When the Apple iPhone 4 was announced, Steve Jobs made some valid points while introducing the new camera on the iPhone 4. What he said was that more megapixels don't necessarily mean better image quality and therefore there was no need of just cramming in several megapixels just for the sake of it.

Instead, they decided to stick with just five megapixel and included some other features that will have a bigger impact on image quality. Apple added a backside illuminated image sensor and decided to keep the size of individual pixels the same while increasing the resolution, so that the amount of light captured per pixel would be the same. They also included a flash, which is something they should have done a long time ago.

This made us wonder about the future of mobile phone photography. So far the trend has been to increase the megapixel count as much as possible with every new flagship model. However, only a few manufacturers have stopped to think whether they are actually giving you better quality or not. The uninformed public is often swayed by bigger numbers and thinks that more megapixels would probably mean better image quality. But then Apple comes in and decides to make some changes in the camera on their phone that was totally opposite to what we have seen so far from other manufacturers.

Apple has often been pioneers of several trends that we have seen in the mobile phone world, whether it was going the full touchscreen way or creating a one stop shop for all your mobile phone applications. So are they on to something this time as well? Will they start a trend of camera phones that focuses more on improving the image quality than just bumping up the megapixels? We think so.

We see mobile phone cameras following the same trend that digital cameras went through when they were first introduced. Every manufacturer wanted to implement more megapixels in their cameras. But later on everyone realized that more megapixels doesn't mean better quality. On the contrary, it can actually mean poor image quality, especially in low light. By just adding more megapixels while keeping the image sensor size the same means you are making individual pixels smaller, thereby reducing the amount of light that it can capture. But nowadays you see high-end cameras like the Nikon D3S sticking to resolutions such as 12 megapixels and concentrating more on having larger pixel size for achieving better low light and higher ISO performance.