It's not easy to take a great snapshot with a camera phone. At the risk of oversimplifying things, when you're looking for a digital camera that takes high-quality images, you want one with a big, heavy glass lens (to let in lots of light) and a big image sensor (so more light falls on each pixel). When it comes to cell phones, though, space and weight are two commodities in short supply, making camera phones that perform at the level of stand-alone digital cameras a hard target to hit. Last week we looked at a new autofocus system that could help camera phones fill that gap, and today we got news of an NEC image processing chip that's also geared towards enhancing camera phone performance.

You won't ever see NEC's Camera Engine 151 chip, buried deep in your phone's guts, but if it's there it will be analyzing the signal from the phone's image sensor, weeding out digital noise and trying to squeeze the highest-quality it can out of the hardware. NEC says that the chip will use a quarter less electricity than its predecessor, which is a godsend for chips running in portable gadgets. The CE 151 supports images up to 13 megapixels in resolution, and can output 1080p video. NEC hasn't announced any partnerships with phone manufacturers yet, but seeing as the CE 151 was designed to be compatible with existing chips, it shouldn't take too long to find its way into upcoming handsets.

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