cellphone camera

A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture photographs. Most camera phones also record video. Some cameras are not mobile phones, and some mobile phones are not cameras, but most are. The first camera phone was sold in 2000 in Japan, a J-Phone model, about a decade after the first digital camera was sold in Japan in December 1989. Most camera phones are simpler than separate digital cameras. Their usual fixed-focus lenses and smaller sensors limit their performance in poor lighting. Lacking a physical shutter, some have a long shutter lag. Flash, where present, is usually weak. Optical zoom and tripod screws are rare and none have a hotshoe. Some also lack a USB connection or a removable memory card. Most have bluetooth and many have WiFi. Some of the more expensive camera phones have only a few of these technical disadvantages, but with bigger image sensors (a few are up to 1″), their capabilities approach those of low-end point-and-shoot cameras. In the smartphone era, the steady sales increase of camera phones caused point-and-shoot camera sales to peak about 2010 and decline thereafter. Most model lines improve their cameras every year or two. Some smartphones only have a menu choice to start an application program to activate the camera. Others also have a separate camera button, for quickness and convenience. A few camera phones are designed to resemble separate low-end digital compact cameras in appearance and to some degree in features and picture quality, and are branded as both mobile phones and cameras. The principal advantages of camera phones are cost and compactness; indeed for a user who carries a mobile phone anyway, the addition is negligible. Smartphones that are camera phones may run mobile applications to add capabilities such as geotagging and image stitching. A few high end phones can use their touch screen to direct their camera to focus on a particular object in the field of view, giving even an inexperienced user a degree of focus control exceeded only by seasoned photographers using manual focus. However, the touch screen, being a general purpose control, lacks the agility of a separate camera’s dedicated buttons and dial(s).