Camera Phones Loom But Impact Uncertain

TWICE: Has the camera phone made any impact yet? Will it have any significant impact?

Nelkin: We see the camera phone bringing more awareness to digital imagery. Someone who is going to use a camera phone is not going to want a print. The motivation behind using the camera phone is a quick snapshot for a picture that you wouldn't have been able to capture any other way.

We picture a network ultimately being built where people will have digital images they have captured from a cellphone, from a multimedia device, from a digital SLR, from a point-and-shoot, and they will store them on a home server, hopefully in DVD-RAM, archive them and be able to view them not only on a computer but on a television.

Then you are talking about a real integrated solution to the end user. I don't see camera phones as a real competitor. I see them as a part of the solution to the end user.

Scott: At Kodak we believe they will impact the entry-level space for digital cameras, but the more important thing is what we are talking about, which is the big opportunity there for those companies that can harness the number of images captured with those devices and build a business model that is based off of services and consumption of media. There is a huge opportunity waiting out there.

Today we believe there are 25 billion images captured worldwide. That is about 800 a second, and that is without cellphone cameras.

Sienkiewicz: Whether or not [the emergence of camera phones] will mean that we will sell fewer still cameras in the future than we would without cellphones is debatable. I think the important thing to think of is philosophically you regard the image that you took with the cellphone differently than you do the one you took with a camera.

A cellphone picture is something that I take, I send back home or I show my friend, I share it and then I delete it. Just as if I received a voice message from you. I don't save it. Even though I may like your voice, I delete it. When it becomes a 5-megapixel cellphone then it may be a different attitude, but right now I think we have to be keenly aware of how consumers regard those images. They are something to be looked at, shared, deleted.

Ryan: I have a slightly different perspective. No one is really sure what is going to happen here, but we do know that the [cellphone] manufacturers have a vested interest in packing ever more features, which look like a camera, into cellphones. The carriers have a vested interest in getting those images transmitted, and the consumers are adopting [camera phones] in large quantities.

If you look at the latest camera phones in Japan, you are looking at auto focus, flash. Starting with a younger consumer who has perhaps never used a camera, in a significant way that camera phone is their life. That is their world. Will it be the primary keeper image type of tool? HP would say no. Is it important that we enable people to be able to easily share and print images that were captured with camera phones? Absolutely.