It wasn’t that long ago that photos taken with camera phones were absolutely horrible. Nokia aimed to change that with the introduction of the Nseries brand, and some would say that the N95, launched back in early 2007 with a 5 megapixel sensor and Carl Zeiss optics, was the first real smartphone you could confidently use as a dedicated point and shoot replacement. Fast forward to today and you’ve got devices like the Nokia N8 on the market with a 12 megapixel sensor with a much more refined Carl Zeiss optics solution, and it’s so sublime that there really isn’t any reason for Canon or Nikon to make slim and pocketable cheap cameras anymore. Just recently we also reported that Apple’s iPhone 4 became the most popular camera on the photo sharing site Flickr, thanks in part to the ease of which you can upload photos from the iPhone to your favorite web services.
Looking to power the next generation of great camera phones, Toshiba has just introduced a new 8 megapixel CMOS sensor that packs pixels that are just 1.12 micrometers small. Using back-side illumination technology (BSI), low light performance should be outstanding, and the 1/4 inch sensor is small enough that it’ll end up in the ever thinner devices hitting the market. Rumor has it that the next iPhone will pack an 8 megapixel sensor from either OmniVision or Sony, so we’re curious to see what Toshiba’s hardware has to offer. If you want our honest opinion, we’d gladly give up megapixel count for pixels that are more sensitive to light and capture colors correctly. Of course that can always be tweaked in software, but most folks just want to point, click, and share, without needed to fiddle with onboard photo editors or worse yet waiting until they get home to import their photos to their computer and spending hours fiddling with sliders to make sure their friend’s forehead isn’t too shiny.