Confused about phone camera quality? Help's coming

(CNET) -- Let's say you're trying to decide whether to buy a new mobile phone and you like taking photos. The Google Nexus One's 5-megapixel camera has 56 percent more pixels than the iPhone 3GS's 3.2 megapixels, but it's clear the camera isn't 56 percent better.

Now let's say it's 2012 and you're trying to decide whether to buy an Apple iPhone 4GS or a Google Nexus Three. You might be able to make a better choice this time.

That's because the International Imaging Industry Association, a consortium involving more than 30 companies, is working on a test that will use a five-star rating and a basic accompanying chart to judge image quality.

It may seem like a simple idea, but it's pretty important. That's because the nature of mobile-phone photography is changing dramatically.

Once upon a time, mobile-phone cameras didn't see much use beyond teenagers mugging for the camera and maybe sending each other the photos for viewing on another mobile phone.

But now mobile-phone cameras are getting good enough to store precious memories, too. That means viewing them on bigger screens, printing them, and saving them for more than a fleeting moment.

"As [mobile-phone photography] gets to older people, it will get more important," said Nicholas Touchard, vice president of marketing for image quality evaluation at the French company DxO Labs, after a speech at the Image Sensor Europe conference here. Touchard represents DxO in the consortium.

He said phone buyers could start seeing the quality score as early as a year from now, but realistically two years is more likely.

The score is based on measurements of a variety of factors. First came basics such as sharpness, color uniformity, and lens distortion. Now the group is tackling image noise, white balance, sensitivity, blur, and other attributes.

Of course, reducing image quality to a single five-star rating scale can oversimplify a complicated situation. There's a bit more, though: a chart that shows how well the camera fares with increasingly demanding tasks -- mobile-phone sharing to a print mounted on the wall, for example -- and showing different uses such as portraits, sports, and landscape photography.

"This is a very controversial thing. Most people will tell you that summarizing the quality of a camera to just one number is quite risky or isn't what you would like to do as a scientist," he said in his speech. "However, as a consumer, it's probably a good idea."

Mobile-phone cameras suffer poor image quality compared even to inexpensive compact cameras, much less to increasingly popular SLRs. One thing that holds them back are the tiny image sensors, which simply have a harder time recording as much information as larger ones in dedicated cameras.

Another is the correspondingly small lenses that must be built to tight manufacturing tolerances but that also must be inexpensive enough for high-volume markets with very thin profit margins.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/25/cnet.mobile.phone.cameras/index.html