Camera Phones Photography

The first commercial camera phone complete with infrastructure was the J-SH04, made by Sharp Corporation, had an integrated CCD sensor, with the Sha-Mail (Picture-Mail in Japanese) infrastructure developed in collaboration with Kahn's LightSurf venture, and marketed from 2001 by J-Phone in Japan today owned by Softbank. The first commercial deployment in North America of camera phones was in 2004. The Sprint wireless carriers deployed over one million camera phone manufactured by Sanyo and launched by the PictureMail infrastructure (Sha-Mail in English) developed and managed by LightSurf.
Camera phones can share pictures almost instantly and automatically via a sharing infrastructure integrated with the carrier network, thus negating the need for connecting cables or removable media to transfer pictures. Some camera phones use CMOS image sensors, due largely to reduced power consumption compared to CCD type cameras, which are also used. The lower power consumption prevents the camera from quickly depleting the phone's battery. Images are usually saved in the JPEG file format, and the wireless infrastructure manages the sharing. The sharing infrastructure is critical and explains the early successes of J-Phone and DoCoMo in Japan as well as Sprint and other carriers in the United States and the widespread success worldwide.
In 2006, Thuraya released the first satellite phone with an integrated camera. The Thuraya SG-2520 is manufactured by a Korean company called APSI and runs Windows CE.
The camera feature proved popular right from the start, as J-Phone in Japan had more than half of its subscribers using cameraphones in two years. The world soon followed. By 2003, more cameraphones were sold worldwide than stand-alone digital cameras. In 2004, Nokia became the world's most sold digital camera brand. In 2006, half of the world's mobile phones had a built-in camera. In 2008, Nokia sold more cameraphones than Kodak sells film based simple cameras, thus became the biggest manufacturer of any kind of camera. Due to the popularity of cameraphones, two of the four giant cameramakers, Minolta and Konica have quit the camera business altogether. At the end of 2008, the world installed base of cameraphones was 1.9 billion.