Suitable for framing
With projections that more than a third of cellphones sold in the United States this year will include a camera, the photos they produce are ready to make the technological leap from just 'good enough' to snapshot quality.
In another watershed for wireless camera phones establishing themselves as viable alternatives to digital cameras, some 20 Eastern Massachusetts photo processors this week are launching a new service to turn cellphone pictures into 4-by-6 snapshot prints.
Most camera phones used in the United States today take low-quality images far too grainy to be worth blowing up and printing as a snapshot. But in recent months, a growing number of phones with cameras of 1 megapixel image resolution and higher, comparable to low-priced digital cameras, have come to the market. Among them: Cingular's $450 Sony Ericsson s710a and the $300 Motorola V710 offered by Verizon Wireless.
Some phones in use in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, countries that are normally a year or more ahead of the United States in wireless technology, offer 3 megapixels and higher along with more advanced flash and zoom-lens capability.
With industry analysts Gartner Inc. projecting that 38 percent of all cellphones bought in North America this year will include a camera, and likely an increasingly sophisticated version, many businesses anticipate booming demand for ways to turn cellphone images into prints.
LifePics Inc., a Boulder, Colo., company that provides the digital-to-print services for 23 Bay State photo shops, including four MotoPhoto outlets in metropolitan Boston, has offered new technology to let camera phone owners transfer their images by e-mail from the phone to a website, then to be printed out at their neighborhood photo processor.
The LifePics service is similar to one rolled out last fall by Sprint Corp. and Fuji Photo Film USA Inc. for making prints at chains such as Ritz Camera and Sam's Club stores, but is available to subscribers of all carriers, not just Sprint.
At the same time, photography giant Eastman Kodak Co. is pushing ahead with two other phone-to-print services. Roughly half of its 30,000 in-store digital photo printing kiosks in the United States, in stores such as CVS and Walgreen's, now accept images beamed by wireless connections from cellphones with carriers such as Cingular and T-Mobile USA, according to spokeswoman Jodi Sacks.
Earlier this month, at a big wireless trade show in New Orleans, Kodak also unveiled a prototype for a home photo printer with a docking station for a cellphone. ''We're still working through all the various things you need to integrate the technology seamlessly, but the idea is, folks should be able to make prints from a phone just by pressing one or two buttons," said Dave Geary, Kodak's senior vice president who oversees mobile photography technology.
Similarly, Hewlett-Packard Co. is among several manufacturers of printers working with top wireless handset makers to develop phone picture printing, using Bluetooth and other emerging standards. Sprint's $250 Sanyo MM-5600 camera comes with a cable for printing out photos straight to printers that use the ''PictBridge" standard.
Some industry executives are skeptical cellphone prints will ever prove to be any serious rival to prints made from film or high-resolution digital cameras. ''We don't expect this kind of service to prove very popular," said Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner Inc. analyst. Even with the 1.3 megapixel cameras now available, she said, ''the picture quality won't satisfy most people."
As a rule of thumb, WinkFlash, an online photo processor in East Greenwich, R.I., that sells prints for 16 cents each, discourages people from attempting to print a cellphone image of less than 1 megapixel, spokesman Dan Esten said. One common camera phone standard is called Video Graphics Array, with images of about 0.3 megapixels, or a television-like format of 640 by 480 dots -- a crisp-looking image on a two-inch phone screen, but prone to becoming a blur of colored squares when printed much bigger.
But Ron Mohney, vice president of concept development for the MotoPhoto chain, noted that millions of Americans have proven to be satisfied with grainy images run through a laser printer. ''You can tell it's your kid, and there's a lake, and there are some trees," Mohney said. ''There's a place for 'good enough' pictures."
Martha Locke, laboratory manager for Zeff Photo Supply in Belmont, one of the local stores using the new LifePics camera-phone processing service, said the idea may be a little ahead of its time but it looks like a wave of the future.
''Right now it seems that most camera phones don't take pictures at a high enough resolution that they would make a good print," Locke said.
''People use them to have fun with, but not to document their lives. But I think as the quality of images gets better and people learn that they can make prints, it'll definitely pick up, and we're getting ready for it."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.
