This is reminding me of the movie Real Genius. A must watch for hackers. Anyway the guys build a really big laser under pressure from a professor and realize at one point that there's a reason the laser needs to be that big-- it's not just research there's a clear use case.

So we have here a camera that can take pictures regularly over long periods of time, doesn't need to be hooked up to power, yet it's unlikely to match or catch up with consumer cameras any time soon.

What possible purpose could there be for this camera?

Ubiquitous surveillance. Build millions of them, put them everywhere. It's a lot cheaper to just tack them on buildings and give them a super capacitor and radio and let them sit there and take pictures for years -- then come by and activate them, download the pictures when needed.

Imagine vans drivign around the city downloading the data from the previous day from all the cameras.

These will never be good for your cellphone but they are good for 1984.