The Wacky World of a Lazy Pig (AKA Simon)

The Future of Digital Cameras?

I was just reading stuff on slashdot.org and ran into this article:

Pixel counting joins film in obsolete bin

It is an interesting read for those of you that are interested in taking pictures. As for me, I like to take pictures of anything and almost everything. Pictures are important to me, since they represent my past and memories. In this age of technology, if you aren't taking advantage of digital cameras, you are really going to be left with less memories that other people.

Some of the things that interest me the most about the article is the battery life using hydrogren fuel cells to power the camera. In actual fact, they even have ways to extract energy from your urine or just water from the tap, very weird. Since hydrogren is everywhere, this is definitely a good way to go.

For me, screen size after 2.5" is really not needed, since a large screen really eats up on batteries. At the same time, increasing the resolution of the screen on the camera is definitely not necessary because the more pixels you are outputting to the screen, the more processing is needed (waste of battery).

The better addition though in recent cameras is the touch screen. I for sure know one thing that would really be a great innovation especially in Asia is to include software on the camera that allows you to maniuplate the photos right from you camera with the touch screen. Asians just love making pictures cute or funny in anyway. Remember those cards or sticker pictures that you pay $5+ for in Metrotown or in Richmond? Well, it would not be difficult to place the same type of software into a camera seeing that such software doesn't require a lot of processing power, since it is just adding clips art on top of the original picture.

For those people that want to edit their photos for red eye or lighting can do it right away, however, at the cost of more processing power needed. Sharpening or actual modifcations to the original picture that requires the changing of colours is quite expensive on the processing. But this would definitely be a good innovation that goes along with the previous Asian cute drawing software addition to a camera.

Another addition to on camera picture editing that would be great would be the ability to supply comments to the picture right away so you don't have to think again later. There could be two options:

1. Speak into the Microphone of the camera and the camera will translate the voice into text that can be placed as part of the picture's metadata with the date
2. Use the touch screen to type in the comment right away

One more final thing that I think would be a big hit is the ability to have fun pictures. This camera might have the idea: Kodak's V570 camera. Think about putting several lenses onto one camera so that you can use each in a slightly different fashion to obtain a fun picture. Sam (my roomate) has a camera that has 8 lenses on it, it is quite good and fun too. Its not super hip now, but I can see its potential especially for people that are interested in taking film like shots.

That is it for cameras of the future. If you think of other types of innovations, just leave a comment.

posted by lazypig @ 11:20 PM