Early developers, including Philippe Kahn, envisioned a technology that would enable service providers to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo".
[20] The resulting technologies, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and Sha-Mail, were developed in parallel to and in competition with open Internet-based mobile communication provided by GPRS and later 3G networks.
The Sprint wireless carriers deployed over one million camera phones manufactured by Sanyo and launched by the PictureMail infrastructure (Sha-Mail in English) developed and managed by LightSurf.
For example, the Samsung Galaxy S4 captures still photos during video recording at 9.6 Megapixels, which is the largest 16:9 aspect ratio crop of the 13-Megapixel 4:3 image sensor.
[34] Parameters adjustable during video recording may include flashlight illumination, focus, exposure, light sensitivity (ISO), and white balance.
[69] The ability to take photographs and film from both front and rear cameras simultaneously was first implemented in 2013 on the Samsung Galaxy S4, where the two video tracks are stored picture-in-picture.
[76][77] The camera effects introduced by Samsung on the Galaxy S3 or S4 including "best photo" which automatically picks a photo and "drama shot" for multiplying moving objects and "eraser" which can remove moving objects, were merged to "shot & more" on the Galaxy S5, allowing retrospectively applying them to a burst of eight images stored in a single file.
[78] In 2014, HTC implemented several visual effect features as part of their dual-camera setup on the One M8, including weather, 3D tilting, and focus adjustment after capture, branded "uFocus".
[80] A "handheld night shot" mode tries compositing a picture as clear as possible from many frames captured in a dark environment throughout several seconds.
[82] Starting in 2013 on the Xperia Z1, Sony experimented with real-time augmented reality camera effects such as floating text, virtual plants, volcano, and a dinosaur walking in the scenery.
[84] An artificial intelligence that notifies of flaws after each photograph such as blinking eyes, misfocus, blur, and shake, was first implemented in 2018 on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9.
[citation needed] Another important enabling factor was advances in data compression, due to the impractically high memory and bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media.
The DELTIS VC-1100 by Japanese company Olympus was the world's first digital camera with cellular phone transmission capability, revealed in the early 1990s and released in 1994.
However, the Kyocera system was designed as a peer-to-peer video phone as opposed to the Sharp project, which was initially focused on sharing instant pictures.
[citation needed] In 1995, work by James Greenwold of Bureau Of Technical Services, in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, was developing a pocket video camera for surveillance purposes.
[97] A camera phone was patented by Kari-Pekka Wilska, Reijo Paajanen, Mikko Terho and Jari Hämäläinen, four employees at Nokia, in 1994.
In the hospital waiting room he devised a way to connect his laptop to his digital camera and to his cell phone for transmission to his home computer.
This is known as a pop-up camera, and it allows smartphone displays to cover the entire front of the phone body without a notch or a punch hole on the top of the screen.
[128][129][130][131] Major manufacturers of cameras for phones include Sony, Toshiba, ST Micro, Sharp, Omnivision, and Aptina (Now part of ON Semiconductor).
[132] The hundreds of millions[133] of camera phones sold every year provide the same opportunities, yet these functions are altered and allow for a different user experience.
Brooke Knight observes that "the carrying of an external, non-integrated camera (like a DSLR) always changes the role of the wearer at an event, from participant to photographer".
While phones have been found useful by tourists and for other common civilian purposes, as they are cheap, convenient, and portable; they have also posed controversy, as they enable secret photography.
As a network-connected device, megapixel camera phones are playing significant roles in crime prevention, journalism and business applications as well as individual uses.
[136] In January 2007, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a plan to encourage people to use their camera phones to capture crimes happening in progress or dangerous situations and send them to emergency responders.
In 2010, in Ireland the annual "RTÉ 60 second short award" was won by 15-year-old Laura Gaynor, who made her winning cartoon, "Piece of Cake" on her Sony Ericsson C510 camera phone.
They are small and numerous and their use is easy to hide or disguise, making it hard for law enforcement and security personnel to detect or stop use.
There is the occasional anecdote of camera phones linked to industrial espionage and the activities of paparazzi (which are legal but often controversial), as well as some hacking into wireless operators' network.
[162][163][164] The movement, though already a few years old, became mainstream with the advent of the iPhone and its App Store which provided better, easier, and more creative tools for people to shoot, process, and share their work.
[167][168] A collection of these was published November 21, 2010, in the New York Times in a series titled "A Grunt's Life",[169] earning an international award (3rd) sponsored by RJI, Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.
[173] Mobile filmmaking is developing its own aesthetics due to its compactness, portability and its technological limitations that are being overcome every day by new implementations.