Sony wants to mount an entire high-end camera lens on your smartphone

Smartphones are still eating away at the dedicated camera market, and it’s making camera makers a bit crazy.

According to a report from Sony Alpha Rumors, Sony is working on a lens camera accessory that would snap onto mobile devices and communicate via NFC and Wi-Fi. The lens, which reportedly will come with a 1-inch 20.2-megapixel sensor, sounds a lot like the Ollocip or Kogeto Dot — albeit on a larger scale.

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None of this will be cheap, of course. If Sony’s accessory is as ambitious as we’re led to believe, the device could cost at least $200. But perhaps that’s a price people will be willing to pay for high-quality smartphone shots.

Still, the device might be a bit of an overkill. Smartphone cameras are getting better by the day, and as the recently announced Nokia Lumia 1020 has shown, the latest camera hardware is capable of taking shots comparable to even those of low-end SLRS. Put in that context, Sony’s camera accessory might not even be completely necessary.

The device, however, does show that lens and camera makers are increasingly willing to try whatever it takes to grab a piece of the mobile photography market. Also paying close attention to the space is Nikon, which apparently is also planning its own sort of camera-phone hybrids.

“Rapid expansion of mobile devices is a change in business environment given to us. Our task going forward is to find an answer to that change,” Nikon president Makoto Kimura told Bloomberg earlier this month.