2013-14: A preview on the Year of Smartphone Cameras

Our smartphones aim to be the all-around go-to device for all of us. Up to some extent, we might even say that they have partly eliminated the need for other gadgets such as netbooks, e-book readers, gaming devices and MP4 players. Majority of the mid-range to flagship models have become such a convergent device, we no longer find the need to bring anything else.

Yet, for some reason, the camera landscape has caught the eye of tech giants. Companies are taking different approaches with this opportunity as seen with the recent announcement of devices.

They’re aiming to partly replace your point & shoots, and up to some extent, possibly your big and bulky DSLR (though we know that IS a stretch).

For Apple, they have announced “iSight“ long ago. Sure, it’s just a marketing term like “Retina Display”, but to anyone who finds the photos taken by those cameras to be bad needs to have their eyes checked; the cameras on the latest iPads and iPhones are very competitive — and in the smartphone battlefield, the iPhone remains to be one of the best and most widely-used shooters around.

Samsung, however, is still in the experimental stage. Believe it or not, they have announced more or less 30 devices for the year of 2013, and that includes the Galaxy S4 Zoom & the Galaxy NX. The Galaxy S4 Zoom simply takes a capable smartphone and stashes a fat-ass 16MP shooter on the back, capable of 10x optical zoom with a Xenon flash. The Galaxy NX on the other hand is a more serious approach since it hosts a mirrorless system, only this time it’s powered by Android.

Nokia’s quite a pioneer in this game, as they have had a huge head start with the N8. From there, they took it to another level with PureView. We have the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 920 and the Lumia 925, which actually delivers their best at certain fields.

UltraPixel is where HTC turns to. For the meantime, the company is trying to get that branding out on every device that they could, starting with the One. The HTC Butterfly S followed that trend, and we’re pretty sure there are a lot more in the pipeline.

Now, let’s take a glimpse at the rumor mill, shall we?

• “The next iPhone will have a dual LED flash.“
• “Nokia’s going to launch the 41MP Windows Phone device on July.“
• “Sony is looking at an Xperia device with CyberShot.“

Without a doubt, cameras on smartphones are going to be the next big craze. You can’t bring a point & shoot camera to a party to snap Vines and Instagram photos, can you?

While DSLRs are here to stay, we’re not sure if the same can be said for point & shoots. This year could be it — the year when mobile phones can actually change the photography landscape.