Camera Phone Photography
Electronics are delicate. The Sony I bought a year and a half ago is starting to fritz out after being carried around in my bookbag for months and after being dropped a few times. Occassionally, the CCD doesn’t pick up anything and all I get is a blank image. A sharp rap on the side of the camera brings it back to life; this is never a good thing. Sony would charge $100 – $150 labor to repair it, and at that price it’s better to just get a new camera.
I don’t think I’m going to get a new snapshot camera, though. The question that has to be asked is, what’s the camera for? I tend to think of cameras as falling into one of two bins. Into one bin goes the digital SLRs (DSLRs) like the Nikon D70, exhaustively reviewed by DPReview.com and Imaging Resource. This is a “real” camera: you can directly and easily control most aspects of photography (shutter speed, ISO, f-stop, etc.) and use it to take more interesting photos, something approaching art. But a $1500 piece of electronics and optics is not meant for casually carrying around unless you’re doing photography seriously.
The other bin are the snapshot cameras that automatically manage aperture exposure, focus and so on. These are generally cheaper, lighter and smaller than the DSLRs and are made for taking ad hoc photos. Their main attributes are the smaller-lighter-cheaper qualities that make them easier to carry around, so that you’ll have a camera in hand when something unexpected and interesting happens. The pictures they take are in some sense largely ephemeral.
Attempting to bridge the middle is the many-megapixel “prosumer” snapshot cameras, such as the Nikon CoolPix. But these are less capable and more annoying than the DSLRs because the more interesting features are still hidden underneath a menu-driven interface. Also, the sensors aren’t as good as the DSLRs, even though they’re advertised as having more megapixels. The article, Beyond Megapixels, has a good explanation on why this is so. Basically, more megapixels just means that there’s more evidence that the snapshot camera has a poor lens. Because of this, for my purposes at least, these machines are still fundamentally snapshot cameras that are too expensive and big for their own good.
One problem with the snapshot cameras is that it’s another piece of electronics you carry around, in addition to phone, PDA, MP3 player, etc. Stand-alone devices are therefore somewhat inconvenient and add to clutter. Note that my Sony is ailing in part because it was an extra piece of electronics, and got banged around in the bottom of the bookbag because it was extraneous most of the time. With the goal of maximizing carry-ability, I think the ideal device would be a Swiss Army knife of early 21st Century portable electronics: a combination media player (audio, video), phone, PDA, camera, voice recorder, all with a hard drive (because you need a hard drive for the media player anyway). We’re not quite there yet. Maybe in a couple of years, Apple will release the iEverything.
The closest thing so far to my ideal is the Treo 600. It’s a nice second generation device, making for an excellent phone and PDA, and it has decent (solid state) MP3 player as well as some capabilities as a video player and video recorder. (This guy has a list of interesting software for his Treo.) In any case, the camera on the Treo is supposedly somewhat subpar. It’s basically VGA with a crappy fixed-focal-length lens; as noted, this is the first generation of SmartPhones with cameras, so we probably shouldn’t expected multi-megapixel devices with f-stop control. Here’s a document on taking better photos with the Treo camera, so perhaps all hope isn’t lost. VGA quality is generally sufficient for web content, though.
So, I’ll try to nurse the Sony along until it no longer works, while waiting on the Treo or its successor for my snapshot camera needs. Note that I’m probably going to buy a DSLR (say, after we sign a contract after the apartment sale) because it’ll be my hobby camera for Cleveland. I’ll probably get the Nikon instead of, say, the Canon. The Nikon has gotten better reviews (being a year more recent than the comparable Canon), and the main reason for going with Canon was to borrow lenses from friends. But since we’re leaving the city, this isn’t much of an issue.