"A picture is worth a thousand words". Still some words are useful for us to understnad the evolution of cameras, those little picture taking devices.
Cameras are one of the easiest and most exciting creative devices. Anyone in the world understands about seeing pictures and to large degree a lot of folks learn about taking pictures too. There are wide variety of cameras in the market. And interestingly enough I believe the camera market is set up for a big shift in technology and potentially disruption in the coming years.
Historically the cameras have stayed at a price range of $200 for simple beginner cameras. Thanks to the cellphone revolution, small pinhole cameras hvae become even more popular world over. It is possible that there are 100s of millions of cameras worldwide. At the high end you have cameras from the leaders like Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony, et al that sell for $1000 and above reaching into 10s of thousands depending on the lens package one gets.
Most folks desire to take great quality pictures. Photos are partly about emotions and settings. One can find subject, solace and depth in pictures from the legends like
Ansel Adams (who focused on nature and outdoors),
Anne Geddes (focuesd on baby pictures), etc. And the remaining part is about the quality of equipment that allows one to take pictures. Over the past two decades, the photo enthusiasts have mastered arcane set of technologies like: aspect ratio, pixels, depth of field, special software like light room to get great pictures. Now can we have the suitable equipment that may make it easy to take fantastic pictures with low degree of matery on the technical stuff?
When I visit children's events, I often find parents (especially dads) with their tiny little cameras taking shots (photos and videos) of their kids' performance. Sadly enough the quality of light and ambience is not conducive to produce great quality pictures. However I easily notice that there are at least 10+ cameras in the hall. What if there was easy shraing of pictures and video stream to create a better combined picture for the event? The constraints are usual stuff - where to share, what to share, what comes out, battery life of equipment used, etc.
And often enough some of my friends rave about their post-processing skills using many different types of software. Such geeky speek is great, but are not economical in time or money. What if there was a way to save time and make it easy to use the various tools easily to manipulate images? That was the success behind Instagram who pioneered a way for users to easily create vintage pictures through software post-processing.
There are some encouraging developments in this line.
Last week I learnt that the researchers at Duke University have
assembled a gigapixel camera (also
see here) from 98 small cameras that use 14 megapixel sensors arrayed around a spherical lens. The produt does not look exciting but the potential is immense to create the equipment that can capture high quailty image using sensors that are available cheaply in the market.
Lytro is a different attempt to create pictures. It captures the light rays instead of getting the finished quality picture. And later through post processing one can obtain rich detailed pictures of interest.
I believe assembling an array of 4-8 cameras one can easily achieve high qulaity pictures at low cost. And who knows this can be built ino the cellphones as well.
