More than 20 years have passed since the first cell phone camera was introduced. The Sharp J-SH04 was the first mass market cell phone with a camera and debuted in 2000. How much have phone cameras evolved since then? Online review site SimpleGhar has collected specification data for smartphone camera lenses on a variety of devices, from iPhone to Google’s Android phones for comparison, and has built a model of how camera quality affects image quality in photos.
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Change of mobile phone cameras in 20 years
Sharp J-SH04 met with consumers as the first camera phone. Sharp J-SH04 does not have a front camera, a mirror is placed next to the rear camera for selfies. This is how you adjust your position when taking a selfie. The shooting quality is 352 x 288 pixels, but unlike the Samsung SCH-V2000, the camera phone that came after it, you can transfer photos directly from your phone. Scroll through the timeline below and you can see that the quality of shooting with the phone has improved every year since the Sharp J-SH04 was launched.
Although we are talking about some iconic changes and popular models of big brands such as Google, Apple, Samsung, the history of phone lenses cannot be ignored. SimpleGhar has compared over 50 camera phones.
How much improved is the iPhone’s camera? From the first iPhone to the present
The iPhone changed the nature of the mobile phone when it was released in 2007, but featured a very basic camera system with no flash, zoom or video capture. The front camera came with the iPhone 4 model. Like many phones of that era, the iPhone performed very poorly in low light. The first iPhone with a relatively high-resolution screen made photos look good to the eye and led people to the idea of a universal device. It was even used to shoot movies when the iPhone 5 came out. On the iPhone 6, the camera had grown to 12 megapixels and 4K video could be recorded. While the iPhone 11 offers an ultra-wide lens and night mode, the iPhone 12 has a LiDAR sensor for fast focusing and AR/VR features. Apple does not like to increase the number of pixels of the camera, which is currently fixed at 12 megapixels; instead it focuses on software to deliver more impressive images.
The most remarkable camera phones of the last 20 years are on the list
To visualize the evolution of camera phones, SimpleGhar analyzed data on camera features and image quality of the most popular and innovative camera phones of the past 20 years. The table creates a list of the best-selling smartphones, as well as models that surprised with the quality of the rear camera when it first came out.
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