Davis says that the little phone camera had two advantages over his more bulky digital SLR. It went everywhere in his pocket and it was less conspicuous. “People tend not to notice the phone camera and therefore it is easier to catch them in a spontaneous moment.”

Laurie Davis is, by profession, a Portfolio IT Manager for visual arts faculties at RMIT. By inclination he is a serious photographer, being in the last stage of finishing an advanced diploma of photography. After many years of amateur photography he started his formal photographic studies at the age of 50. When a representative from SonyEricsson saw some photos that he had taken with the earlier version of their phone camera he was so impressed that he offered Davis a phone and accessories for his European trip. SonyEricsson also took responsibility for the printing and mounting of the photographs for exhibition.

The K750i is a veritable Swiss army pocket knife of a mobile phone, incorporating camera, video (Davis took 150 video clips on his travels, including a clip of a busking orchestra in the Paris Metro that he says he would not otherwise have been able to capture), voice recorder, FM radio and MP3 player. He uses all the functions and says that the phone is now his go-everywhere visual and audio diary. He even uses it as a portable photocopier to snap pages from books and magazines when he needs to record them. The K750i has the facility for sending photos from one phone camera to another and for emailing image files once the multimedia service has been set up.

Davis carried the optional accessory flash unit that plugs into the multi-function socket that serves as battery charger and file transfer port and took some spectacular flash lit shots that he says he would not otherwise have been able to take. He uses a Bluetooth wireless connector to transfer the pictures from the camera memory card to his Mac laptop and he charges the phone battery every night via the USB connector. Charge time straight from the mains socket is about 3 hours from flat to fully charged and via the USB connector charge time is about 6 hours.

The one feature that he doesn’t use is the digital zoom because of the degrading effect that it has on image quality. The 2 megapixel images enlarge to A4 size, at which degree of enlargement digital artefacts start to become apparent.

Laurie Davis says that the key to getting good results from the SonyEricsson phone camera is understanding its technical parameters -- aperture (it is fixed at f2.8), focal length, also fixed, and the judicial use of exposure compensation which is controlled from the phone navigation joystick.

And apart from all that, how is the SonyEricsson K750i as a telephone? It is a solid little block of a phone, 100mm by 45mm and about 17mm thick. It has good sensitivity but is not quite as comfortable to use as a flip phone (this is a personal and subjective assessment). With so many truly useable functions in such a small volume and weight it is a remarkable piece of technology. In Laurie Davis’s opinion no traveller should go abroad without one.

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See the Davis European photographs here >>