THE YEAR-END IS the time when most people get out their cameras for that family gathering, corporate party or holiday trip. It’s also the busiest time of the year for photo-sharing websites such as Flickr or social networking sites such as Facebook, which are uploaded with a zillion terabytes of images from around the world. What’s different this Christmas, though, is more people will be capturing that special moment without actually clicking their point-and-shoot camera. They will happily freeze the moment with their camera phone.

While feature-rich mobile phones with a camera have been around for more than eight years now, 2010 marks the year it all went downhill for standalone cameras. It wasn’t long ago that cheap digital cameras replaced film cameras. Almost all of us recall how we dropped off film negatives at the labs to be processed and printed, an era epitomised by the 2002 movie One Hour Photo, a psychological thriller starring Robin Williams.

The early cameras in phones weren’t very user-friendly and even geeks couldn’t snap a decent photo that might be deemed printable by a publisher. These days, you can find magazines full of professional-quality images from the iPhone, the BlackBerry or a Samsung phone. Indeed, camera phones have been the single-biggest factor behind the revival of citizen journalism. Anybody with a phone can capture a scene — from a road accident to something bigger or more dramatic. The newest smart-phones aren’t just devices for surfing the Net, making calls or exchanging emails; they are also decent cameras in their own right.