Tokyo, Japan, July 8, 2004--PerkinElmer, Inc. (Wellesley, MA) announced that its flashlamp technology has been adopted by Kyocera Corporation for use in a Kyocera mobile phone. The flash module embedded in the phone is provided to Kyocera by Stanley Electric (Tokyo, Japan) and features both continuous light-emitting-diode (LED) illumination suited to streaming video and PerkinElmer's miniaturized flashlamp, which is ideal for high-end digital still cameras of 1 megapixel or above.
"The megapixel CCD camera embedded in the Kyocera phone offers extremely high-quality photos, but requires a light source with far more power than that provided by an LED flash," said Nobuharu Shino, general manager of Kyocera's Yokohama mobile-phone division. "We selected the flashlamp solution because its auto-strobe function enables crisp, high-quality still photographs even in areas that are poorly illuminated."
PerkinElmer's flashlamps project up to four times the distance of LED-type flashes currently found in most cameras. Other advantages provided by the flashlamp technology include the more-even distribution of light over the subject of the photograph, as well as a color temperature close to that of sunlight, or between 5500 K and 6000 K, an improvement on the usual LED color temperature of 8500 K, which results in a blue-tinged light that is less than ideal for still pictures taken by high-end cameras. Flashlamps also produce shorter-duration flashes that improve picture sharpness even for moving objects.
While most mobile-phone camera product offerings in 2003 contained 0.3-megapixel cameras, demand for higher quality in the mobile-phone camera industry is expected to surge in 2004, with the market progressing towards 1.3-megapixel cameras and above that offer better-quality pictures while requiring higher light output that flash modules alone can provide. Miniaturization is key to achieving the goals of reduced cost, increased light output, lower power consumption, and better light distribution, and PerkinElmer's roadmap includes further efforts aimed at shrinking the size of flashlamps and other components.