(Column) – Nokia has it, Sony Ericsson has it and now Motorola has it as well. The new Razr V3x supports a new feature that’s garnering attention from everyone, a 2-megapixel camera. The first company to come out with this was Sony Ericsson and its K750i. This camera surprisingly lacked a Carl Zeiss lens, since up until that point all Sony digital cameras supported those lenses. Sony’s loss became Nokia’s gain and the N90 series attributed Carl Zeiss lens.

I have personally tested both cameras and I can confidently confirm the differences in image quality you get out of them, which is purely amazing. The K750i, especially, captures the most amazing pictures I have ever seen captured from a cell phone camera.

Despite having Carl Zeiss lens onboard, the Nokia model has ways to go before it can achieve the brilliance of images you can capture using the SE. How Motorola compares to them would be interesting for sure, but that’s a discussion for another piece.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the advancement in technologies will ensure that soon camera phones would reach the quality of most prosumer cameras, which would be the beginning of end of all but professional digital cameras.

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Juha Putkiranta, Senior Vice President of Nokia’s Imaging Business Unit (India) let me in on the fact that starting 2006, all cell phones from Nokia will feature a 2-megapixel camera at the least. Although this is a leading statement that implies the future of high-end camera phones, it also hints on the fact that we might start seeing higher "megapixeled" camera phones soon.

Samsung already retails a 7-megapixel camera in Korea with an option of attaching a telephoto lens just so you can shoot "professional" photographs, so the possibilities of higher megapixeled cameras availing in retail market soon doesn’t appear to be farfetched.

Digital cameras and camera phones are at the same crossroads as MP3 Players and Portable Media Players. However, the MP3 players survived because of the sheer frenzy created by different generations of iPod. The camera segment is a little different in that aspect, and if a phone manufacturer can indeed give a reasonable 4-5 megapixel camera with a reasonable optical zoom (say 3x) and great picture quality in addition to the standard phone-like functionality, I don’t see any reason why anyone would pay separately for two devices, especially when purchasing an integrated solution will ensure that it’s always ready to capture the moments that value the most. After all, capturing the precious moments of life is the whole point of photography.

Having said all that, a lot needs to change before camera phones can come anywhere near independent digital cameras. The first thing that needs to go is the excruciatingly sluggish interface that plague today’s phones in general and Nokia models in particular. Give me a phone with a sluggish interface and I am bound to get unprofessional pictures on account of sheer frustration of using the device. Due to this, I might opt for an economic cell phone and an expensive digital camera, which translates into revenue loss for manufacturers like Nokia who, unlike Sony, are not in the camera business.

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The other thing that we need to check for is zoom (especially optical zoom); the second question that buyers usually ask after confirming the megapixel count is the zoom length, and anything above 3x optical would be greatly appreciated.

After asking Putkiranta about the various hardware changes (in terms of microprocessors, lens etc.) in the Nokia N series, I got a haphazard response, which basically translated to – we haven’t done a thing about it and sure enough the interface is definitely very slow and it takes you more than three seconds to actually get inside the camera interface once you have pressed the button.

It’s these kinds of inconveniences that need to be looked into if manufacturers really want to tap into the entry level or casual user digital camera market, but unless these few issues are corrected, the dream of killing the digital camera product line will stay firmly out of reach.