Engadget is reporting that NEC has joined Kodak in the battle for the new high-ground in mobile phone cameras. The Japanese tech co. has come up with an eight-megapixel sensor for cameraphones that is priced at just $33/ £17 per unit, and that’s before mass-production has kicked-in.
This is all well and good but as early pics taken with Sony Ericsson’s new 5MP K850i Cyber-shot phone appear to prove (pics over on Phone Daily), our mobile cameras don’t just need more pixels — they need better lenses. This is especially true if predictions that the low-end digital camera biz is about to get swallowed by the mobile phone industry prove to be correct.
Much as we want fewer, better gadgets, we don’t want that to happen at the expense of being able to take good-quality photos. All the whizz-bang digital image correction and stablisation tech in the world won’t beat a good lens — and that’s just fact. The onus now lies on phone manufacturers to start building-in better lenses, and not simply to rely on marketing-friendly increases in megapixels to sell more handsets.
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