Nobody Prints Camera Phone Pictures
Camera phones these days are all the rage. Sometimes it’s even hard to find a new phone that doesn’t include a camera. Everywhere you go people are taking pictures of everything and anything with their phones. So, where do all those pictures go? Well, pretty much nowhere according to this story from Forbes.
The numbers that they cite from Lyra Research are that this year an estimated 112 million camera phone users will take 11 billion pictures. That’s up from 69 million users and 5 billion pictures last year. But of all those images, only 20% will be sent to another phone, only 14% will be transferred to a computer, and most disheartening to the printer industry, only a measly 3% will ever be printed. Companies like HP and Kodak are looking at a potential fortune in revenues, but they haven’t figured out how to make it work.
The main reason that nobody ever does anything with these pictures is because of their poor quality. Anyone that has seen a camera phone knows that the pictures don’t even look that hot on the tiny little camera screen. Once you transfer it to your computer, what you get is likely a dark and blurry memory. A typical digital camera takes 4 megapixel pictures at 1600 x 1200. A good camera phone takes 1 megapixel pictures at 640 x 480. Odds are no one is going to want to waste some ink and photo paper on something of such low quality. There is also the issue of the lack of a flash, which is found only on more expensive models, which explains why all those pictures you took at that bar or restaurant turned out like mug shots.
Maybe some day more than 3% of camera phone users will take pictures, transfer them to their computer, and print them on an inkjet or photo printer. These days people use camera phones because they are available, easy to use and don’t require much effort. When you start talking about transferring and printing them, there is actually some effort involved and people probably aren’t that interested. If they were, they would just be carrying tiny digital cameras around everywhere.
Pushing Camera Phones To Print [Forbes]
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May 8th, 2006 at 9:21 am
In this age of high technology, we are still deprived of a printer that prints directly from our camera phones. Camera phones help us in more than one way. We need not carry a separate devcice to capture some memorable moments. The sad thing is that we dont have a printer that prints these images directly from the phone. We have to transfer the images from the cellphone to a computer and then print it. Companies have taken note of this and I bet that we will soon have a printer that is cell phone compatible.