A short history of the camera phone

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The term camera phone commonly refers to cellphones with a built in digital camera, that allows it to capture stills and short video clips, store them, and share them with other devices and users through wireless communications technologies.

The first mobile picture phone prototype, entitled the Intellect, was invented in 1993 by Daniel A Henderson, and now resides in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The Intellect was a hand held cell phone with a large monochrome display that could receive and display digital picture and video data sent by a wireless transmitter, and pioneered many of the technologies and protocols that were to find their way into the modern camera phone.

During the nineties, there were several attempts to combine mobile phones with digital camera technology. Camera manufacturers Kodak and Olympus demonstrated several digital camera/mobile phone combinations at trade shows during the nineties, and Apple tried a different tack with a combined mobile videophone and PDA. Impressive as these devices were, they lacked one crucial element of the modern day cameraphone – they could not connect to the internet, and were therefore unable to quickly and easily share images with other users, without physical connection to a computer.

The first image sharing infrastructure technology was demonstrated in 1997 by Philippe Kahn of US tech firm Lightsurf enterprises, who successfully sent a picture of his newborn baby to over 2000 friends, relatives, and associates from a prototype Sharp cameraphone. This phone, the Sharp J-SH04, finally hit the shelves in Japan in 2001, and appeared in the US and European markets the following year.

The ability to take pictures and share them quickly and easily with others was one of the main selling points of the new 3G phone services, so naturally phone manufacturers were keen to include cameras with their new phones wherever possible in order to start making money from their expensive 3G licenses. By 2006, over half of all mobile phones had in built cameras, which was to prove catastrophic for the digital camera industry, forcing two of the big four manufacturers, Minolta and Konica, out of business.

At the end of 2008, there were over 1.9 billion cameraphones in circulation worldwide, and that figure looks set to rise even higher over the coming years.

The Tsunami disaster of 2005 was the first major world news event where the majority of the footage used as the news broke was filmed by citizens on camera phones, rather than by professional camera crews.

With the advent of video sharing platforms such as Youtube, and its rapid acceptance as a format for breaking news footage, cameraphone footage has become an increasing part of the visual fabric of our culture.

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