Camera and Camera-Phone Trends to Expect in 2012

PC World - First, let's get the obvious out of the way: In 2012, cameras will become smaller, more powerful, and more specialized. Meanwhile, smartphone cameras will continue to improve at a blistering pace, approaching the imaging capabilities and features found in stand-alone cameras of a few years ago. Over the next 12 months, you can expect another great round of "phones versus cameras."

In some ways, stand-alone cameras and phones will forge a more symbiotic relationship in 2012. In 2011, we saw both storage cards (the Eye-Fi Mobile X2) and point-and-shoot cameras (the Panasonic Lumix FX90) that synced wirelessly to smartphones and tablets, thus enabling iOS and Android devices to store and share images from higher-quality cameras over ad-hoc Wi-Fi connections.

That trend of cameras "playing nice" with phones is likely to continue in 2012, but you should also expect cameras to come out fighting against their smartphone counterparts. You'll almost certainly see some very competitively priced cameras with high-end optics and features that run circles around those found in your average smartphone. Their arrival will make buying a "real" camera a more attractive proposition.

We'll know more specifics in just a few weeks when the International CES 2012 trade show is in full swing, but here are some safe bets for the upcoming year.

You'll See CMOS, Mostly

From DSLRs to smartphones, you'll be hard-pressed to find a new camera in 2012 that has a CCD sensor. While the type of sensor embedded in your camera of choice may not be of much interest to you, the in-camera features associated with CMOS sensors certainly might be: Among them are 1080p video capture at high frame rates, very fast burst modes, good low-light performance, automated HDR image capture, 3D shooting with a single lens, the ability to simulate a shallow depth of field with a small sensor, and video recording at hundreds of frames per second to enable superslow-motion playback.

[Read: Why CMOS Is Winning the Sensor Battle]

The CMOS sensor's speed and versatility have led to many of the best features we've seen in stand-alone cameras in recent years--and that wave of in-camera innovation will hit the world of smartphone cameras in 2012. In fact, we've already seen the first ripples in the past few months: T-Mobile's MyTouch 4G Slide and the HTC Amaze both offer photographic features that we were used to encountering only in stand-alone cameras, such as motion-controlled panorama modes, multiexposure HDR, and burst modes that reach up to 5 frames per second.

Of course, the CMOS sensor is only part of the equation. A camera's image-processing engine has to do a lot of the work. And that brings me to my next point...