Bringing touch interfaces to real-world objects often involves putting hardware either inside the item or in front of it, neither of which is especially natural. Fujitsu has developed a control system that could eliminate those obstructions and bring digital interaction to many surfaces, even to old-fashioned paper. Its multi-camera approach can distinguish between objects on a table and the exact positions of a user’s fingers, right down to fingertip outlines; it’s accurate enough to scan text from a book as you drag your finger along the page. The system really comes alive, however, when its projector is involved. Besides providing visual feedback, the image overlay allows for both control of purely digital objects and interfaces tailored to real-world items. The company imagines brochures or maps that pop up extra details, among numerous other examples. While we wonder how long the technology will remain useful when there’s an ongoing push to go paperless, Fujitsu sees enough practicality that it’s anticipating a product in its fiscal 2014. That doesn’t leave long until we can get a very literal hands-on.
When it comes to digital cameras, most of us would think of the usual suspects, them established names such as Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Sony, and perhaps even Samsung, but how many of you would figure out just where Minox would fit into the picture? Minox has come up with their latest model, the Minox DCC 14.0 digital classic camera that seemed to have gone through a shrink ray of sorts. This particularly small camera has been created to a scale of 1:3, allowing it to fit in the palm of your hand. As its name suggests, this bad boy will come with a 14-megapixel sensor, in addition to a fixed lens and an optical viewfinder.
However, if you decide to bring home the Minox DCC 14.0 digital classic camera for yourself, you should not have too high expectations of it, especially when it comes to its image quality. Forget about it being able to rival higher-end (and considerably larger) retro-shooters including the Fujifilm X100S. Checking out the Minox DCC 14.0 for the first time, it looks more than decent, where it comes complete with nice touches including a chrome-plated brass lens cap as well as a metal plug-on optical viewfinder. The Minox DCC 14.0, however, is more of a collector’s toy compared to being a serious photographic tool for obvious reasons.
There will not be the 14-megapixel CMOS image sensor as stated, but the F2.4 7.4mm lens that comes with it will offer a focal length equivalent that is approximately 45mm in 35mm format. When one figures that out, it is somewhat akin to a 1/2.5-inch sensor (5.76 x 4.29 mm), which is similar to the one deployed in a budget compact point-and-shoot. Makes perfect sense after all, as this is basically what the Minox DCC 14.0 digital classic camera is all about, although it comes in an extremely fantastic looking package.
Capable of capturing photos in 640 x 480 resolution, storing them onto an SD memory card, and has a 4x digital zoom, a minimum focusing distance of 50 cm (20 inches) and a two-inch LCD right at the back, you will be able to bring home the Minox DCC 14.0 in a choice of either black or silver colors at $240 a pop.
I started off liking the HTC One. Now, having used it as my only camera while on holiday in Japan this past week, I’m in love with it. HTC has a whole lot riding on the One this year, and one of the more contentious features is the Zoe photography system, blending stills and short videos that are simultaneously captured in what the company says will “bring to life” your photo gallery. Attempts to differentiate from the gush of other Android devices with software customization is something we’ve seen so often now, it’s hard not to be cynical (and simply demand “pure” Android instead), but Zoe has turned out to be a different story.
I’m bad at taking photos, especially when I’m away. All too often I’ll come back from a trip and realize I have nothing – bar the memories in my own head – to show for it. Stills seldom capture the emotion of a moment, while video gets long and unwieldy, and thus goes unwatched.
Zoe, though, combines a burst of twenty stills with about three and a half seconds of Full HD video. You can shoot just stills, or just HD video, but HTC expects most One users to give up on regular images and instead use Zoe mode: once you’ve captured a cluster of shots, you can then scroll through and pick out the one with the best framing or facial expressions, or indeed combine features from two stills into one. The One also automatically combines a selection of Zoes into a highlight reel, 30s of curated content complete with music, effects, and transitions.
What Zoe is particularly great at, though, is putting photography into a framework. You’re not just snapping hundreds of stills and recording dozens of videos – which, if you’re anything like me, you have a strong suspicion that you’ll never actually look through or share after you’re home. Instead, you start to think about photography in terms of easily snackable chunks of content: a simple 30 second highlight reel that you can imagine actually showing someone without having to worry that you’re boring them.
It also makes you think of your life in terms of events. On every other phone I’ve used, I’ve never bothered with albums: all of my images and videos have been left in one long stream of content (and one I seldom bother scrolling back through). On the One, though, you start to consider how an event might look when seen as a highlight reel: I started purposefully shooting panning shots that I knew would be particularly good at setting the scene, for instance, and tried to take more photos of people and their reactions, rather than just impressive landscapes.
The result is a gallery I actually want to flick back through, and photos I actually want to show to people. Highlight videos that require less than a minute’s investment in time are perfect for attention-short social networks like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and of course since it’s Android there’s fully baked-in sharing with whatever service you have installed.
“The result is a gallery I actually want to look through”
It’s not all perfect, however. As we noted in our review, right now the One gives you no control over what resolution the Zoe highlight reel is encoded at – it’s Full HD or nothing – and that makes for a big video. When you’re roaming abroad, it means finding a (fast) WiFi connection is essential unless you want to bankrupt yourself with foreign data fees.
That’s not the only upload-related headache. Zoe doesn’t work at all well with automatic-upload systems; I love how Google+ pushes new photos and videos to the cloud in the background, ready for me to share them later, but on the One every single shot is queued up for the same online treatment. Given each Zoe consists of twenty stills as well as the brief video, that means a whole lot of unnecessary duplication when you browse through online. “You have 3825 new photos ready to share” Google+ eagerly informed me, after suggesting that I might want to pay to upgrade my Google Drive storage.
In fact, there’s a sense that HTC only really thought about the photography experience on the One itself, not that people might want to explore their shots outside of the handset. Having spent a couple of hours sifting through all of the multiple Zoe shots after dumping them over to my computer, picking out the best/least blurry/most interesting to share with family, the comparative value of the highlight reels began to wane. For every scene there were twenty shots to key through, and the HTC Sync Manager app does nothing but push everything into iPhoto.
HTC really needs to offer more granular – and straightforward to use – control over which photos are treated as the default by other apps and services, particularly given the shortcomings of the current highlight reel selection process. Eventually, you should be able to pick out which images are used to build the automagically-edited video; right now, though, the only way to manually control what’s included and what isn’t is to sort them manually into different Event albums (the One splits up events that are at different times and locations automatically, but I found it still mixed together activities while I was away).
Those Events can then be used to create more specific highlight reels, but then you miss out on auto-uploading, since most such services only look at content in the root Photos folder. Events on the One are organized into subfolders, unless you copy rather than move them, in which case you run into storage limitations (which, since there’s no memory card slot, could quickly become an issue given the size of each single Zoe cluster).
I’d love to see HDR support in Zoe mode (at the moment, you can only use it in standard camera mode); that generally works well, though it sometimes left the sky oddly colored in brighter scenes. The ability to opt for longer highlight reels would be great too: a minute or 90 seconds, perhaps, to fit in more media from longer Events.
The fumbles and glitches don’t undermine the overall experience, however. HTC’s decision to opt for a 4-megapixel-equivalent sensor might mean we get stuck with awkward “UltraPixel” branding, but it doesn’t stop the One from taking solid shots and delivering great low-light images (useful for when you’re taking food photos in restaurants; yes, I know it’s a cliché, but I still did it).
Zoe seemed like a gimmick at first, but it’s enough to make me reach for the HTC One in preference to the iPhone 5 or any other Android handset when I know I’m likely to be taking photos. Now HTC just needs to bring its sync app up to speed too, as well as do a better job of explaining to potential consumers why they might end up thinking the same, if they’d only give the One a try.
You’d be forgiven if you weren’t entirely on the same page with Panasonic regarding its micro color splitter sensor: it’s a big break from the traditional Bayer filter approach on digital cameras, and the deluge of text doesn’t do much to simplify the concept. Much to our relief, DigInfo TV has grilled Panasonic in a video that provides a more easily digestible (if still deep) interpretation. As the technology’s creator says, it’s all about the math. To let in so much light through the splitters requires processing the light in four mixed colors, and that processing requires studying the light’s behavior in 3D. Panasonic’s new method (Babinet-BPM) makes that feasible by finishing tasks 325 times faster than usual, all while chewing up just a 16th of the memory. The company isn’t much closer to having production examples, but it’s clarifying that future development will be specialized — it wants to fine-tune the splitter behavior for everything from smartphone cameras through to security systems. Catch the full outline after the break.
GPS is burgeoning into a tool for more than just finding our way, such as choosing gears on a weekend drive. If one of Google’s newly published patent applications becomes reality, positioning might also fix our off-color photos. Its proposed technique would use GPS to automatically tune a camera based on both the local climate and whether or not you’re outdoors: the white balance and saturation could be different for a sunny day in the park than a rainy day stuck inside, for example. While automatic settings are already commonplace, the method could lead to more accurate output that reduces the urge to flick on a manual mode. There’s no guarantee that we’ll ever see the patent in a shipping product, but don’t be surprised if future Android smartphones produce uncannily good photography with little effort.
Originally, GPS was used by the military, and ever since the technology has made its way to the masses for peaceful and civilian use, we have seen our fair share of GPS navigation systems. Of course, these dedicated GPS navigation systems were once considered to be a “must have” device, but the proliferation of more affordable and yet capable smartphones with integrated GPS capability, alongside powerful mobile mapping software, rendered such dedicated GPS navigation devices more or less obsolete. Google has not forgotten about the functionality of GPS, and their recently published patent application has proposed the clever use of GPS to tune a camera automatically, depending on where you are, the local climate as well as your position – whether you are indoors or outdoors, so much so that the white balance and saturation will be configured accordingly to make shooting photos with your smartphone more or less a dummy-proof experience.
Of course, this remains a patent as at press time, and could very well be in the same boat for many more years to come, but I suppose the door is always open for Google to include this in future Android smartphones for a more intuitive photo taking experience.
Instructables member Alexander Morris made a photo booth that looks like the app icon of the popular image sharing service Instagram. If you’re a fan of the service you might be disappointed to know that Alexander didn’t actually integrate Instagram or any image editing service into the photo booth. But Alex more than makes up for it with the quality of his build.
Just by looking at it you can already tell that Alexander has some serious crafting skills. Inside the beautiful case are two Nikon SB900 flash guns, a Nikon D3200 camera with an 18-55mm lens, a TV that serves as the viewfinder and an Arduino microcontroller to run things. It also has two seven-segment LEDs, but I’m not sure what they display. Perhaps a timer and a total image count?
Think you’ve got the skills to make one? Then head to Alexander’s Instructables page for the instructions. Otherwise stick with the Instagram app, or wait for one of these, because Alexander isn’t selling the photo booth.
Have you ever experienced that you found a new dent or scratch on your car when you came back to your parking spot? Thanko’s new security camera automatically starts recording a movie for a few minutes after detecting an impact to your car. It’s ready to start recording after you attach the camera to the front window and connect the power cable to the cigarette lighter socket. Three minutes after the engine is stopped, it automatically enters monitoring mode and only when it …
If you know someone who refuses to type on anything but a typewriter despite being born in the mid-90s, that person will love the latest camera from the crazy folks at Superheadz. The Japanese company’s Sun & Cloud camera can be charged via USB, but it also has a solar panel and even a hand-crank to juice it up. It’s always ready to go. Your friend’s food, cat and latte foam that vaguely resembles his beard don’t stand a chance.
The Sun & Cloud has a 3MP CMOS sensor and an LED flash in front, an LCD screen and button controls at the back and the solar panel up top. From the looks of it, it seems like the hand crank folds neatly into the camera’s case. The camera can also record video and uses micro SD and micro SDHC cards for storage. Finally, what’s a hipster camera without some filters? The Sun & Cloud’s 15 built-in filters has your bicycle-loving behind covered. Judging from the sample shots below, they range from My Recommended Daily Allowance of Sadness Black & White to The Past Was Brighter Than The Future Washed Out.
You can order the Sun & Cloud camera from AC Gears for $199 (USD). But if you want to be extra hip you should buy it straight from Superheadz itself. Seriously though it could be a fun first camera for kids.
Pratt & Miller has created a rear-facing radar that can track approaching cars, with the information gathered being offered to the driver via a display. The system was shown off at 12 Hours of Sebring, and is said to be the only currently available of its kind. You can check out a video of the intriguing radar after the jump.
Corvette Racing’s radar system is similar to the camera systems used to provide visibility in blind spots, but with a sophisticated vehicle tracking feature that can provide racers with information that could be difficult to get otherwise, such as during the night time. Check out the video below to see it in action.
Pratt & Miller embeddded systems engineer Chris Hammond said, “The system uses a rear-facing radar sensor to track up to 32 objects, and runs on a custom-built Linux PC with a Core i3 CPU. With a momentary glance the driver knows how many cars are following, how far back each one is, their closing speeds, and whether or not they are probably a faster class.”
The radar works something like this: The camera keeps an eye on the vehicles nearby, and whether it is bright and sunny or dim and rainy (or after dark), the system will use symbols to indicate things about other racers. For example, a yellow symbol is used to identify vehicles that are going the same speed as the driver’s car, while a green symbol is used to show a car that is going slower and a red symbol to show cars that are going faster.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Originally, GPS was used by the military, and ever since the technology has made its way to the masses for peaceful and civilian use, we have seen our fair share of GPS navigation systems. Of course, these dedicated GPS navigation systems were once considered to be a “must have” device, but the proliferation of more affordable and yet capable smartphones with integrated GPS capability, alongside powerful mobile mapping software, rendered such dedicated GPS navigation devices more or less obsolete. Google has not forgotten about the functionality of GPS, and their recently published patent application has proposed the clever use of GPS to tune a camera automatically, depending on where you are, the local climate as well as your position – whether you are indoors or outdoors, so much so that the white balance and saturation will be configured accordingly to make shooting photos with your smartphone more or less a dummy-proof experience.
The Sun & Cloud has a 3MP CMOS sensor and an LED flash in front, an LCD screen and button controls at the back and the solar panel up top. From the looks of it, it seems like the hand crank folds neatly into the camera’s case. The camera can also record video and uses micro SD and micro SDHC cards for storage. Finally, what’s a hipster camera without some filters? The Sun & Cloud’s 15 built-in filters has your bicycle-loving behind covered. Judging from the sample shots below, they range from My Recommended Daily Allowance of Sadness Black & White to The Past Was Brighter Than The Future Washed Out.
