The story of technology of the modern world is essentially the story of convergence of different types of skills and equipments being rolled in to a singular unit. And pertaining to this, both the experts and users agree that there is perhaps no better example for this phenomenon that the camera phones that are currently so widely popular all across the globe. A camera phone is fundamentally a mobile phone with inbuilt accessories and technologies that will enable the user to capture still as well as moving images and store, transfer and exchange them in the form of digital data.
Though there are various patents dating back almost to five decades which can be considered relevant in the development of the camera phone technology, the CMOS active pixel image sensor which is all about ‘camera on a chip’, advanced by a team led by Dr. Eric Fossum in the early 1990s is actually the first step towards materialization of this idea. Though initially the camera phones marketed by Japanese corporate used CCD instead of CMOS sensors, the later has successfully captured the market at present. Among the advantages of CMOS technology over CCD are the scope for mass production and the low power consumption by the former. However the advent of camera phones has also given rise to a number of social issues that have currently called for execution of new regulatory laws.