With a cell phone on the front and a digital camera on the back, the SPH-V7800 has a wide range of advanced digital camera features such as linear zoom, 4x digital zoom, auto focus, ISO setting, automatic exposure bracketing (AEB), and flash. It also provides 16 shooting modes including self shot, couple shot and night shot. Users can also adjust the color tone of the picture with a filter function.

The company said the major concern of the camera phone market is shifting from pixel competition to including highly advanced camera functions.

Since the release of a 1.1 megapixel camera phone in April 2002, mobile phone manufacturers have been trying to outdo each other in upping the number of pixels, with a 7.0 megapixel camera phone launched this March. Now it appears competition is starting to shift to a head-on cross-product clash between digital cameras and camera phones.

(Park Chang-sin, heri@chosun.com )