The saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet in the case of the wireless industry, you can twist that old axiom to a picture phone is worth millions of handsets sold. At least that is what a new study by the InfoTrends Research Goup demonstrates.

InfoTrends projects that worldwide unit sales of camera phones will reach nearly 150 million in 2004, or just over a quarter of all mobile phone sales. Camera phone sales are expected to experience a compound annual growth rate of 55% through 2008 to 656 million units. In addition, the rapid adoption of camera phones worldwide will generate an additional 29 billion digital images captured this year.

"Growth in the camera phone market creates new opportunities for many industry players, including handset vendors, wireless carriers, and digital photofinishers," says Jill Aldort, an InfoTrends Analyst. "More consumers are purchasing camera phones and experimenting with taking, sending, and even printing photos. Camera phones have boosted slowing worldwide mobile phone sales and photo messaging has contributed to an increase in data sent over the wireless networks. In turn, these circulating digital images have already added to the number of digital prints made."

In its report, InfoTrend provides market forecasts for North America, Europe, Japan, and the Rest of the World. More than half the camera phones sold last year were in Japan, while China, already the largest mobile phone market worldwide, should help boost the Rest of the World region to a slight majority this year, and to a 56% share by 2008.

While cameras are increasingly becoming popular in mobile phones in general, they're pretty much standard fare in smartphones, such as the palmOne Treo 600 and Sony Ericsson P900. In addition, camera phones aren't just useful to consumers, as they have professional applications as well, including, for instance, in real-estate and healthcare. U.K based Wireless Healthcare pointed out recently that a number of trials have even been setup to test the performance of picture phones in medical imaging applications.

At last month's 3GSM World Conference a large number new handsets featuring integrated cameras were announced, including Motorola's MPx, MPx100, A1000 and E1000, Panasonic's X700, Nokia's 9500 Communicator series, Samsung's SGH-i700 and so on. And just yesterday, Sony Ericsson unveiled several new camera phones, the S700, K700, Z500, and T637 .