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March 09, 2006
[ SHOOTING BEN HUR ON THE TAKEAWAY PHONE ]
The world’s first feature film shot entirely on mobile phones has just been made in South Africa.
SMS Sugarman, made by director Aryan Kaganof, was shot using Sony Ericsson W900i phones. For some scenes eight phones were used for shooting.
The W900i phones have a 2 megapixel camera built in and record to Memory Stick Duo. Imaging has tested one of the Sony Ericsson camera phones and been impressed, but there’s no getting away from the fact that by any standards these units produce low resolution images. The digital zooms are unusable and there is virtually no manual control of any of the usual parameters such as ISO speed and aperture, nevertheless the plan is for cinema and DVD release.
Asked why he did it Kaganof said: “Somebody had to do it.”
dpexpert is old enough to remember when a phone was something that had a handle to crank and a switchboard operator on the other end with a spaghetti jar of wires, plugs and sockets to patch through to the called subscriber. A telephone was just a telephone. Alexander Graham Bell would have recognised it.
Goodness knows what he would make of the new Nokia 6280 which is a phone, camera, video camera, stereo music player, sound recorder, image storage and display device, stopwatch, diary, web browser, email client, portable games device, television set, address book and FM radio combined. We apologise to Mr Nokia if we have left anything out of that list.
The 2 megapixel camera works at three resolutions and three image sizes for both still and video shooting. At top resolution and size [1600 by 1200 pixels] the images make respectable prints to 10 by 15 cms.
These tiny, low resolution, fixed focus, wide angle cameras can, with careful use, produce romantically back lit soft-focus images that are especially attractive. The sepia effect in the Nokia makes for charming portraits.
The storage medium in the Nokia is a combination of SIM, phone memory and mini SD card. The card supplied is 64 meg capacity and larger capacity cards can be installed to hold more MP3 and JPEG data.
Using the software supplied with the phone it is linked to a PC via the USB port and it appears in My Computer as “Nokia phone browser” and works as though it were an external drive. Files can be transferred in both directions.
The LCD viewing screen on the Nokia is of a decent size and resolution and makes a decent portable image viewer. Photographers can also brag about their best shots by installing them on the phone as wallpaper, displayed when the phone is in standby mode.
Photos can be sent as multimedia messages to other similarly equipped 3G phones.
But wait, there’s more! The Epson Stylus Photo RX650 multi function device we have been testing prints from an infrared enabled phone just by pointing it at the printer and pressing a button on the phone itself. It has to be seen to be believed. (Other makers’ multi function units do the same.)
The Nokia 6280 is one of the cheapest 3G phones but at the moment a 2 megapixel camera is as good as it gets. There will no doubt be higher resolution cameras in phones in the next few months and there may even be phones with optical zooms. The LCD viewing screens probably won’t get much larger because that would involve increasing the overall size of the camera and who wants that?
As things stand the Nokia and phones with similar specifications represent a useful accessory for photographers. At the very least they are go-anywhere cameras with image storage and viewing functions. And at their best they may be tools for re-shooting Ben Hur.
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Posted by terry at March 9, 2006 08:36 AM
