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WirelessDevNet.com Press Release
MMS Severely Degrades the Quality of Photos Sent From the Latest Megapixel Camera-Phones
16th August 2004, London - Cognima, the effortless mobile services company, today published a report following its research into the loss of image quality when photos are sent via the MMS picture messaging system. The report compares the quality of photos transferred from the latest megapixel camera-phones to online photo albums using MMS. Cognima used Nokia's new 7610 megapixel camera-phone to conduct tests on each of the UK's four largest mobile networks: Vodafone, Orange, 02, and T-Mobile.
For the tests, Cognima took several megapixel photos with the 7610 phone and sent them via MMS to an online photo album over the four UK mobile networks. The results were consistent across all the networks. When sending a photo using the default "small" MMS setting the photo resolution is reduced by a factor of 50 - from the 1152x864 pixel resolution of the original megapixel photo to a 160x120 pixel image. The result is an extremely low quality photo that some online photo albums will refuse to print.
The 'small' MMS photo setting is the default because many phones can only receive MMS messages of this size. However, all four of the UK operators can support larger 100k byte MMS messages, which megapixel camera-phones (including the Nokia 7610) can use if the user switches the phone to the 'large' MMS photo mode.
Cognima repeated the tests in 'large' MMS photo mode. Once again the results were consistent across all the networks: the photo resolution is reduced by a factor of four - from the original 1152x864 pixel resolution to a 576x432 pixel image. The result is a low quality photo that is barely printable and shows visible artifacts from the severe image compression.
"The quality of the photos sent from these phones by using MMS is below print quality even in 'large' mode," said Bloor Research mobile industry analyst, and semi-professional photographer, Rob Bamforth. "For users who have bought a megapixel camera-phone it will be extremely disappointing that they cannot easily get their high quality photos into an online photo album where they can keep them safe, share and print them."
"MMS was designed to solve the problem of getting photos from one phone to another. Low quality photos are fine for that purpose, but it was never designed to get high quality megapixel photos from a camera-phone to an online photo album," said Simon East, CEO Cognima. "Cognima Snap solves this problem by allowing users to effortlessly transfer their megapixel images from their camera-phone to an online photo album".
Cognima recently announced the launch of its Cognima Snap(tm) service which allows megapixel quality images to be uploaded from supported camera-phones direct to online photo albums with a single key press on the phone. Results of a trial with a major UK network operator revealed that Cognima Snap increased the number of photos uploaded from camera-phones to online photo albums by 14 fold.
A copy of the full test report can be downloaded from: www.cognima.com/megapixel/
ABOUT COGNIMA
Cognima was established by Simon East, previously VP of Technology, Symbian, in 2001. A privately held company based in London, Cognima develops effortless mobile services.
Cognima believes that in order to create uptake of mobile data services they must be effortless to use and meet real user needs. Cognima has developed a set of innovative new services that meet these user requirements and therefore allow Network Operators, Handset Manufacturers and Service Providers to derive new revenue from their customers. Cognima's patented data replication technology makes the operation of these services totally invisible to the user.
Cognima is currently running trials of Cognima Snap(tm) with 15 major Network Operators and Service Providers. Cognima Safeguard(tm) has been selected by CPP Group Plc to enable their Mobile Phone Data Protection service which is currently running as a pilot programme in a major Network Operator.
Cognima's website is www.cognima.com
ABOUT COGNIMA'S DATA REPLICATION TECHNOLOGY
Cognima's patented data replication technology was designed with a focus on reliability, minimal phone ROM footprint and cost-effectiveness. The client software in the phone is written in highly optimised C++ and has a very small ROM footprint. The client software is running on Symbian OS- based phones, Microsoft Smartphone 2002/3 based phones, Palm OS based devices, and TTPcom's phone development system.
The server software is designed for integration with external systems through the use standard technologies such as J2EE, SyncML and Web Services and runs on industry standard server platforms for carrier grade availability and scalability. The back-end is built around BEA WebLogic 8.1 application server and Oracle 9i database server.
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