Blog Post #6

The First Camera Phone 

 

    The first camera phone was manufactured by Samsung and originally released in South Korea in 1999. It wasn't released, however, in the United States until November of 2002. The first model of this phone with the camera was worth $400, which is much different than the prices of phones today ranging up to $1000. The original model was able to hold up to about 20 pictures before they had to be downloaded to another device, most commonly to a computer. The picture quality was about 350000 pixels (about .35 mega- pixels) which was very good at the time but not so much to us now. In order to download the pictures to a computer you had to attach the phone to the computer with a cord and wireless download wasn't invented until 2004. In 2004 the camera quality of the evolutionary camera phone was getting better and was not only allowing wireless download and printing but the picture quality was good enough for the pictures to be printed without it being too grainy. Later in the evolution of this invention, the multi-shot camera was added to the phone giving it the ability to to take up to 8 pictures at one time, and brought the price up by about $150. Within the first year of the new camera phone about 80 million people had one of these camera phones worldwide. 

    The first camera phone idea was originally thought of by a man Philieppe Khan. He was sitting the maternity ward waiting for his wife to give birth and he wanted a way to take a picture of the birth and then send it to their friends and family. He made the camera using a computer, a regular camera, and his phone. When his daughter was born he was able to take the picture of her and then send it to 2000 different people. After he figured out how to do this, he took it South Korea where it was developed into the first camera phone. He had created something that changed our entire world of technology all because he wanted to take a picture of his new daughter and send it to his family. The phone today has gone through many changes since then and evolved into the iPhones and Samsung (or any other kind of phone) that we know today. 

    The first camera phones have a lot of pros and cons that stemmed from this newfound technology. Some of the pros are that it jump started the evolution of the smart phone and now all phones have a camera as a default to the design of any device. It made it a lot easier to take and share photos with people because it was all in one device and you didn't have to have a separate camera and computer to do that anymore. It was very easily accessible to the people. On the other hand there were some cons as well. One of them being that in 2006 camera phones surpassed the sales of digital and film cameras hurting the sales of those devices.  The camera quality in these phones were not the best at first but they have significantly gotten better over the years. It was also a problem for people who wanted to take a lot of photos because the storage on the phone and for the camera was very limited so people had to keep downloading them to another device which could be a hassle sometimes. Overall though the camera phone was a revolutionary upgrade from the first cell phone and brought us to the amazing technology that we have today.