A friend of mine, who is a firm believer in the statement that “pictures are just pictures no matter what camera you use to take them”, could not understand why should I need what he said an “expensive” camera for my photography hobby.
Photos were just photos, he said. Why couldn’t I just use my camera phone to take them and be satisfied with it, he would ask.
Photos can be expressive
I made no effort to explain to him that photos weren’t just photos. That a photo can be expressive, that it can be a work of art, and that one can really have satisfactions from having taken a well-frame shot.
He told me that photos from camera phones could also come out superb.
I, of course, doubted if his superb was any good. Having heard him said that photos were just photos, I found it difficult to trust his judgment about what made a photo superb; and furthermore, I didn’t believe in camera phones.
Even after I read that Samsung was coming up with a 7.1 megapixel camera phone, I still didn’t think that photos from a mobile phone could be of any use, creatively speaking.
The Samsung Soul U900 experience
Well, what do you know. I recently got hold of a Samsung Soul U900 5-megapixel camera phone — it burned holes in my pocket; and to think that I bought it for someone else… — and put it to test, not extensively but enough for the camera to prove its worth.
The four shots here are sample pictures of the Samsung Soul U900, a phone that was released about a year ago and without doubt, one of Samsung’s flagship phones. All photos are shot at full resolution but had either been cropped of scaled down.
There were also some post-processing involved. The verdict? Well, I’ve got to admit that the output here, to my not-so-extensively-trained eyes, are not bad, or at least not as bad as I expected from a camera phone.
In fact, the photo is here is way better than the ones I had taken with my first digital camera back in the year 2000 and comparable, if not better, than the Nikon E5200, my second digital camera, which I bought in early 2004.
Camera phone photography
There is indeed huge potentials in camera phone photography in the future, not only because the camera is embedded in the phone — making it easy to send pictures; so long as the phone has signals, that is — but also because there really is the promise of quality in the photos taken with camera phones.
Camera phone today is what digital camera is 10 years ago — at its infancy — and with a couple more years of technological advancement, there really is something to expect in this segment of the market.
Digital photography taking four ways to Rome
Digital photography, I think, is now developing on four fronts — all offering its own niche of photo-taking.
First, of course is on the digital single reflex (DSLR) front, secondly on the newest and exciting micro four-third digital camera or what is essentially a DSLR minus the mirror box, thirdly on the mass market point-and-shoot camera and finally, on camera phones.
Camera phone cult following
Someday in not too distant future, there may be cult followings in the camera phone industry the way Nikon and Canon create their fanatics.
In the case of camera phone, though, I’m not yet a Samsung. I have always been a Sony Ericsson man and I’m glad that the phone maker has brought onboard the CyberShot technology into its series of phones.
I would recommend the 8.1-megapixel Sony Ericsson C905 anytime. I guess, one of these days my friend will be proven less wrong in saying that even photos from camera phones could come out superb.
