Live with a Less-Than-Perfect Camera

Ansell Adams might not have used a camera phone to photograph "Moonrise, Hernandez," but I bet he would have loved to have one around when he was hanging out with Edward Weston.

The value of a photograph taken with a camera phone does not lie in its photographic quality.
The value lies in the sense of immediacy and the knowledge that you are able to capture? And, indeed, share? A moment in time that would have been lost had your camera phone not been with you.
Most of us who are not professional photographers do not carry cameras with us all the time.

Many of us, however, take our mobile phones everywhere we go. We take photographs for their personal value. Photographs can let us relive a special moment time again and again.
So, for many of us, the choice between nonexistent six-megapixel images (because the digital SLR is home, safe and sound, in the file cabinet) and a small, slightly blurry picture from the camera phone is clear: pull out the camera phone! For example, I can show you the rainbow in Figure only because I had a camera phone with me to capture it.

Camera-phone picture of a rainbow
How Photos from Camera Phones Are Different
Anyone who has played with taking pictures on a camera phone knows that it's not the same as regular digital photography, at least not yet. We're already seeing impressive improvements in camera-phone technology in Japan, and those improvements will soon spread across the globe. Until then, here are some of the main reasons why photographs taken with camera phones don't look quite as good as those taken with regular digital cameras.

Pixel resolution

Many camera phones still take pictures at 640 480 pixel resolution (0.33 megapixels).
In printing terms, these dimensions translate to output that is 3" 4", before cropping.
We're starting to see more camera phones with higher megapixel resolution, so if making prints is important to you, look for that specification in your next phone.

Optical properties of the lens

The camera lens used in camera phones cannot be expected to compete with hobbyist, semiprofessional or professional camera lenses. Moreover, if you look at a camera phone's lens, you will notice that it has some kind of plastic or other clear material to protect the lens. Although this protective covering generally appears transparent to your eye, it probably does not allow the perfect, unimpeded transmission of light through it to the camera lens. It is also susceptible to tiny scratches (or worse) that might contribute to image blurring and chromatic (i.e., color) aberration.

Image sensor properties

Instead of film, digital cameras have an image sensor. As you might imagine, the image sensors in camera phones generally do not have the same image-capturing quality found in conventional digital cameras, especially compared to new digital image-processing technologies such as Canon's Digit, Kyocera's RTUNE, and Olympus'
Tropics, which are all sophisticated and greatly enhance signal

Source: O'Reilley | Portfolio Website | Online Portfolio