Smartphone cameras are getting better each year, but they still don’t hold a candle to the optics of dedicated cameras. But if SonyAlphaRumors is correct, Sony will soon release two very unusual cameras that bolt onto a smartphone. Will these “lens-cameras” give you the best of both worlds? Or will the whole be less than the sum of its parts?
Supposedly, on September 4 Sony will announce the DSC-QX10 and DSC-QX100 lenses. Each lens will have a “built-in sensor, Bionz processor, Wifi/NFC wireless connection and SD card slot”, but no LCD or controls. Those last two bits will supposedly be provided by your smartphone. SonyAlphaRumors said that the DSX-QX10 has the same 20.2mp Exmor R sensor and Carl Zeiss lens as the DSC-RX100 camera. The DSC-QX100 on the other hand will have a 10x zoom lens and the same 18.2mp Exmor R sensor that’s in the DSC-WX150.
The lenses will supposedly connect to smartphones via NFC and Wi-Fi, but I don’t know if the cameras will be compatible with all (modern) smartphones or just with Sony phones. Perhaps they will even be limited to one Sony phone: SonyAlphaRumors points out that the phone included in these leaked images is the Honami i1, which Sony also hasn’t officially announced yet.
I guess we’ll know if these cameras are real or not soon enough. But assuming they are real the biggest question here is pricing. The hardware has already been proven in previous devices so the quality is pretty much a given. But how much will people be willing to pay for a camera that seems like it would be useless without a smartphone?
The folks over at Nokia were kind enough to put one of their Lumia 1020 Windows smartphones in my hands for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve put together some of my thoughts on the device to share with you here.
As you’ve probably seen in the commercials, the Lumia 1020 touts a camera with an incredible 41 megapixel sensor, which makes it the highest resolution camera phone on the market by a great deal. The phone is no slouch in other departments either, running the latest build of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and offering full HD video capture as well. It also offers stereo microphones for high quality audio recording. It works on major 4G data networks, including LTE and WCDMA standards, along with 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and NFC support.
The phone itself looks sleek and modern, coming in a white, yellow or black polycarbonate shell, with a bright 4.5″ AMOLED touchscreen at 1280×768 resolution. This results in a pixel density of 334 ppi. The colors and rich blacks on the display really look awesome, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Measurements for the Lumia 1020 are 71.4mm (w) x 130.4mm (h) x 10.4 (mm) thick. That added thickness is due to the camera’s lens and xenon flash assembly which protrudes from its back. The main body of the phone is actually a couple of millimeters slimmer. In fact, it’s virtually the same thickness as my iPhone 5.
Having that camera lens assembly on the back of the device – plus a dedicated shutter button – really does make a statement that Nokia wants this phone to replace your camera, and in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. Not only does the camera capture incredible amounts of detail, but it offers manual controls heretofore not found on smartphones or point-and-shoots.
The 41 megapixel sensor is Nokia’s solution to the zoom lens problem. Since it’s thus far been impossible to cram the optics of a high-powered zoom lens into a smartphone, Nokia opted for the highest resolution sensor they could find, combined with the largest lens the could cram into a phone’s form factor. This combination results in the ability to zoom into your images AFTER you take them, instead of trying to frame them up at the time you shoot. In my experience with the Lumia 1020, this is very effective – especially in daylight shots. Take a look at the image below for a zoomed out view along with a zoomed in portion:
Pretty incredible, no? Sure, there’s a bit of grain in the closest up portions of images, but it’s still impressive that you can get that sort of detail from a smartphone camera. Despite its 41 megapixel sensor, one thing I found odd is that the highest resolution 16×9 image the camera stores are actually 34 megapixels (7712 x 4352 resolution), along with a 5 megapixel (3072 X 1728) version for sharing. If you switch into the 4×3 aspect ratio, you can shoot 38 megapixel images. Either way, it’s way more pixels than your current phone has.
As I mentioned, the camera offers manual controls, which include white balance, focus, ISO (100 to 4000), shutter speed (1/16000th to 4 seconds) and aperture (from -3.0 to +3.0 ). All of these controls are accessible within the Nokia Pro Cam app, the default app that’s tied to the shutter button. Accessing manual controls requires a simple touch and drag action from the icon on the right of the screen. This reveals slider controls which provide immediate visual feedback of everything but shutter speed (which makes complete sense.) You can also go into the settings menu to enable a grid overlay to help with your composition, in rule of thirds, golden ratio, crosshairs or square variants.
I’m not an expert on camera optics, but I’m pretty sure they have to do these things digitally. Regardless, these fine-grained controls allow for images you definitely can’t produce with post-production image software. For instance, being able to capture long-exposure night shots or true depth of field focus effects.
One other nicety is that Nokia includes a library of short tutorials for budding photographers, which provide interactive examples of what each of the controls does, along with pointers on various photographic techniques. The lessons aren’t deep, but they’re a great thing to have if you don’t know your aperture from your ISO.
In order to put the camera through some of it’s paces, I captured a few images at this weekend’s Wizard World Comic Con in Rosemont, Illinois. Here are some sample shots.
Be sure to click on the images to see the full hi-res originals:
There’s no question from those examples that the images are detailed, and capture colors impeccably – especially with good lighting. There’s a sort of pastel effect if you zoom in all the way, but I’m still impressed – especially compared to every other smartphone I’ve ever used. Nighttime shots do suffer from added grain, but I don’t think they can do much about that unless they could put a bigger lens on this thing. Here’s a closeup shot I grabbed in near darkness, with no flash and the ISO jacked up to 4000. Not bad. Try this with another phone. Click image for hi-res original:
The camera also works with Nokia’s Smart Cam app which allows you to capture multiple images in rapid succession so you can pick the best image, create composite motion shots or even remove moving subjects from the scene. There are also a variety of “lenses” you can download from the Windows Phone Marketplace for adding effects to your images.
One thing that is a bit irksome is that there’s not an easy way to share the full hi-resolution images from the phone. Microsoft Skydrive, email and social networks all seem to get a low-resolution 5MP version instead, so the primary way to pull full-res images off of the phone is to connect it to your computer. If you happen to be an AT&T user (which was the carrier for my review sample), there is a way to save hi-res images with their AT&T Locker service – which offers 50GB of free storage.
Individual hi-res image files can be quite large (9 to 15MB each), so you’ll definitely want to be conservative about when you upload hi-res images if you’re on a mobile data plan anyhow. As a Mac user, I also couldn’t get the Lumia to transfer directly to iPhoto either. You have to download an extra app to transfer images for some strange reason. I also found it difficult to locate images imported into iPhoto. The best thing was to create a Smart Album for images from the Lumia 1020. That worked like a charm.. Ah, the Microsoft vs. Apple battle rears its ugly head once more.
Still, once the photos are transferred, they’re quite impressive. Video quality is very good as well, with the main camera capable of shooting full 1080p action at 30fps (or at 24 or 25fps). Like most smartphone video cameras, it does quite well in daylight conditions, but definitely exhibits noise in the dark. Unfortunately while shooting video, the manual controls are limited to flash, white balance and focus, so you can’t increase ISO to see if that can help. Here’s couple of quick samples I captured, one with ample lighting, the other without.
As for the phone itself, there’s not too much to complain about. It’s plenty fast for tasks ranging from email to browsing the web, to playing games – and the Windows Phone 8 interface quickly grows on you. The only real issue with the OS at all is the relatively small number of available apps compared to iOS and Android. I won’t really go into the Windows OS itself, as it’s pretty much stock, with the addition of a few useful Nokia apps, such as HERE Maps and Drive for mapping and navigation as well as Nokia Music.
Phone call quality was satisfactory, but nothing to write home about (or maybe that’s just the AT&T network). I also found battery life to be less than thrilling. With typical usage (and standby time sitting in my pocket,) I was down to about 25% battery life after 10 hours. In the same conditions and time, my iPhone 5 still had 42%. That said, I spent much of my time in areas with poor coverage or too many people (i.e. a convention center), so I’m sure that some extra battery was burned while it was searching for a connection.
That all said, as a camera, this thing rocks. No, it’s not going to replace a high-end DSLR, but Nokia has definitely raised the bar for smartphone cameras, and all but killed what’s left of the point-and-shoot market with this thing. If you want a good Windows phone, you’ll be totally fine with a Nokia 920 or 928. But if you’re looking for a smartphone that is first and foremost capable of taking impressive photos, you won’t be disappointed in the Lumia 1020.
The folks over at Nokia were kind enough to put one of their Lumia 1020 Windows smartphones in my hands for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve put together some of my thoughts on the device to share with you here.
As you’ve probably seen in the commercials, the Lumia 1020 touts a camera with an incredible 41 megapixel sensor, which makes it the highest resolution camera phone on the market by a great deal. The phone is no slouch in other departments either, running the latest build of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and offering full HD video capture as well. It also offers stereo microphones for high quality audio recording. It works on major 4G data networks, including LTE and WCDMA standards, along with 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and NFC support.
The phone itself looks sleek and modern, coming in a white, yellow or black polycarbonate shell, with a bright 4.5″ AMOLED touchscreen at 1280×768 resolution. This results in a pixel density of 334 ppi. The colors and rich blacks on the display really look awesome, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Measurements for the Lumia 1020 are 71.4mm (w) x 130.4mm (h) x 10.4 (mm) thick. That added thickness is due to the camera’s lens and xenon flash assembly which protrudes from its back. The main body of the phone is actually a couple of millimeters slimmer. In fact, it’s virtually the same thickness as my iPhone 5.
Having that camera lens assembly on the back of the device – plus a dedicated shutter button – really does make a statement that Nokia wants this phone to replace your camera, and in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. Not only does the camera capture incredible amounts of detail, but it offers manual controls heretofore not found on smartphones or point-and-shoots.
The 41 megapixel sensor is Nokia’s solution to the zoom lens problem. Since it’s thus far been impossible to cram the optics of a high-powered zoom lens into a smartphone, Nokia opted for the highest resolution sensor they could find, combined with the largest lens the could cram into a phone’s form factor. This combination results in the ability to zoom into your images AFTER you take them, instead of trying to frame them up at the time you shoot. In my experience with the Lumia 1020, this is very effective – especially in daylight shots. Take a look at the image below for a zoomed out view along with a zoomed in portion:
Pretty incredible, no? Sure, there’s a bit of grain in the closest up portions of images, but it’s still impressive that you can get that sort of detail from a smartphone camera. Despite its 41 megapixel sensor, one thing I found odd is that the highest resolution 16×9 image the camera stores are actually 34 megapixels (7712 x 4352 resolution), along with a 5 megapixel (3072 X 1728) version for sharing. If you switch into the 4×3 aspect ratio, you can shoot 38 megapixel images. Either way, it’s way more pixels than your current phone has.
As I mentioned, the camera offers manual controls, which include white balance, focus, ISO (100 to 4000), shutter speed (1/16000th to 4 seconds) and aperture (from -3.0 to +3.0 ). All of these controls are accessible within the Nokia Pro Cam app, the default app that’s tied to the shutter button. Accessing manual controls requires a simple touch and drag action from the icon on the right of the screen. This reveals slider controls which provide immediate visual feedback of everything but shutter speed (which makes complete sense.) You can also go into the settings menu to enable a grid overlay to help with your composition, in rule of thirds, golden ratio, crosshairs or square variants.
I’m not an expert on camera optics, but I’m pretty sure they have to do these things digitally. Regardless, these fine-grained controls allow for images you definitely can’t produce with post-production image software. For instance, being able to capture long-exposure night shots or true depth of field focus effects.
One other nicety is that Nokia includes a library of short tutorials for budding photographers, which provide interactive examples of what each of the controls does, along with pointers on various photographic techniques. The lessons aren’t deep, but they’re a great thing to have if you don’t know your aperture from your ISO.
In order to put the camera through some of it’s paces, I captured a few images at this weekend’s Wizard World Comic Con in Rosemont, Illinois. Here are some sample shots.
Be sure to click on the images to see the full hi-res originals:
There’s no question from those examples that the images are detailed, and capture colors impeccably – especially with good lighting. There’s a sort of pastel effect if you zoom in all the way, but I’m still impressed – especially compared to every other smartphone I’ve ever used. Nighttime shots do suffer from added grain, but I don’t think they can do much about that unless they could put a bigger lens on this thing. Here’s a closeup shot I grabbed in near darkness, with no flash and the ISO jacked up to 4000. Not bad. Try this with another phone. Click image for hi-res original:
The camera also works with Nokia’s Smart Cam app which allows you to capture multiple images in rapid succession so you can pick the best image, create composite motion shots or even remove moving subjects from the scene. There are also a variety of “lenses” you can download from the Windows Phone Marketplace for adding effects to your images.
One thing that is a bit irksome is that there’s not an easy way to share the full hi-resolution images from the phone. Microsoft Skydrive, email and social networks all seem to get a low-resolution 5MP version instead, so the primary way to pull full-res images off of the phone is to connect it to your computer. If you happen to be an AT&T user (which was the carrier for my review sample), there is a way to save hi-res images with their AT&T Locker service – which offers 50GB of free storage.
Individual hi-res image files can be quite large (9 to 15MB each), so you’ll definitely want to be conservative about when you upload hi-res images if you’re on a mobile data plan anyhow. As a Mac user, I also couldn’t get the Lumia to transfer directly to iPhoto either. You have to download an extra app to transfer images for some strange reason. I also found it difficult to locate images imported into iPhoto. The best thing was to create a Smart Album for images from the Lumia 1020. That worked like a charm.. Ah, the Microsoft vs. Apple battle rears its ugly head once more.
Still, once the photos are transferred, they’re quite impressive. Video quality is very good as well, with the main camera capable of shooting full 1080p action at 30fps (or at 24 or 25fps). Like most smartphone video cameras, it does quite well in daylight conditions, but definitely exhibits noise in the dark. Unfortunately while shooting video, the manual controls are limited to flash, white balance and focus, so you can’t increase ISO to see if that can help. Here’s couple of quick samples I captured, one with ample lighting, the other without.
As for the phone itself, there’s not too much to complain about. It’s plenty fast for tasks ranging from email to browsing the web, to playing games – and the Windows Phone 8 interface quickly grows on you. The only real issue with the OS at all is the relatively small number of available apps compared to iOS and Android. I won’t really go into the Windows OS itself, as it’s pretty much stock, with the addition of a few useful Nokia apps, such as HERE Maps and Drive for mapping and navigation as well as Nokia Music.
Phone call quality was satisfactory, but nothing to write home about (or maybe that’s just the AT&T network). I also found battery life to be less than thrilling. With typical usage (and standby time sitting in my pocket,) I was down to about 25% battery life after 10 hours. In the same conditions and time, my iPhone 5 still had 42%. That said, I spent much of my time in areas with poor coverage or too many people (i.e. a convention center), so I’m sure that some extra battery was burned while it was searching for a connection.
That all said, as a camera, this thing rocks. No, it’s not going to replace a high-end DSLR, but Nokia has definitely raised the bar for smartphone cameras, and all but killed what’s left of the point-and-shoot market with this thing. If you want a good Windows phone, you’ll be totally fine with a Nokia 920 or 928. But if you’re looking for a smartphone that is first and foremost capable of taking impressive photos, you won’t be disappointed in the Lumia 1020.
Photography has come a long way since its beginnings, but there are still some amazing things to be discovered by looking at how things worked back then. Inspired by the early days of photography, this lens has been re-engineered from one that was invented in the 19th century.
The team of Lomography have released their Petzval lens, which is supposed to replicate the lens that was originally invented by Joseph Petzval in Vienna, Austria, in 1840. It will work with Nikon F-mount and Canon EF-mount DSLRs.
The original Petzval lens was used to create beautiful portrait shots, and the new lens keeps the same strong color saturation, depth of field, bokeh elements, etc for which the lens was lauded.
Lomography launched their project as a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s been wildly successful so far. They’ve already amassed over $833,000 versus their goal of $100,000 – so this lens will definitely be made. There are 25 days left of funding, but you’ll have to pledge $400(USD) to get yours.
If you still like print photography and frequently send friends and family snapshots, then you might want to get a Stampede. It’s basically a large, pre-inked rubber stamp that transforms your photographs into postcards instantly.
There’s just something different about sending and receiving an actual photo in the mail, rather than just checking it out on a computer screen or a mobile device. All you have to do is grab a photograph, ink the Stampede, and stamp it onto the back of the photograph. It’ll instantly be stamped with all the stuff that postcards are printed with: address lines, the divider, a space for your handwritten message, and of course, the box where you’re supposed to affix the stamp.
Stampede is currently up for funding on Kickstarter, where a minimum pledge of $50(USD) will get you one of your own.
The Oculus Rift will most likely lead to a new genre of first-person games, but it could also make drones a lot more fun to use. For his master’s thesis, Jonathan of Intuitive Aerial is working on Oculus FPV, a drone camera system that streams 3D video that can be viewed with the Rift.
The system uses a Black Armored Drone carrying a laptop and two cameras. The laptop compresses the feed from the two cameras and sends them to a second computer on the ground via Wi-Fi. It’s a crude setup, but it works. According to Intuitive Aerial the current rig has a range of about 160′ to 320′ when using Wi-Fi cards. The video latency is 120ms, good enough for the viewer to pilot the drone at the same time.
That shot of the pilot wearing the Rift reminds me of Ghost in the Shell. Intuitive Aerial said it will improve Oculus FPV if it receives enough interest from potential clients. They should incorporate the MYO armband to Oculus FPV make it more fun to use.
Crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, so why not apply the concept to shooting a video? That’s exactly what Lexus did when it got together over 200 fans to each shoot frames for a promotional video. What makes the clip unique is that all of the images were captured and posted via Instagram.
The short film, called #LexusInstafilm captured a walk-around of the new 2014 Lexus IS, by instructing each of its Instagrammers to stand (or lie down) in a specific location to capture their still image. 3D mapping technology was used to identify the precise locations where each image needed to be snapped in order to stitch together the final stop-motion video.
Each individual captured their image, applied Instagram filters and posted them with a specific hashtag so they could be filtered and edited into the video sequence later the same day.
Here’s the final video, along with a little behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot:
Sure, it seems like a whole lot of labor to capture just a few seconds of video, but it’s still a creative way to let so many people could contribute to a single video.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids go missing. Some are eventually found, while others are never seen or heard from again. Missing kids posters and notices on milk cartons help, but there’s another means to get the word out and it’s got a wider reach because it can get the word out to people all over the globe: Missing Kids stamps.
The project was developed by was developed by ad agency Lowe Roche for the Missing Children’s Network. It essentially builds upon the Canada Post’s existing service that allows people to upload their own images to customize their stamps.
Instead of uploading on of their own pictures, Missing Kids Stamps asks people to upload a picture of missing child instead. The site features a series of kids along with how and when they went missing. It’s a heartbreaking gallery to look at. The service is only available in Canada though, so if you live there, then you can really make a difference… starting with your snail mail.
A wild spherical camera appears! Actually it’s not the first of its kind that we’ve seen, but unlike the previous device, Serveball’s Squito is being designed for both professional and recreational use. Forget about Instagram or Vine, the cool kids will want to get ball shots! Yeah! No.
According to Serveball’s press release, the current prototype of Squito has three cameras, an inertial measurement unit, a microcontroller and an image processor. As you’ll see in the video below, the prototype can take 360º panoramic pictures and videos. When taking pictures, the Squito can reorient and stitch the images that its cameras take. When shooting a video, the Squito can stabilize the video, but don’t expect a free falling camera to be as steady as one on a tripod. The Squito will also be able to wirelessly send its pictures and videos to PCs and mobile devices.
The tail end of the video featured a version of the Squito with night vision and thermal imaging capabilities. From what I can tell those features will be on a separate variant of the Squito, which Serveball is calling the Darkball. Fold your browser into a ball and throw it to Serveball’s website for more on its cameras.
While there are many futuristic uses for the heads-up display in Google Glass, several people I’ve met who were wearing them used them primarily to capture images and videos from their personal point of view. So if you don’t want to spend $1500 on a pair of real Google Glasses, you can get the camera part for less than 1/10th that cost.
Made by Japan’s Thanko, the Mitanmanma Megane HD Camera Glasses(JP) are designed so you can capture POV video on the cheap. Just place the glasses over your eyes, press the button, and start capturing video to a microSD card. Unlike Google Glass, however, that’s all these glasses do. If you start asking them where the nearest Starbucks is, you’ll be waiting a very long time for an answer. They don’t capture still images, and they won’t make appointments for you either.
Unlike other video glasses, these ones are quite minimal, weighing in at just 2.1 ounces (though a regular pair of sunglasses weighs about 1/4 of this). Also, they can’t be worn over other eyeglasses like Google Glass. They’re capable of capturing a (suspect) 1920×1080 resolution AVI format video at 20 to 30fps. They’re supposed to run for about 30 to 40 minutes on a charge. Here’s some craptacular sample video so you can check out the image quality:
I’m not sure if the frame rate gets any better than that, so they look like they’d be good for capturing animated GIFs and Vines more than full-motion video. Still, what do you want for a hundred bucks? You can get a pair of the Thanko Mitamanma Megane HD Camera Glasses from Japan Trend Shop for $112(USD) plus $12 for worldwide shipping.
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