, developed by
Sharp and released by
J-Phone in 2000, was the first mass-market camera phone. The camera phone, like many
complex systems, is the result of converging and enabling technologies. Compared to
digital cameras, a consumer-viable camera in a mobile phone would require far less power and a higher level of camera electronics integration to permit the miniaturization. The
active pixel sensor (APS) was developed in 1985. While the first camera phones (e.g.
J-SH04) successfully marketed by
J-Phone in Japan used
charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors rather than CMOS sensors, more than 90% of camera phones sold today use CMOS image sensor technology. Another important enabling factor was advances in
data compression, due to the impractically high
memory and
bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. The most important compression algorithm is the
discrete cosine transform (DCT), a
lossy compression technique that was first proposed by
Nasir Ahmed while he was working at the
University of Texas in 1972. Camera phones were enabled by DCT-based compression standards, including the
H.26x and
MPEG video coding standards introduced from 1988 onwards,
Experiments There were several early
videophones and cameras that included communication capability. Some devices experimented with the integration of the device to communicate
wirelessly with the
Internet, which would allow instant media sharing with anyone anywhere. The DELTIS VC-1100 by Japanese company
Olympus was the world's first digital camera with cellular phone transmission capability, revealed in the early 1990s and released in 1994. In 1995,
Apple experimented with the Apple Videophone/PDA. There was also a digital camera with a cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997. In Japan, two competing projects were run by
Sharp and
Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras. However, the Kyocera system was designed as a peer-to-peer video phone as opposed to the Sharp project, which was initially focused on sharing instant pictures. That was made possible when the Sharp devices was coupled to the Sha-mail infrastructure designed in collaboration with American technologist Kahn. The Kyocera team was led by Kazumi Saburi. In 1995, work by James Greenwold of Bureau Of Technical Services, in
Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, was developing a
pocket video camera for surveillance purposes. By 1999, the Tardis recorder was in prototype and being used by the government. Bureau Of Technical Services advanced further by the patent No. 6,845,215,B1 on "Body-Carryable, digital Storage medium, Audio/Video recording Assembly". In October 1992, Kyocera Corp filed a Japanese patent application titled "Electronic still camera with mobile phone function", which issued as JP 3059841B2 on July 4, 2000. In addition to operating as a conventional mobile phone, the device included a lens, image sensor, image processing and compression circuits, and internal image memory. After one or more images were captured, a prestored phone number was dialed and the images were wirelessly transmitted. The camera phone could also receive and display images transmitted from another device. A camera phone was patented by Kari-Pekka Wilska, Reijo Paajanen, Mikko Terho and Jari Hämäläinen, four employees at Nokia, in 1994. Their patent application was filed with the Finnish Patent and Registration Office on May 19, 1994, followed by several filings around the world making it a global family of patent applications. The patent application specifically described the combination as either a separate digital camera connected to a cell phone or as an integrated system with both sub-systems combined in a single unit. Their patent application design included all of the basic functions camera phones implemented for many years: the capture, storage, and display of digital images and the means to transmit the images over the radio frequency channel. On August 12, 1998, the United Kingdom granted patent GB 2289555B and on July 30, 2002, the USPTO granted US Patent 6427078B1 based on the original Finnish Patent and Registration Office application to Wilska, Paajanen, Terho and Hämäläinen. In October, 1993, Professor
Bodil Jönsson and her colleagues at CERTEC (Center for Rehabilitation Engineering) at
Lund University began work on
Isaac, a personal assistant for the differently abled which enabled them to communicate using pictures. Isaac included a touchscreen
PDA with a
digital camera and a cellular modem. By the end of 1994, CERTEC had built and deployed 25 Isaac units, which transmitted digital photos over standard cellular networks to an image server at a support center. Isaac used a Sharp touchscreen PDA with a case that had been modified to include a miniature
video camera which provided 256 x 256 pixels using a 1/3-inch format Sony CCD, along with a mic and speaker. The PDA was tethered to a shoulder bag, which included an image frame memory, cellular
modems for voice and data, a
GPS receiver, an
Intel 80186 processor, 1
Megabyte of
RAM, and 256 Kilobytes of
flash memory. The strap for the shoulder bag included antennas for the two cellular modems and the GPS receiver. A picture was taken when the user touched a camera preview window on the PDA screen, and could be immediately transmitted over the cellular network to the support center. A Geographical Information System (GIS) produced an electronic map showing the position of each user and a graphic overlay showing nearby bus stops and public buildings. The support center helped
schedule activities for each user. On the Isaac screen, activities appeared as
pictograms positioned relative to a vertical timeline. This improvised system transmitted his pictures to more than 2,000 family, friends and associates around the world.
The Birth of the Camera Phone is a four-minute short that reenacts the situation that Philippe Kahn was in.
Commercialization ,
LG Viewty,
Samsung SGH-G800,
Sony Ericsson K850i; they were marketed as having advanced cameras. The first commercial camera phone was the
Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time, and had a 110,000-
pixel front-facing camera. The first mass-market camera phone was the
J-SH04, a
Sharp J-Phone model sold in Japan in November 2000. Cameras on cell phones proved popular right from the start, as indicated by the J-Phone in Japan having had more than half of its subscribers using cell phone cameras in two years. The world soon followed. In 2003, more camera phones were sold worldwide than stand-alone digital cameras largely due to growth in Japan and Korea. In 2005, Nokia became the world's most sold digital camera brand. In 2006, half of the world's mobile phones had a built-in camera. In 2006,
Thuraya released the first
satellite phone with an integrated camera. The Thuraya SG-2520 was manufactured by Korean company APSI and ran
Windows CE. In 2008, Nokia sold more camera phones than
Kodak sold film-based simple cameras, thus becoming the biggest manufacturer of any kind of camera. In 2010, the worldwide number of camera phones totaled more than a billion. Since 2010, most mobile phones, even the cheapest ones, are being sold with a camera. High-end camera phones usually had a relatively good lens and high resolution.
smartphone is the first Nokia smartphone with a 12-
megapixel autofocus lens, it features
Carl Zeiss optics with
xenon flash. The label indicates the lens manufacturer, megapixel count, aperture, and autofocus ability. Higher resolution camera phones started to appear in the 2010s. 12-megapixel camera phones have been produced by at least two companies. To highlight the capabilities of the
Nokia N8 (Big CMOS Sensor) camera, Nokia created a short film,
The Commuter, in October 2010. The seven-minute film was shot entirely on the phone's
720p camera. A 14-megapixel
smartphone with 3× optical zoom was announced in late 2010. In 2011, the first phones with dual rear cameras were released to the market but failed to gain traction. Originally, dual rear cameras were implemented as a way to capture 3D content, which was something that electronics manufacturers were pushing back then. Several years later, the release of the
iPhone 7 would popularize this concept, but instead using the second lens as a wide angle lens. In 2012, Nokia announced
Nokia 808 PureView. It features a 41-megapixel 1/1.2-inch sensor and a high-resolution f/2.4 Zeiss all-aspherical one-group lens. It also features Nokia's PureView Pro technology, a pixel oversampling technique that reduces an image taken at full resolution into a lower resolution picture, thus achieving higher definition and light sensitivity, and enables lossless zoom. In mid-2013, Nokia announced the
Nokia Lumia 1020. In 2014, the HTC One M8 introduced the concept of having a camera as a depth sensor. In late 2016,
Apple introduced the
iPhone 7 Plus, one of the phones to popularize a
dual camera setup. The iPhone 7 Plus included a main 12 MP camera along with a 12 MP telephoto camera which allowed for 2x optical zoom and
Portrait Mode for the first time in a smartphone. In early 2018
Huawei released a new flagship phone, the
Huawei P20 Pro, with the first triple camera lens setup. Making up its three sensors (co-engineered with
Leica) are a 40 megapixel RGB lens, a 20 megapixel monochrome lens, and an 8 megapixel telephoto lens. Some features on the Huawei P20 Pro include 3x optical zoom, and 960 fps slow motion. In late 2018,
Samsung released a new mid-range smartphone, the
Galaxy A9 (2018) with the world's first quad camera setup. The quadruple camera setup features a primary 24 MP f/1.7 sensor for normal photography, an ultra-wide 8 MP f/2.4 sensor with a 120 degrees viewing angle, a telephoto 10 MP f/2.4 with 2x optical zoom and a 5 MP depth sensor for effects such as b`okeh.
Nokia 9 PureView was released in 2019 featuring penta-lens camera system. In 2019,
Samsung Electronics announced the
Galaxy A80, which has only rear cameras. When the user wants to take a selfie, the cameras automatically slide out of the back and rotate towards the user. This is known as a pop-up camera, and it allows smartphone displays to cover the entire front of the phone body without a notch or a punch hole on the top of the screen. Samsung,
Xiaomi,
Oppo,
OnePlus, and other manufacturers adopted a system where the camera "pops" out of the phone's body. Also in 2019, Samsung developed and began commercialization of 64 and 108-megapixel cameras for phones. The 108 MP sensor was developed in cooperation with Chinese electronics company Xiaomi and both sensors are capable of
pixel binning, which combines the signals of 4 or 9 pixels, and makes the 4 or 9 pixels act as a single, larger pixel. A larger pixel can capture more light (resulting in a higher ISO rating and lower image noise). Furthermore, under display cameras are being developed, which would be placed under a special display, allowing the camera to see through it, such as in the
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3. File:Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3.jpg|A
Samsung foldable smartphone features multi-cameras. File:Galaxy Z Fold 3 5G.jpg|An under-display
front-facing camera on a
flexible screen File:Vivo X60 Pro+ Orange.jpg|
Vivo X60 featured the
Zeiss co-engineered imaging system. File:Huawei Mate 40 RS.jpg|The
Huawei Mate 40 RS features penta-camera lenses with
Leica optics. File:Xiaomi 13 Ultra.jpg|
Xiaomi 13 Ultra featured a
Leica Summicron camera system. File:OnePlus 9 Pro Camera Module with Hasselblad logo.jpg|The
OnePlus 9 features upgraded optics with
Hasselblad. File:Oppo Find X6 Pro.jpg|
Oppo Find X6 features software-based tuning co-developed with
Hasselblad. ==Manufacturers==