Forum: Author Hangout

I read that when iPhone came out in 2007 that it changed the market for mobile phones. And that it changed the market for taking pictures.
Here's what I'm unsure about. Were the Smartphones that existed before the iPhone able to take photos. And if the answer to that question is no - then what could you use to take a picture - did you have to rely on film and darkrooms and developing and all that - or was there some interim step between the two. What, for example, could you have used in 2005 to take a snapshot of family and/or friends? What if you wanted to take a nude shot of your significant other - would you have to send that to a photolab in 2005?
The year 2005 is a point in my WIP in which photography is an issue - and I don't want to have them using a technology that wasn't available at that time.

Cell phones definitely had cameras before the iPhone came along. Not great cameras, usually, but they were there. You seem to be completely forgetting digital cameras, as well. They were big before iPhones and I believe still are with serious photographers. It was quite possible to take decent pictures in 2005 and earlier without having to get them developed.

Not that having to get film developed stopped anyone. I remember a friend telling me about picking up some photos from CVS that included a few nude shots. She said the clerk laughed and said they're not supposed to develop nudes, and my friend indignantly told him "I have no idea what you're talking about! These are pictures from my grandmother's funeral!" and stormed out as the clerk just laughed harder.

Back in 2004, I (and everyone else I worked with) was using an XDA Orbit that featured a whopping 1MP camera on its backside. That was half the resolution of the camera the first iPhone came with, but it amounted to pictures with a resolution of 1155 X 866 in 4:3 format. In short, detailed enough to take nudes with you could later jerk off to. The bigger problem were snapshots of family and friends, since photoprinters back then cost more than what I paid for the damn phone. So, for that, we relied on simple digital cameras (that already had 5MP cameras in cheap models for way below 100 Bucks) and went to local stores to have them printed.

When articles like the one you describe claim how apple revolutionized anything, they're basically talking about their product being marketed at the majority instead of specific demographics (like businesses).

iPhone was the first smartphone how we understand that term today. What most cellphones were around then is what we now know as "feature phones" with a bunch of buttons and relatively small screen that isn't touch sensitive. Not all cell phones then had cameras, but some definitely did.

For example, Sony Ericsson K750 was introduced in 2005 with very decent 2MP camera I have taken many thousands of very good images with (including for work, like, documenting construction, as visuals to go with measurements etc). Low light images had a lot of noise, but in good conditions it was good. It almost totally displaced my 5MP digital camera we had for several years before that. And I may be mistaken by memory, but I pretty sure the K750 wasn't the best by parameters phone camera in existence either; dedicated photo phones already existed as a niche product.

So yes, while not all cell phones in 2005 had a camera, and most that did had them not very good, decent cameras in cell phones was already a thing.

IIRC digital cameras with a resolution of 3MP or better were available pre-2000 but expensive. They became relatively affordable in about 2001-2002 and by 2005 were cheaper. So there was a period of several years post-film-cameras and pre-smartphones when people took digital pictures with a camera. Getting the pictures to a PC was not difficult but suitable printers in the home were expensive. Didn't stop lots of pictures being emailed around !

Ian

In the late '90s, my father had a Sony Mavica, which was a digital camera built around a standard 3.5" floppy drive. 0.3 MP, I think, which wasn't great, but it was the late '90s, whatchagonnado? 1.44 MB didn't hold a lot of pictures at maximum resolution (and anything less than maximum resolution wasn't enough resolution), but floppies were cheap, and you could just bring a whole pack and cycle through them. Its main drawback was that the floppy drive was noisy and slow, so you had to be sure of your shot, because it was going to be several seconds before you got another one.

Around 2000, 2001, I got a similar Panasonic camera that was built around an LS-120 "Superdisk" drive. The LS-120 was a 120 MB 3.5" floppy disk. The LS-120 drives could take standard 1.44 MB floppies, but the reverse wasn't true. 1.2 MP camera, and enough storage for quite a few shots, even short video (though it dropped back to 0.3 MP for that), and still easily reloadable like the Mavica. The LS-120 wrote a lot faster than a standard floppy, too. It had a USB port, so it could act as a USB LS-120 drive, which was handy because computers that had an actual internal LS-120 drive weren't common (I had a couple specifically because of that camera, but they never really caught on... I think I only ever ran into one other in the wild). Its main drawback was that running the disk drive ate batteries. The battery charger doubled as a power cable for it, but that didn't help if you were trying to take pictures outside.

Both the Mavica and my Panasonic were pretty hefty compared to a modern digital camera, just because of the physical need to fit a 3.5" disk inside, but they were no more so than a decent film SLR.

These days I have a 14.1 MP Sony Cybershot, which is a cheap camera, but still far, far better than the crappy ones in my phone and tablet. My sister, who's serious about photography, has a high-quality digital SLR body that takes real lenses.

A little off center but it blows my mind how trusting people are with all the apps and QR codes they download on their smartphones. Do they not know that phones can be hacked and even cloned?

Just as a side note, anyone remember who invented the digital camera, Just a small company no one's ever heard of call Kodak. They were so sure it would go nowhere that they just sat on the patent and other than very niche areas like satellites and such. One of the most influential inventions effectively ended the company that invented it because they did 'nothing' with it till the patent expired in (from memory) the mid nineties.

But yes the digital camera market was booming by 2005. Compact Flash would have been the media of choice for anything remotely serious and XD for anything else. XD had a problem with format. If you've wondered why they keep changing the names of SD cards it's because they change the 'rules' of how they store data.

SD maxing out at 2GB : 2005 capacities 32, 64 and 128MB

SDHC (high capacity) 32GB : 2006 capacities around the 4GB mark

SDXC (eXtended Capacity) 2TB : 2009 capacities 64GB

SDUC (Ultra Capacity) 128TB : not on market 'yet'

It was these and other 'cards' that lead to an explosion in phone camera capability as storage was now a consumable. Just like the original Sony Mavica ('97-98) from memory. The cost of both the camera itself and the media to store the ever larger 'photos' has been exponential. What may be the 'downfall' of this media is cloud storage which it unlimited as long as you pay.

Just a quick trip down my 'memory lane', Pun intended

Don't know if it is common or not, but the memory cards should not be used for long term storage of images. Why do I say this? Cause I lost some images on a card that was out of the camera for an extended time. So...if the images are important move them to a more robust storage media.

Just my thoughts...

For me it is more the quality of the drive. I have some sticks that are about 15 years old and still have everything from photos, mp3's, epubs and zip files. My biggest problem is I forget to hit the "eject media" button before I pull the stick and sometimes it ruins the stick.