New technology releases

[Mike McCarty]

Lest you think that the digital camera engineers are all down at the Starbucks sipping mocha choco latte yaya decaf ...

Here's a couple of interesting recent entries:

Fujifilm FinePix S6500fd
Thursday, 13 July 2006 06:20 GMT

This 6 mp compact camera sports the following benefit, for those who aren't that good at picking out your subjects face. Pulled from the brochure:

"Face detection"

Photographs of friends and family are among the most popular in day-to-day photography. Yet these are the shots that are hardest to get right because the best photographs are not the posed ones, but those that are unexpected. Previously, face detection concepts have been a slow, software based process, relegating them to a novelty feature rather than a powerful picture-taking tool. The potential delay in

[Mike McCarty]

If you still believe that Sony is the one and ony here is a new offering in the 10 mp range.

It appears that the new under a $1000 benchmark for horsepower has jumped from 6 mp to ten mega pixel. For this new Sony camera this will produce a 3872 x 2592 image. This would seem to be a blisteringly good image. It makes you wonder just how much farther they need go. My guess is that photographers are no different than bass fishermen. I think they'll level off somewhere around 150 mp.

Stores are now taking orders for future delivery of the new Sony Alpha DSLR-A100, a 10.2 effective mp DSLR selling for $899 body only.

The announcement read:

In July 2005 Konica Minolta and Sony made an announcement that they were to jointly develop digital SLR cameras. This agreement hinted at shared technology between the two companies such as auto focus, metering and Anti-Shake coming from Konica Minolta and sensors, electronics and batteries from Sony. Some six months later Konica Minolta dropped a bomb on the camera market by announcing that they were withdrawing from the camera business and had transferred certain camera assets including the Maxxum/Dynax lens mount and related SLR technologies to Sony.

Almost a year on since that first announcement we have the new Sony Alpha DSLR-A100, a compact, ten megapixel (CCD) digital SLR with a (Konica) Minolta lens mount, Anti-Shake (now Super SteadyShot) and a definite cross-breed appearance. It's fair to say that while this camera may share some components with previous Konica Minolta digital SLR's Sony's involvement has brought external styling, build quality and finish up to a higher standard. The lens mount is to be called the 'Alpha mount' and Sony has announced no less than 22 lenses which will carry the Sony Alpha branding (although many are based on existing Minolta lenses).

[Mike McCarty]

New Nikon coming soon...

Nikon Japan has today started a teaser campaign promoting a new compact 10.2 megapixel digital SLR which will be announced in 20 days, we can only guess that this would be the natural successor to the D70/D70s. The teaser gives away few details other than the fact that the camera will have 10.2 megapixels (just in case you were thinking of buying a Sony Alpha mentioned above).

[Jeff Fuchs]

Face detection is important indeed

[Mike McCarty]

Face recognition? They can pick out Osama Bin McCarty in his Irish disguise from a space satellite.

It's an amazing thing when you think about the kind of electronic logic that must go into this. It's not something that would send me off to the camera store for a quick purchase, but it is an amazing thing to contemplate.

This is my understanding: lets say you have a scene with five people on and around a couch. Some down on the floor in front, one or two sitting on the couch, and a couple variously standing behind. The problem that can arise if your not careful is one of depth of field. The distance from the face of the closest subject sitting in front to the person standing in the back could be six or more. You nail the focus on grandma sitting in the middle on the couch and the front and backs are out of focus. Dang, you say, I wish I had had some of those face recognition algorithms going for me.

If you had, the camera would have tagged the position of each face and adjusted (made deeper) the depth of field (aperture, fstop) such that it would include the closest and the farthest subject. Also adjusted the exposure for the faces.

I understand that it will also track these faces while in motion.

A horse is a horse unless of course ... it's uncle Harry! I'd like to test this algorithm on some of the faces I've woke up with.

Is skilled labor a thing of the past? It may be in our lifetime.

Speaking of sitting on the couch.

[Mike McCarty]

I pulled this off of the dpreview.com site. It was given in the context of this years big photo manufacturers annual convention when all the new products are trotted out.

Under the heading of "future trends" ...

This year will see the end of the megapixel race for compact cameras, while we will still see some manufacturers releasing cameras with higher pixel counts the majority of sensible manufacturers will realize that most buyers know that they have a large enough image and that there are other more important things for the R&D guys to be working on.

We also need to be aware of the increasing use of marketing speak, image stabilization that isn't (it just increases sensitivity) and high ISO on compacts which is unusable, use of the word RAW where there isn't any. Other things to expect are larger and larger LCD's (3.0" won't be unusual) and some with touch-screen. It's a year when all the manufacturers will have to start thinking again, the last three or so years have been a megapixel staircase (without necessarily the step up in image quality), this year cameras are going to need be better, faster and more featured.