Last week, the main Mobile Choice site reviewed the new Samsung G600 mobile (pictured), which is the latest five-megapixel cameraphone to go on sale, following the recent LG KG920 and Nokia N95, with the Sony Ericsson K850i Cyber-shot coming soon.
These are all relatively expensive handsets, of course, although the price comes down if you get them on a contract. But we think it's the start of a slippery decline for low-end digital cameras. Once a five-megapixel phone is affordable, why would you want a digital camera offering the same or less resolution?
Note, we're not saying phones will kill all digital cameras. If you're into your snapping, a ten-megapixel digital camera still vastly outperforms phones - not just on resolution, but on all the other photography features too. But in terms of a camera that you carry around with you for quick snaps, phones are already winning the war.
Think about it. You always have your phone with you, and it's got enough internal memory (plus memory card space) to store pics, rather than having to connect it to your PC every night to upload your latest photos. Mobiles are connected too - with the right application such as ShoZu, you can automatically put camphone snaps on the web without a PC getting in the way. Digital cameras can't (yet) compete on that score.
There are some improvements we'd like to see, of course. Optical zoom would be nice in cameraphones, as would better quality lenses - our photography friends assure us that picture quality is about more than pure megapixels. And there remain some concerns over battery life, which you'll know if you've spent the night at a party or in a darkened pub taking mobile snaps with the flash on.
But the fact remains that our poor old four-megapixel digital camera is being retired to the scrap heap now we've got a five-megapixel cameraphone. And while we might consider a more expensive digicam for those special occasions, at the low-end, it'll be phones forever for now on.
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