Le stampe di fotografie scattate con i cellulari sono decisamente migliori di quelle ottenibili tramite fotocamere usa e getta e di qualità paragonabile a quelle delle macchine fotografiche digitali di fascia consumer. A sostenerlo è una ricerca effettuata da Future Image, che ha effettuato una serie di test con nove differenti fotocamere, quattro cellulari, due macchine fotografiche usa e getta e 3 fotocamere digitali economiche, valutando poi le stampe ottenute utilizzando apparecchiature domestiche, servizi di stampa online e negozi specializzati.
‘Siamo stati piacevolmente sorpresi della qualità delle fotografie dei cellulari, anche con una fotocamera VGA i risultati sono stati quasi sempre accettabili e paragonabili a quelli ottenuti con le fotocamere usa e getta. Il cellulare con fotocamera da 2 megapixel provato ha addirittura raggiunto gli stessi risultati di una fotocamera digitale a prescindere dalla risoluzione in tutte le nostre prove’, ha dichiarato Tony Henning, uno dei principali autori della relazione di Future Image.
"We fully expected to offer excuses for the image quality produced by the miniature sensors and lenses found in camera-phones,” said Tony Henning, Managing Editor and lead analyst for Future Image’s Mobile Imaging Report and the study’s principal author, “but we were pleasantly surprised. Even the VGA camera-phones produced acceptable results for most of the subjects and they compared favorably to the one-time-use cameras in overall score across all six subjects and all four categories. The 2MP camera-phone in our study was even more of a surprise — it completely outperformed the OTUCs and matched the digital cameras, regardless of resolution, for all the subjects and in all categories.”
Prints from images obtained by camera-phones with resolutions of 640 x 480 (two models), one megapixel, and two megapixels were compared to those from a single use (OTUC) film camera, a single use (OTUC) digital camera, and digital point-and-shoot cameras of one-, two- and three-megapixel resolution.
Six test subjects, representative of standard consumer photo activities, were photographed: a house in full sunlight, an interior shop display, an outdoor portrait in bright open shade, an indoor portrait, a close-up of small objects, and an antique spice rack in dim interior lighting. Standard consumer 4 x 6-inch borderless glossy prints of all 54 test shots were made using three different methods — a home inkjet printer, thermo-autochrome equipment at a corner drug store kiosk, and an online service that uses a silver halide-based process. We used the prints from these various sources as the basis for our evaluation of the results. Prints were scored in four performance categories — sharpness/level of detail, color accuracy and saturation, compression/interpolation artifacts, and dynamic range, yielding overall quantitative scores for each device for each subject and for each performance dimension.
The evaluation shows that camera-phones deliver acceptable 4 x 6 snapshots — suitable for the family fridge or photo album — in virtually all cases, and the higher-resolution models deliver keepsake quality prints — suitable for frames on the mantle or wall — across the board. The study concludes that the implications of these surprising results for standalone digital cameras are serious, but the implications for single-use cameras are profound. Other than the occasional high risk or party-favor application, most of the reasons for buying an OTUC will rapidly disappear.
“While camera-phones have closed the quality gap with surprising speed, the same is not true of the convenience gap,” said Alexis Gerard, President, Future Image Inc. “Making prints from camera-phone images is still much less convenient than making them from a digital camera, never mind a film camera. This creates a dramatic opportunity for vendors of printing services and equipment, but only if they react with speed and single-minded focus on customer benefits. Hopefully the industry will have learned from its past mistakes, having in effect encouraged early digital camera users to abandon the printing habit by failing to offer them convenient, inexpensive, and high-quality print options in a timely fashion.”
