Sony’s K750i was a triumph in a sea of ​​noble failures



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On May 7, 1946, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo”, the company that would later become Sony. After its beginnings in the manufacture of tape recorders and transistor radios, it quickly developed into a myriad of industries. From its “My First Sony” line to early camcorders, from virtual reality headsets to digital audio tapes, Sony has always tried new things, with varying degrees of success. On the occasion of the company’s 75th anniversary, we have put together a series of articles about our experiences with some of its most interesting and unusual products.

The Sony Ericsson K750i was a marvel in its day and, even today, sixteen years later, is a milestone on the path to the era of smartphone photography. The candybar phone was one of the first to come equipped with a suitable camera, containing two whole megapixels of power inside its body. Sony, which was (and still is) the master of point-and-shoot, had managed to cram a modest point-and-shoot into a handset barely bigger than its predecessor, the T610. It was designed to behave like a camera, with a sliding shutter cover (and I love a slider) that kicked off imaging mode – it even had a dedicated shutter release button. Sony knew phones would eat up cameras eventually, but couldn’t be foresight in the smartphone age.

The woman who would become my wife and I both packed a K750i into some sort of deal for probably £ 20 (around $ 36 at the time) up front. In 2005, when it launched, carriers ate up the cost of phones to keep you tied to their plans, and we bought 50 minutes of calls and 100 texts for £ 7 ($ 13) per month. It was pretty much affordable for me and it would be my first real chance to own a digital point-and-shoot, as I could never have justified owning one otherwise. But here’s Sony (Ericsson, admittedly) who actually gave me a digital camera free.

For its size and age, the K750i was remarkably powerful, as it could play audio files, videos, and send data through its infrared port. It even comes with a 64MB Memory Stick Duo, allowing you to store lots of photos on it before you need to transfer them to your computer. Of course, it was a Sony phone, so every component was an attempt to guide you through its ecosystem. The proprietary memory card, non-standard headphone connector, and custom file formats frustrated as much as they delighted.

An absolutely stunning image of the back side of the Sony Ericsson K750i, a 2005 candybar phone with a sliding camera.

Daniel Cooper

However, it didn’t have 3G which would keep the cost down and make it one of the most popular phones of the day. The K750i sold around 15 million units in its first two years and established Sony Ericsson as a company that could, in its day, go head to head with (then champion) Nokia. And while it had ditched a buzzing feature like 3G, the handset has perfectly bypassed the unnecessary arms race that set the standard in its early days. Two of my friends bought expensive 3G phones and are planning to do so watch TV on your phone via the Internet. And no, it never worked.

Sony did not invent the camera phone and Nokia had already launched the N90, in the form of a camcorder, before the K750i dropped. But there was something about Sony’s implementation that looked better than any of these rival devices. Especially since most other manufacturers were still using VGA cameras, like the hugely popular original Motorola Razr, or, at best, 1.3 megapixel lenses. Between Sony and Nokia, the world of mobile telephony would soon embark on a megapixel arms race that has driven the industry to this day.

Two megapixels wasn’t much, but it was the kind of figure where the images were high enough quality that you could, if you wanted, print them out. The K750i’s camera used a 1 / 3.2 ”CMOS sensor with relatively large pixels, measuring at 2.8 microns, producing images with a resolution of 1632 x 1224. 1 / 3.2″ is still considered as a good sensor size for a smartphone in 2021, and 2.8 microns is larger than Sony’s most prestigious point-and-shoot today, the RX100 VII. It had a fixed aperture of f / 2.8 and only produced JPEG images, a compromise you would expect with a device like this. But the images, as you can see, were certainly not the worst, especially with a camera of this class:

I <3 Ce cliché [1]

The ability to have a camera, good enough to take pictures you can be proud of, has been revealing. It wouldn’t be long after the launch of the K750i that Facebook would arrive in the UK, and soon after, open up at our university. (Remember when Facebook was a closed network for college students only? Imagine where we would be if this mission statement had never changed.) Now our social lives have reorganized to deal with the novelty that such platform offered. You would go out, take snaps of yourself enjoying your night out, then upload them to Facebook the next morning, tagging your friends in the pictures and sharing them for everyone to see.

Look, I know this sounds crazy today, but in the early days of Web 2.0 it seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do, okay.

In fact, I looked at Flickr and found the K750i to be the most popular, at least by download, camera that Sony Ericsson has ever released. These are not representative statistics, but I’m not surprised because it was a really great camera. He could take breathtaking photos despite his modest resolve, although his successes were more a matter of luck than judgment. The shutter speed was extremely slow and you got motion blur in every third frame, especially thanks to the slow processing time. I don’t want to repeat the cliché that the best camera was the one with you, but even in the pre-iPhone days it was true.

The party wouldn’t last, of course, as Sony Ericsson tried to build on the success of this device for the rest of its life. I traded it in for a W880i (after an abortive flirtation with everything Nokia was contract-free at the time) but, even then, the magic was starting to dull. The company’s years of expansion would be short-lived, and its demise – like so many mobile businesses – was reported on the day the iPhone was announced. The company would be brought back into Sony proper by Kaz Hirai after it became a losing operation. It now exists as a boutique operation, making a small profit on the small number of handsets it sells, a far cry from what it was in 2005.

But for the noble failure of his business, the K750i was a true triumph, a triumph that went everywhere that I did for almost three years.

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