Recent days have seen several reports demonstrating that the world of standalone digital cameras is not a happy one, with more and more folk using smartphones/camera-phones as their day to day camera and with sales of standalones on the wane. Neither you nor I will be surprised, of course. And we weren't five years ago when the media was reporting a similar crisis in the 35mm film industry. And there's noone to blame, nothing's actually failed here, it's simply that the technology of convergence moves on.
The same killer attribute that makes a smartphone preferable to a standalone PDA or MP3 player also comes into play when talking about photography. Everybody already carries a mobile phone, so why take along a PDA, MP3 player and camera as well? Yes, modern digital cameras are relatively small, but each still has its own charging cable, it's own data cable, carry case and possibly its own (different) memory card format. Why complicate things?
Integration of PDA functions was covered in the first wave of smartphone OS software. Stereo digital playback took a while to arrive but is now more or less ubiquitous, in the second wave, with memory cards now big and cheap enough to store dozens of audio CDs.
Also arriving more or less with the second wave were megapixel cameras. Up to (roughly) the Nokia 6630, most smartphones came with simple 'VGA' CCD arrays (640 by 480 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels) and (usually) lousy JPG compression algorithms. Witness the output from an early Series 60 device or a palmOne Treo 600 and you'll see how really bad pictures can get.
But smartphone megapixel cameras, with resolution of 1280 by 960 at least, are capable of surprisingly good results, despite the relatively tiny lens sizes. Print out a VGA image (via a photo lab like Truprint, or similar) and your friends and family will say 'Why is it all grainy?'. Now, quadruple the number of pixels, print out a megapixel image and most people will be hard pushed to tell at first glance that the photo was taken on a phone and not on a dedicated camera.
Now, photography professionals will be shouting with outrage at this point, and yes I know that a 1.3 megapixel camera with a small lens can't really compete at professional level with images from a dedicated camera with proper aperture control and focus, artistically set up and carefully posed. But the smartphone images are absolutely fine for 'fun' use, or (printed) for the family album. And this is very much my point.
'Fun' is where 98% of all photography is at. I'm a typical camera user. I started with arty shots of landscapes as a teenager on my 35mm SLR, now consigned to the loft. I then got married and had to get used to things moving at a different pace and for a different purpose. Suddenly there were lots more shots of people who weren't very good at keeping still for more than a couple of seconds. So I got a decent Olympus Trip with auto-everything and was happy until a couple of years ago, when I got fed up with the wait back for prints and, like the rest of the world, went digital.
Yet the patter of tiny feet in the house meant a whole new, somehow even more satisfying subject for photography, but one that never, ever kept still, had no concept of posing and rarely did the same thing twice. My digital camera was rarely around ('left it in the car', or, worse, 'left it in my other jacket at home') when I wanted it, but I discovered that, naturally, my smartphone was always with me ('surgically attached to my hip', as my wife puts it) and its camera wasn't that bad. When it comes to capturing the moment (especially when children are involved), the smartphone on your belt is supremely accessible and reliable.
The fact that my images are 'only' 1.3 megapixels and that my camera lens is only a millimetre or so in diameter doesn't actually matter as much as the fact that I'm usually the only one fast enough (around 2 seconds from idea to getting the shot) to capture 'the moment'. In fact (as any parent will attest), there were several occasions when my 2 second 'draw' time is itself too long and I ended up missing a classic photo opportunity. By the way, the snaps on this page were taken 'in the moment' on my Nokia 6630 smartphone, and are scaled down to fit on this page. All were quickly captured moments which would never be repeated.
Of course, there's always going to be room in the market for serious cameras for serious jobs. I'm tremendously impressed by the output of the latest digital cameras, many now incorporating serious video capture as well. But for the vast majority of people, I think a smartphone hosted megapixel camera will be all they need, which is why the traditional digital camera market is going to have to adapt and move further up market.
It's worth noting that all smartphone megapixel cameras aren't equal, by the way. In a recent head-to-head test, I showed that the cameras inside the Nokia N70 and N90 were light years ahead of similarly specced competition from non-Symbian OS smartphones. For good photos, you need enough lens diameter, enough pixels in the receiving array, enough pre-processing grunt in the camera electronics and clever enough software to handle its output.
As someone with a high profile for the last decade, I somehow seem to attract the attention of serious gadgeteers who write in to tell me how a single smartphone can never replace their PDA, iPod, camera or whatever. In a way they're right, a single box solution will rarely do quite as good a job as a collection of dedicated devices. But back in the real world, you unexpectedly find yourself with a 30 minute wait for something. Need some music? Wish you'd brought your iPod? Your always-with-you smartphone can shove stereo decibels into your ears quite nicely. See something interesting that you want to record for posterity? Wish you'd brought your standalone camera? Snap it (quite adequately) with your smartphone.
When you moved from monochome to colour (TV, PC, PDA, whatever), you knew that you could never go back. The same applies to people moving from a two, three or even four box solution to a single smartphone/communicator. Adding in a decent camera just emphasises yet again that this is how useful a true smartphone should be.
So what of the future? We've already seen a Carl Zeiss lens in the Nokia N90, although with Symbian seeking to bring down the cost of building a smartphone I doubt such quality optics will become the norm. The resolution of smartphone cameras will continue to rise, to 3 megapixels and beyond, at which point the limiting factor in terms of quality is definitely the laws of physics. There are only so many photons of light that can get through the tiny fixed-focus lens in even the highest quality smartphone. You can see the effect in low light shots and digital 'noise', where there simply isn't enough light hitting the sensor for the electronics to make a good measurement of its level. Make the fixed lens and aperture larger and the images will start to get blurry.
So the traditional (solid) candy-bar smartphone will never really challenge professional cameras with proper focussing and light adjusting optics. But I don't care. I'd rather capture 'the moment' adequately than get a clearer but artifical, posed shot of the same subject. And so, I suspect would you.