Camera Phones, Privacy Concerns Not Clicking

He was not talking about digital cameras attached to mobile phones, but he might as well have been.

The privacy implications of cameras on phones have raised concerns beyond the fears of stalked celebrities and cheating spouses. Gyms, factories and national governments are among those that have banned camera phones.

Even the makers of camera phones do not seem keen on the technology when it is turned on them: Samsung Corp. and LG Electronics Inc., the South Korean handset makers, caused a chuckle in the industry when they banned the phones in their facilities this year.

Camera phones are tiny, easy to use and relatively cheap to buy, thanks to the subsidies that mobile phone companies offer to attract customers. As digital photo components have plummeted in price and their size has shrunk, it has become easy for phone makers to start building them into handsets without turning their phones into unattractive bricks.

"The emotional experience of using a camera phone will drive sales," said Nitin Shah of RHK Inc, a South San Francisco-based telecommunications consultant. "You get that instant connectivity. But there are still issues around networks and interoperability, [such as] whether you can send photos to users on different networks."

And the picture quality lags well behind that of ordinary cameras, or even cheap digital cameras. Pictures tend to be low-resolution and indistinct, with only about one-tenth of the number of pixels of images captured by mainstream digital cameras.

Quality will continue to be an issue. Even if expense were not an issue, higher-quality cameras might place too much of a strain on the handset's battery life to be feasible, and a flash would consume even more power. But people hardly mind the poor quality when the purpose is to send the image to friends for a laugh. And mobile phone companies love them because they appeal to the lucrative youth market, seen as another valuable way of raising the average revenue per user.

Camera phones also have been touted as useful for workers who may need to send photos of machinery or other items from remote locations back to base. But that is unlikely to take off, Shah said. "The quality is not high enough; you don't get enough detail."