Nokia-Nikon tie-up on the cards?

Camera phones have been steadily ramping up the megapixels over the past couple of years.

Gone are the days when phones sported poor VGA-quality cameras that had less than 1 megapixels.

Today’s camera phones average 2 megapixels, while the top end models from the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson now offer 5 megapixels, and come with a raft of camera-specific features such as auto-focus, red-eye reduction and xenon flashes.

The upward megapixel trend is set to continue, as NEC have just announced a new chip that can process image data of up to 8 megapixels. The NEC CE131 comes with features to ensure the captured image data resembles the subject as much as possible, and can can correct camera shake to help prevent blurred pictures.

This is just the latest in a growing trend of improvements in camera phone technology. As the rest of this article argues, camera phone technology is now reaching such a high level that it is a direct threat to existing digital camera manufacturers, and could see some unlikely partnerships emerge.

8 megapixels sets the limit

NEC is set to launch its camera phone chip in volume in October 2007, and will reportedly ship 1 million units per month. This should see top end camera phones equipped with 8 megapixel cameras in 2008, with mid-range phones ramping up to 5 megapixels and low-end phones coming with 3.2 megapixels.

Once we all have camera phones with huge megapixels, though, what then? As any camera buff will tell you, megapixels aren’t everything. Autofocus, white balance, ISO settings, and a whole host of other features can all have a much greater impact on the quality of a photograph than just the number of megapixels.

As such, 8 megapixels should be the limit of camera phones, at least for a while (Samsung released a 10 megapixel camera phone in Korea in 2006, but that was a one-off). Once every phone has a decent number of megapixels, the focus will turn to the quality of the images they can produce, rather than just the number of megapixels they have.

Camera phones need camera brands

Already this is starting to happen, as Nokia’s N-Series phones and Sony Ericsson’s CyberShot phones compete to see which can take the better picture. Sony Ericsson has staked the reputation of its CyberShot brand on the quality of its camera phones’ pictures, and with good reason – its latest K850 CyberShot phone has been warmly received by analysts, and the quality of its pictures are stunning for a mobile phone.

Indeed, as camera phones start to focus more on image quality, having a recognized camera brand attached to your camera phone will become crucial. Sony Ericsson have the CyberShot brand, Samsung are (reasonably) well know for their digital cameras, and Casio will soon be releasing a new line of camera phones that will bear their well-respected Exilim camera brand.

So what of Motorola, LG and Nokia? More on this later…

The camera phone’s threat to the digital camera

Despite the fact that camera phones have been with us for some years now, and have become so ubiquitous that they’re taken for granted, next year’s range of models will bring photos that are much closer to those of a digital camera than ever before.

As this trend continues, as it undoubtedly will, it can’t be long before digital camera are replaced entirely by camera phones. There are only so many features you can fit into a low-end digital camera, and these features are steadily finding their way into cheaper and cheaper camera phones, many of which (at least in the UK) are subsidized by the networks, and so are available for free.

Once you have low-end camera phones with 5 megapixels and a range of features such as Xenon flash and red-eye reduction, there really will be no point in buying a separate digital camera, leaving the current digital camera manufacturers left with only the high-end and professional market. This could happen as soon as 2010.

Interesting partnerships for interesting times

Already there have been some interesting partnerships between digital camera manufacturers and mobile phone manufacturers. Motorola and Kodak, for example, have already announced a new partnership, with some Motorola phones set to sport the Kodak brand in the near future.

Over the coming 12 months or so, we can expect more of such announcements, as companies such as LG and Nokia, who don’t have recognized camera brands to attach to their phones, will seek to add to the perceived quality of their camera phones in order to compete with companies such as Sony Ericsson and Casio, who do.

Which leads us nicely to the title of this post: a Nokia-Nikon partnership. I’ll state at this point that this all just my opinion and is highly speculative, but from both a branding and a business perspective, it makes perfect sense.

Nokia get a world-renowned brand to add the shine of kudos, respect and authority to their camera phones; Nikon get access to a new market to offset the inevitable decline in their revenues that will occur when camera phones really eat into their market; and us users get a new range of camera phone from Nokia with a super-cool name!

Win-win-win!

[Source: TechOn]