Charlie Sorrel at Wired:
If Apple puts a camera in every iPod (the dying Classic and the tiny Shuffle excepted), will it kill the compact camera industry? The answer might actually be yes.
Camera iPods: game over for cheap digicams
18 Responses to Camera iPods: game over for cheap digicams
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well… i think they’ll need to up them a bit to meet current pocket cam standards. 5MP is really the minimum, and optical zoom can be pretty handy, as well as a decent flash.
It’s finally happening, though, the convergence of all devices into one device. Convenient as hell, til you drop it.
the dying Classic?
To answer the article’s question, “Who would buy a different cell phone AND a camera?”, the answer is… Me!
I hate iPhones about like most people love them, along with most touch screen phones, and typically like devices that do one thing well rather than twenty things poorly.
Besides, I don’t see iphones either racing drastically ahead of other cell phone cameras, nor catching up (overtaking?) the cheap digicam market.
Several problems:
a.) Cameras on every cellphone are a big enough problem in secure or sensitive areas, much less locker rooms or the like.
b.) Pocket cameras have zoom lenses, autofocus, image stabilization, and last but not least a 1/4-20 thread on the base for tripods.
c.) Given Apple’s pricing, an equivalent digital camera or cellphone can seriously undercut the cost.
The underlying assumption is that point and shoots are all shit. If you accept that premise, and don’t then trick yourself into agonizing over the difference between really shit (iphone) and slightly shit (Exilim, Cybershot, Elph, etc), I thin he’s right.
Micro 4/3 could become the new entry level. Wouldn’t that be grand!
Also, batteries. With a compact cam, I can go crazy with the flash and just replace the batteries as I go (I use rechargeables and carry a set with me, or I can just buy some more nearly anywhere). With a phone, the batteries go dry, and I don’t have either my camera or my phone until I can recharge it.
Sorrel writes some real shite sometimes.
Cell phone cameras are crap. All of them. The best ones are still below mediocre. I know, I own one (Nokia N82) and I use it a lot.
If you put a proper sensor, a proper zoom lens, a proper flash, and proper camera software into a phone, then fine, you’ve got a good cell phone camera. Actually, you’ve got a camera with a phone, and it’s bulky and heavy. You aren’t going to see a lot of those.
Yeah, some people are happy enough with their crap phone cameras. But not enough to have a drastic impact on the camera market.
By Sorrel’s logic, the MP3 player market should already have evaporated, since most phones are MP3 players, including the one he so wrongly believes will soon be synonymous with ‘phone’.
But Murray, do you think that point-and-shoot cameras qualify for “proper” anything unless you’re buying a $500+ Lumix? He’s suggesting that better ipod cams with knock out all the shitty digicams that you get for <$2-300.
Sorrel’s piece wasn’t about the iPhone, it was about rumored forthcoming iPods. That is why it was titled “Cameras in iPods.”
Hang on Rob – is he saying that “iPod cams will knock out all the shitty digicams” OR is he saying that they will “kill the compact camera industry” – cos that’s not the same suggestion, and the second assertion is what I and others here are taking issue with.
Yes, I could read the article for myself but as you’re taking the trouble to argue his side, could you clarify?
But Rob, do you think an iPod camera will make better pics than the average cell phone camera? Did cell phones render point-and-shoots obsolete?
Pretty much every phone produced in the last 3 years has had a multi-megapixel camera on it, and that hasnt killed off compact cameras. It’s reduced the market for the cheap-end cameras, that’s true, but why would adding one to an ipod make any difference to this?
Oh, because it’s apple doing it, and in your mind, anything apple does is innovative and thus newsworthy.
Seriously though, are they paying you to write this stuff, or has fanboy fervour finally erased even the pretense of objectivity from this site? Which is it, corporate whore or religious zombie?
I’ll echo #4 here: Unless it has a zoom lens, image stabilization, and a decent flash (the iPhone 3Gs has autofocus), it’s not game over yet. While this could knock the Flip cameras off the market, I think $100 cameras like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS85 (8MP, 4x Optical Zoom, Optical Image Stabilization, 848×480 video, SDHC, and 6.3m flash) are perfectly safe.
Rob, read his article again. He’s not specifying the low end of the compact camera market; he’s talking about all compact digicams.
To answer your question: yes, I think – I know – that sub-$500 cams count as “proper”. Actually, even the lowest end of, say, Canon’s range is better in every way than a phone camera – for under $200.
The sales of compacts may be declining, and phone cameras probably do have something to do with it, but the rest of Charlie’s argument is just too flawed.
Apple still expects customers to pay higher prices for less features and shorter battery life in the mp3 player field. More and more other companies are fielding really sound, fairly-priced players.
Even if they did integrate a passable camera it won’t change the fact that they’ve been gouging customers for the privilege of owning an inferior product. Unless the functionality of the devices is much further expanded to keep up with the marketing that has kept them successful so far in a developing market, I doubt they’re going to continue to have enough ubiquity among utility-minded customers, in a now mature market, that the camera feature would be a serious threat.
While they might cut out the $70 to $110 market of digicams, the incredibly cheap (sub $30) and higher-end compacts will still be around. I bought a Canon for $140 and it is hands down better than any phone cam I’ve encountered IRL, though I have not seen the high-end Nokia or Samsung phones. My camera is especially great after I loaded up some hacked supplemental software for it, giving me the ability to have a live histogram.
Cheap phones are priced to appeal to the population that depends on the public phone network.
Everybody nowadays have a mobile phone according to his necessity and needs. Latest mobile phones are widely used and available in the mobile markets of the world
Cheap mobile phones are not all bad when compared with high definition mobiles.