I rarely print photos that I take with my smartphone and also rarely view them on anything other than the device they were taken with. However, the vast majority of photos I take are with a smartphone because it is convenient and is able to capture those moments that just happen when you are near.
Also, the best photos I have taken over the past few years were done with a lowly 2.0MP or 3.2MP smartphone camera and the thought of having a 5MP smartphone and above holds almost no interest at all for me. It sounds great in the marketing bumph, but usually these phones have little else behind them and they are not always as quick as you would like at taking a photo.
A smartphone camera should be super quick, reproduce good colour and be easy to use. The amount of times I have needed to take a quick photo and had to go through the fuss of opening up the camera application, waiting for it to load and then staring into space while the auto-focus decides what to do are too many to mention. Give me a simple camera which takes a decent snap and I am happy.
The Treo 650, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and iPhone are perfect examples of smartphone which include low specified camera, but which are great at capturing the moment. The photo in this article is an example from my iPhone last weekend. I just happened to take a photo as my son tried to save the football and it caught him in mid air. It’s not the sharpest photo and will not print at a high resolution, but it holds the memory perfectly and that is ultimately all I need.
For the second day in a row, I find myself in the odd position of entirely agreeing with everything you’ve said, Shaun.
I still prefer my point and click 8mp canon ixus.
For example, I wanted to take a few very low light photos with no flash last week (in a museum) and I just wouldn’t have been able to do that with any smartphone camera I’ve had. I do take the odd snap with my iPhone and keep it or upload to twitpic though.
My first thought was how much time is the phone going to take to process a 12MP image. And why on earth would you want that high a resolution for a phone.
When my wife went to America for holiday, I gave her a Sony-E W900i phone which had a 2MP camera. It was perfect. Quick and Easy to use.
I seriously doubt anything of the 12MP variety could make that claim.
12MP sound like it belong to a professional grade SLR camera for studio work, or for spy satellites to read contract fine print over peoples shoulders
I’ve never needed more than 2MP for snaps. I only use 5MP for my promotional photos. 12MP is overkill IMO.
Agree with the comments. Huge amounts of megapixels on a phone would be best described as “megapixel envy”…
A simple camera phone should have decent image quality (there goes the cheap plastic lenses) and quick shutter response.
If I wanted something more than just “snapshots”, then a decent compact or a DSLR would be better for different light conditions.