July 15, 2004

Camera Phone Pictures

Having a camera in your phone makes it easier to get any shot at anytime. Now Kodak is making it easier to print those shots.

Tech Beat: The quality of camera phone pictures
7/14/2004 5:27 PM
By: Adam Balkin

hese pictures were taken by a 1 megapixel phone.
Having a camera in your phone makes it easier to get any shot at anytime.

Now Kodak is making it easier to print those shots.

The company has a wireless add-on for its picture-making kiosks, so now you can print more easily.

CVS Pharmacies is the first nationwide chain to roll out the updated kiosks.

"You can now make prints from any IR -- infrared -- or bluetooth camera phone or device, in addition to being able to make prints from any digital camera that you might want to bring to the store. You click on the picture, it'll ask you to send that picture to some location, you click bluetooth and away it goes -- it just transfers that automatically to the picture station," said Grant Pill, with CVS. "Quality varies according to the camera or the phone that you have. A 1 megapixel phone, which is just what's coming into the market right now, will make a great 4x6 picture."

But if you already have a camera phone, chances are it only takes .5 megapixel pictures or less. So is it worth it to print pictures from that phone?

We did a side-by-side comparison. The kiosk will actually warn you if the file seems too small to make a decent print. We did it anyway, and while the shot from the 1 megapixel camera phone looks relatively crisp, pixelation is obvious in the .5 photo.

Some analysts predict that as the technology within the phone improves, so too might the popularity of the kiosks.

WATCH THE VIDEO on the site.

As camera phone technology improves, so does the quality of the pictures they take.



"If you can go put your camera on a kiosk and you have infrared technology that just sends it there, and you print your pictures and you walk out -- people love that. It's easy, it's quick and you have just one small device, and that's what everyone's looking for," said Jenny Everett, with Sync Magazine.

The prints cost 29 cents each.

If your camera phone does not have bluetooth or infrared capability, you can't print directly from your phone. But you can still use the kiosk if you save the pictures to your computer, then transfer them to a CD or memory card.

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Posted by Craig at July 15, 2004 02:48 PM