LG P710 Optimus L7 II - CCD front-facing camera with connector-7048

A front-facing camera, commonly known as a selfie camera, is a common feature of

camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with a ...

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive telephone call, calls over a radio freq ...

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

s, tablets, laptops, and some handheld video game consoles. While stand-alone cameras face forward, away from the operator, tablets,

s and similar mobile devices typically have a camera facing the operator to allow taking a self-portrait photograph or video while looking at the display of the device, usually showing a live preview of the image. These are called front-facing cameras and are important for videotelephony and the taking of

selfie A selfie () is a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a digital camera or smartphone, which may be held in the hand or supported by a selfie stick. Selfies are often shared on social media, via social networking services such as Fac ...

s. Often, the preview image is by default a mirror image, which is more intuitive for most people; this default can be overridden, and in any case the recorded image is not reversed.

History

Perhaps the first front-facing camera on a hand-held device was the Game Boy Camera, released in Japan in February 1998. The Game Boy Camera was an attachment for

Game Boy The is an 8-bit fourth generation handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan on April 21, 1989, in North America later the same year, and in Europe in late 1990. It was designed by the same te ...

. The first front-facing

camera phone A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture photographs and often record video using one or more built-in digital cameras. It can also send the resulting image wirelessly and conveniently. The first commercial phone with color cam ...

was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time, and had a 110,000-

pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the s ...

front-facing camera. It stored up to 20

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and im ...

digital images, which could be sent over

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

, or the phone could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System (PHS)

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The mos ...

cellular network A cellular network or mobile network is a communication network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless. The network is distributed over land areas called "cells", each served by at least one fixed-location transceiver (typically th ...

. Several mobile phones with front-facing cameras were released to Western markets in 2003, including the NEC e606, NEC e616,

Sony Ericsson Z1010 The following is a list of products manufactured under the Sony Ericsson brand. Most of the models have been released under multiple names, depending on region of release, currently usually indicated by a letter added to the end of the model n ...

and Motorola A835. The front-facing camera was originally intended for video-conferencing. The Motorola A920 was released in 2003 as well and may have been the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In May 2017, the Essential Phone introduced the notch - the removal of part of the display to accommodate the front-facing camera. The iPhone X popularized this concept after its introduction in late 2017. As of 2019, several smartphones incorporate front cameras that pop up from within the smartphone to allocate the area that would be otherwise utilized by notches to the screen. Under-display cameras are under development, which would place a camera under a special display that would allow the camera to see through the display.

References

{{reflist Cameras Self-portraits Japanese inventions