The history of the camera phone

A camera phone is a mobile phone that incorporates a small digital video and photo camera, and is capable of storing these images in the internal memory of the phone and sharing them with other devices via cables or wireless networks. More than half of all mobile phones in the world are camera phones.

Although there have been landline videophones for several decades, the first cell phone capable of transmitting, receiving, and displaying digital images was a prototype device called the Intellect, which was designed in 1993 by American inventor Daniel A. Henderson. The Intellect was, in essence, a handheld mobile phone with a large, high-resolution monochrome screen, which could display images and video files that had been transmitted by a computer connected to a wireless transmitter. Many of the data transfer technologies and protocols pioneered at Henderson are still used today in our modern camera phones.

Other early experiments with wireless image sharing alongside mobile telephony included Apple’s videophone / PDA in 1995, and various digital camera / mobile phone combination prototypes demonstrated by Kodak and Olympus in the mid-1990s. However, none of these devices was capable of connecting to the internet wirelessly, which turned out to be a crucial advance as it allowed for instant media sharing with anyone, regardless of their location.

However, it wasn’t long before a bright spark, namely Philippe Kahn of the Lightsurf companies in the US, invented a structure for sharing mobile images, and the first camera phone to make use of this was the Sharp J-SH04, which was developed in the late 1990s and received a commercial release in 2001 in Japan.

It goes without saying that the camera phone was going to be a huge success and by 2006 more than half of all mobile phones in circulation were camera phones, spelling the end of two of the world’s leading camera makers. world, Minolta and Konica.

At the beginning of 2009, there were more than two billion camera phones in circulation worldwide.

Images filmed by citizen journalists with camera phones have even started to appear in major television news bulletins. The first big international breaking news to use camera phone footage in this way was the 2005 Boxing Day Tsunami.

This is expected to become a more common occurrence as time goes on and camera phones become even more ubiquitous.