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 It doesn’t take a think-tank computer model or a deck of Tarot cards to see the future of photography. All that’s required is a plane ticket to Tokyo. In this technology-obsessed, camera-crazed city (where I’ve seen people on trains actually reading camera instruction manuals), it’s easy to divine where photography is headed and spot trends that will sweep the U.S. in the years ahead.
While we Americans don’t like to think of ourselves as ever playing Catch Up, when it comes to mass-market photography and electronics, the Japanese are light years…well, maybe model years…ahead of us. It’s an entire country of what marketing types call “early adopters.”
 During meetings in Japan this past fall with top executives of major camera, lens, and equipment manufacturers, two words kept popping up: “camera phones.” Not that the majors are making them—that’s for the electronics companies—but many are making parts (lenses, for instance), and there’s a widespread sense in the Japanese photo industry that this is a major development in mass-market photography.
Put simply, the camera-phone trend could put a very capable camera into virtually everyone’s hand. Photography doesn’t get more mainstream.
 Of course, we have cell-phone cameras in the U.S. As with the Japanese phones, the camera doesn’t add bulk to the phone, just a tiny lens on an outside surface. But so far, America’s camera phones are more gimmick than camera. The best are only VGA, the equivalent of 0.3 megapixel. In Japan, however, 1MP phones are common, and Casio has debuted a 2MP phone.
Japan’s camera phones are becoming real cameras. Not competition for SLRs and serious enthusiast tools, of course. But for everyday snapshooters? Absolutely. With the camera-phone boom in Japan, film point-and-shoots are history; low-end digital point-and-shoots don’t exist.
In the past year, 80 percent of all cell phones sold in Japan packed a camera, with an estimated 30 million now in use. These numbers indicate that camera phones aren’t just for giggly teenagers sharing group shots. They’re for everyone. I saw people with camera phones photographing the crows, cats, and roses in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. Almost every executive that Pop Photo’s Herbert Keppler, Tony Nagatomo, and I met with was carrying a camera phone. Not that many admitted to using it. (If you worked for Canon or Nikon, would you?)
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