Looks more like a mini tablet, or a smart phone, yet it is a camera!

According to a recent interview by Sunhong Lim, VP Sales and Marketing of Samsung, digital cameras are morphing into communications devices. Already in 2012 most of Samsung cameras will have WiFi connectivity and this will become a standard feature in the coming yeas. The reason, according to Lim, is that customer are looking for a total solution to their picture taking fancy, and that includes manipulating the picture and sharing it immediately.

Clearly, young users are in the habit of sharing their pictures on line and for them it is just natural to be able to do the same thing from the camera itself and as soon as they have shot the picture.

The cloud may be the real enabler for making connected cameras a reality and in the future Telecom Operators might even subsidize cameras similarly to the way they subsidize smartphones, according to Lim.

Really, in just a few years we have seen a potential overlap of cameras and cell phones (notice that some cameras are already embedding a mike so that you can voice annotate your pictures and the move from WiFi connectivity to LTE is not a big one, in perspectives). The real question is if cell phones will kill the digital camera market (by embedding good cameras) or if the two world will coexist.

My personal bet is that most of point and shoot cameras will disappear, replaced by the cell phone, whilst the reflex digital cameras for their superior optical quality (and this requires a bulky set, something you are not going to carry around all times) will flank cell phones and probably might embed a cell phone. Or, alternatively, they will wirelessly connect to a cell phone that creates the bridge to the Web.

The widespread use of digital camera, now most everyone has a digital camera in her cell phone…, is changing the way we record our memories, and the availability of miniaturized camcorder is leading to a massive amount of digital recording of our life moments. Goggles with embedded cameras are becoming a common sight on ski slopes or trekking adventures.

Look at the camcorder inserted in the glasses frame....

Now, Taser International is selling its Taser Axon camcorder to police forces to be worn as a standard equipment, letting them to record their actions continuously. Interestingly, the recording is being stored “in the cloud”, with the devices able to store locally up to two hours. This local recording is transmitted and stored in the cloud as soon as a wireless connection becomes available.

It is easy to imagine that what is now a specialized application will become widespread in just a few years. Are we going to be haunted by our images?

Clearly, the Big Brother is looming, but is not the one imagined by Orwell. The Big Brother is me, it i you!

We are the ones that capture our life moments and share them. Whereas capturing a snapshot with a camera may form time to time become embarrassing, capturing a whole life (or significant portions of it) is almost sure to become a source of embarrassment.

I guess this is another area where technology is moving faster than our understanding of its effect and our capability to cope with it.

It is another example of the need for a sort of “tutor” to manage our data, letting us the option of backtracking. It has been often said that what you post on the web is there forever and forever beyond your control. It does not have to remain like that, and I think we will see a tremendous business opportunity in the management of data, beyond any concern about privacy since, as I suggested the Big Brother is “us”.

Stafonrd University professor Marc Levoy and graduate student Andrew Adams are working on a project aimed to prototype an open source digital camera which can be customized, configured and programmed according to the users’ needs and expectations.

The article published by CrunchGear explains the brilliant idea of the Staford researchers. According to the story:

Frankencamera uses essentially off-the-shelf parts: a TI system on a chip, Canon EF lenses, a generic LCD screen, and a Nokia N95’s photo sensor of all things. It’s ugly, bulky, and fragile, but that’s the way prototypes tend to be. [...] The setup they’ve created (it runs Linux) lets them control and program each aspect of the camera with precision. With a standard API they could release it into the wild with a few prototypes and hackers would be able to go to town on it. 

In the following video, the researchers tell more about the hardware and the software used to assembly this prototype and about the powerful computational photography features enabled.

The open source approach will help users to obtain outstanding results when taking photos and not with a complicated and time consuming post processing. As physorg observes:

Virtually all of the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere.

This means that the digital camera could be also associated to a dedicated app store populated by a miriad of digital imaging applications developed by firms independent programmers and aimed to take a complete control of the digital camera features in order to take better pictures and unleash photographers’ creativity.

In other words, an open source device can be the seed to grew a new ecosystem, based on a community of developers. It is not easy to predict if this innovative approach will succeed in a sort time and how the players involved in the digital imaging industry will react (compete? cooperate?); for the time being, the idea is quite impressive and exciting. We will see how it will be developed in the next month.

More information about the open source Frankecamera can be found in the following websites and blog:

• CrunchGear
• Stanford University channel on YouTube
• Stanford Camera 2.0
• Stanford News article
• Physorg article
• Coolest Gadegts article
• Make Blog article

By the way, Frankencamera is not the only open source camera project. Elphel camera, developed by Russian scientist Filippov, is described and explained in this paper.

I have just finished reading an impressive article published on Popular Photography and based on the ideas of some of the most influent visionaries in the digital photography research. Professor Raskar, who I had the honor to meet in his laboratory at MIT, is probably the best known (and most mentioned) scientist when it comes to digital photography disruptive innovation.

According to the article (and to Professor Raskar’s ideas), in the next years an increasing significant role will be played by the computational photography and by the miniaturization of image recording devices, since the sensors will be probably embedded not only in mobile phones but in clothes and fabrics in general, making it possible to take a photo just moving a finger. The camera will disappear: it will be a part of our everyday objects.

3D pictures will become popular and easy to create. Actually, they are already available today: YouTube has recently start providing a 3D visualization option. The following video is a demonstration of this feature.

We will be available to change the light direction after (and not during) taking a photo in order to express our mood and obtain different result. We are going to completely change the way we take pictures and record videos.

Even if some of the predictions can sound little realistic, most of the work and the research of Camera Culture at MIT  will probably become true in the next 20 or 30 years. I do encourage you all to read this short story and to take a look at Computational Photography research here.

When a party starts, there is always someone busy in taking pictures to his/her friends. People are usually photographed while their eyes are closed and their facial expressions are actually far from looking smart.
All the blurry, crappy pictures are therefore condemned to be published to Facebook and other social networks, with funny results.

At Sony, they should have understood two things. The first one is that people who take pictures at parties instead of having fun, weel, basically don’t have fun. The second is that the web is already populated with blurry pictures — so why add some more?

That’s why — I presume — they invented the following gadget: a robot which automatically takes pictures when you have something better to do. As Wired reports, Sony Camera Robot acts as your personal photographer.

The little mount is controlled by the camera and will tilt and zoom, seeking out any people in the room using the face detection in the camera.

Here the original press release of Sonu Party Shot.

Friends at a party are photographed without posing, naturally. So it seems that technology can help again humankind in their duties. But are we sure that taking pictures can be assimilated to washing dishes or shredding chease? Can really a robot replace man in photographing human beings?

I am not sure I will put Sony Party shot in my guest list, as CNET suggests.

Nikon has unveiled the world’s first compact camera with a built-in projector. Nikon Coolpix S1000pj projects images in size with a VGA resolution and a maximum distance of 2 meters. Really.

As soon as you take a picture, you can project on the wall

The projector boasts up to 10 lumens of brightness. It will be able to display photos and movies as small as 5.0 inches up to 40.0 inches. According to Nikon, a fully charged battery will be able to support continuous use of the projector for up to an hour.

Projectors have been considerated that they take a lot power to be operated. Therefore, they were often big sized and overheated. But not anymore, Optoma’s mini projector is a good example.

Optoma's pocket projector. PK102

it’s not a big surprise that digital cameras getting new functions inside. Digital convergence is very active specially in mobile gadgets. Now, Let’s see what other features digital cameras will take, something that we thought it was too big to put together. (Printer, Projector)

The latest rumors about Apple new products deal with the integration of a digital camera in the iPod touch and maybe other models. Apple has recently updated iPhones’ crappy 2.0 MP camera with a slightly better 3.2 MP one — even if we are still far from Zeiss branded cameras which equip high end Nokia phones.

iPod with digital camera (simulation by Wired)

Theoretically, a fashionable portable media player like the iPod which comes also with a digital camera is a great idea: even more, it’s the perfect multimedia gadget, always in the pocket, easy to use (honestly, Nokia N95′s camera is not that easy to use), with powerful syncronization features. Just try to picture how many services Apple will be able to design around digital photos taken with an iPod…

And this is the good news. Because medals have always two faces.

As Wired reports, the fantastic camera-iPod — fashionable and desireable like most of Apple products — could be a serious threat for compact cameras manufacturers: once I’ve a reasonably fair digital cameras inside my MP3 player, with a consolidated ecosystem behind (the iTunes ecosystem), why should I spend 100-200 extra $ to buy myself a compact camera? Plus, I can download and install many photo-related applications on my iPod touch, action that can’t be performed on a regular digital camera.

This is a possible scenario. If i have an iPhone, I already have a digital camera. If I buy a next generation iPod, I either get a digital camera. Everytime I connect my new iPod to my computer, all my pictures are automatically stored to my computers and — why not? — published on the web or shared with my contacts. I can download some photo editing applications and I can have fun with my pictures. And I know that I can’t do any of these things with a compact digital camera.

Many people — not the tech enthusiasts or the amateur photographer who buy DSLR cameras — may decide to stop buying compact cameras and to shop for iPods only, causing a serious problem to all that guys involved in the camera manufacturing. That’s the ugly face of the medal.

I can’t predict wether this scenario will turn to reality or not but let’s face it: Apple tought us some important marketing lessons, while many major manufacturers still have a geek approach to their potential customers and don’t provide them with any ecosystem solutions.

After MP3 players, tablet PCs, personal navigation devices and mobile phones, touchscreen technology is going to enhance digital cameras’ functionalities and interfaces.

Panasonic, which is confirming its role as one of the most innovative companies, has presented a couple Lumix models featuring a touchscreen display, an advanced Face Recognition system – a function that ‘remembers faces’ – and a continuous autofocus which can lock onto any subject and keep it in focus even if it moves.

According to the authoritative DPReview.com,

the DMC-FX550 incorporates a large 3.0-inch touch-screen interface to achieve amazing ease in both shooting and playing back the images. Effortlessly easy to navigate thanks to the responsive interface, the FX550’s touch screen is streets ahead of its competitors.

Cnet.com has recently published a synthetic comparison of the touchscreen cameras currently available on the market and produced from Sony, Nikon, Samsung and Panasonic. These cameras are sold for as low as about 300$, and the price will probably decrease.

Actually, 3-4 years ago many Sony and Canon digital camcorders were already equipped with touchscreen displays to access menu and functions, but now this technology is becoming more popular.

An increasing number of users and consumers is becoming familiar with touchscreen interaction and, as far as I know, when they start using touchscreen priducts, they hardly come back to button and switch interaction: this happened to mobile phone users when they started using Apple iPhone.

Digital cameras, with their techno-enthusiast audience, can effectively drive the spread of touchscreen interaction technology.

As a consequence, we can forecast that touchscreen interaction will be adopted by an increasing number of manufacturers on a wider range of products, from consumer electronics to computers and automotive. Besides being sexy and fashionable, touchscreen allows manufacturers to save money on the BOM (lower costs for mechanical switches) and increase the ATBF/ETBF of their products.

• still picture / motion picture convergence: just to mention one, the new Canon Eos 500D can shoot 15 MP pictures and full HD movies as well
• high speed shooting: Ricoh presented its 120 fps digital camera (Ricoh CX1)
• more sensitive digital sensors: 3200 and 6400 ISO with low noise are becoming a standard feature in compact and bridge digital cameras, while some DSLR are now available with even higher ISO values.

What was missing?

No connectivity. As I was expecting, no Wi-Fi enabled models will be available for the Italian market in the next weeks. The lack of a widespread, free wireless network is probably slowing down the adoption and the success of Wi-Fi cameras which, as stated by a Sony representative, “don’t make sense to wirelessly transfer pictures to your computer when you are at home”. And I completely agree with him.

Few services. Photoshow is a good event to see and touch a lot of exotic hardware but it’s not the right place to speak in terms of services and applications. Unfortunately, it seems that manufacturers are not willing to work together with other players in order to design and develop integrated services. But I am pretty sure that there’s still space to build up a digital imaging ecosystem with the collaboration of many different players.

Il Sole 24 Ore has published a complete coverage of the event.

Canon has just announced it new 500D model which can shoot HD video and costs about 1000$. It is a challenge to Nikon D90. Wired blog covers the story and compares the current DSLRs with HD video capabilities.

If in the last years, the race between camera manufacturers was focussed on megapixels, supposedly the next race will be on hidef video and shooting speed. Consumer DSLRs are still behing professional grade cameras in terms of frame per second, but probably we will have a full HD, 30 fps (or more) DSLR at an entry level price.

The race is never over.