem like a simple idea, but it's pretty important. That's because the nature of mobile phone photography is changing dramatically.
Once upon a time, mobile phone cameras didn't see much use beyond teenagers mugging for the shooter and maybe sending each other the photos for viewing on another mobile phone.
"As [mobile phone photography] gets to older people, it will get more important," said Nicholas Touchard, vice president of marketing for image quality evaluation at the French company DxO Labs, after a speech at the Image Sensor Europe conference here. Touchard represents DxO in the consortium.
He said phone buyers could start seeing the quality score as early as a year from now, but realistically two years is more likely.
The score is based on measurements of a variety of factors. First came basics such as sharpness, color uniformity, and lens distortion. Now the group is tackling image noise, white balance, sensitivity, blur, and other attributes.
Of course, reducing image quality to a single five-star rating scale can oversimplify a complicated situation. There's a bit more, though: A chart that shows how well the camera fares with increasingly demanding tasks--mobile-phone sharing to a print mounted on the wall, for example--and showing different uses such as portraits, sports, and landscape photography.
"This is a very controversial thing. Most people will tell you that summarizing the quality of a camera to just one number is quite risky or isn't what you would like to do as a scientist," he said in his speech. "However, as a consumer, it's probably a good idea."
Mobile phone cameras suffer poor image quality compared even to inexpensive compact cameras, much less to increasingly popular dSLRs. One thing that holds them back are the tiny image sensors, which simply have a harder time recording as much information as larger ones in dedicated cameras. Another is the correspondingly small lenses that must be built to tight manufacturing tolerances but that also must be inexpensive enough for high-volume markets with very thin profit margins.
But as the saying has gone in photography circles since the days of film, the best camera is the one you have with you, and people always bring their mobile phones.
Flickr's statistics show the iPhone 3G is the most widely used camera on the photo-sharing site. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland)
Adding to that is another fact: As Internet connectivity increasingly is built into phones, those photos are more likely to escape the phone via email, Facebook, or other means. It's not a coincidence that the iPhone is the most popular camera on Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site. And the new smartphones are powerful enough to run software such as Photoshop for those who want to polish before sharing.
There could be more quality improvements coming, too, that separate camera quality more widely.
In 2011, start-up InVisage hopes to transform the smartphone market with much higher-quality image sensors. The company believes its QuantumFilm technology--small precisely sized elements of light-sensitive semiconductor painted onto the surface of an image sensor chip--will be as much as four times as sensitive as prevailing image sensor technology.
InVisage has another potential edge, too, said digital design manager Michael Malone in a talk at the conference. That's because InVisage's design isn't as sensitive to the direction light is arriving from, in contrast to traditional sensors that work best with light arriving perpendicular to the sensor. InVisage's approach opens up options for lens designs that permit a smaller camera package. And as everybody knows with mobile phones, thin is in.
Key to making the camera phone image quality (CPIQ) score useful will be persuading those who sell mobile phones--handset makers and carriers, chiefly--to show the number.
Touchard believes they will--at least some of them some of the time.
"They're all waiting for who makes the first move," Touchard said. "Progress is not really coming from the carriers. They don't know much about this, and they don't want to do it if the others aren't doing it."
Of course, plenty of companies won't want to if their phone's camera gets a low score. But Touchard believes that those on the other end of the quality spectrum will be instrumental in its spread. It also will appeal to newcomers or those trying to show off a competitive edge.
This is where Google and Microsoft, which joined the phone quality effort in 2009, could come into play.
"Google and Microsoft are in a battle to get into the high-end market because of Apple and Nokia," two incumbent powers, Touchard said. Google has a particular interest in image quality: Its Google Goggles program lets people submit photos as search queries, and text recognition doesn't do well with low-quality images.
And once consumers start seeing the camera ratings, they could become sophisticated enough to recognize that there might be a reason it's missing from some products.
Via CNET News
Latest comments
One of the reasons of inferior photographic quality of mobile phone comparing even with the low-end DSC, beside the smaller sensor and optic used, is the lack of xenon flash light. Most of the mobile phones today use LEDs which lack of brightness and produce inconsistent image quality. Even the dual-LEDs solution used in some high-end mobile phones are useless after the sunset, not to mention for fill-flash under the bright sunlight on portraits. Unfortunately, there is not many mobile phones introduced with xenon flash light last year. The Nokia N82 has been a classic example of a good camera mobile phone. I can't wait for the next phone with xenon flash from Nokia, and hopefully from Apple and Google soon.
It's nice but not necessary though. Still imaging, video, music just a value added feature to put in the mobile phone. The important things in the phone is battery quality, connectivity, antenna quality, and speaker quality. Mobile phones are exist because people need to communicate anytime and anywhere. Digital Camera or Handycam become cheaper nowadays and they have a better feature and quality than mobile phone camera. Also I'd rather use PMP than wasting my mobile phone battery to listen for music or watching video.
Still too early for this. The technologies isnt so advanced for camera phone to have image/ video quality of consumer cameras.
Jack of all trades master of none...so I would rather that we can at least get a passable camera with good lens. Ultimately, the sensor AND lens plays important parts in image quality. You can have great sensor but the lens, especially the small ones, just don't cut it. It may have carl zeiss like the SE phones but the processing speed of the phone would suffer some. So have to question why you buy the phone for? If you really want a camera, get a good camera. If you want a phone, get a good phone that makes your calls and get your messages...i do not want the awkward situation where you need to call but your battery died on you because you use the phone for photo taking during the day out at Universal....and vice versa.
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