Musician Will.i.am launching a 14-megapixel iPhone camera attachment next week

This is gonna be every iPhoneographer’s dream come true. Apparently, musician Will.i.am is set to launch an interesting iPhone accessory next week via his new consumer electronics venture.

It basically replaces the device’s built-in iSight camera with a 14-megapixel sensor that clips onto the iPhone to provide dramatically enhanced clarity and definition of your snaps.

The gizmo also has its own built-in flash better than the iPhone’s. “You dock you phone into our device and it turns you smartphone into a genius-phone”, he tells The Telegraph. “We take over the camera”

The musician told Georgia Dehn of The Telegraph how he came up with the idea at a photo shoot in London in 2008:

I was just hanging out afterwards, and one of the models took an iPhone picture, which circulated the planet before the shoot was even over.

I took one of the photographer’s lenses and held it up on my phone and said “imagine this one day”. Then I said: “I’m going to do this”.

The accessory will be announced at a media event next week in London. We’ll be updating you with price and availability information so stay tuned. Will.i.am plans to release a bunch of digital products that bear his name.

It’s interesting that the Black Eyed Peas leader cautioned artists in his keynote address at the Grammy Foundation’s 13th annual Entertainment Law Initiative Luncheon last year that iTunes “should be the scariest thing in the world”.

Soon after, he established a consumer electronics and app venture called i.am+ and released an iPhone app called BEP360, basically a glorified 360-degree music video of the hit single “The Time (Dirty Bit)”.

His venture can be found at www.i.am, where the musician plans to give owners of i.am+ accessories individual online profiles in the form of www.i.am/username.

We’ll be watching how this unfolds. One thing is certain: Will.i.am is quick to seize an opportunity when he sees one. Some folks, this author included, were holding their breath for an increased megapixel count on the iPhone 5’s back camera.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone 4S and its eight-megapixel sensor has served me extremely well most of the time, sans low-light situations. But the ability to snap fourteen-megapixel photos using a camera attachment is gonna give the term “iPhone photography” a whole new meaning.

Does this accessory even make sense to you?