Open-source camera could revolutionize digital photography...
 

Open-source camera could revolutionize photography

-- peer

A fun little project for sure at the university but it's of little practical use for people who just wants to pickup a camera and take beautiful images. Computation photography <> real photography

Look - current DSLRs for the most part, has evolved to a point where photographers using the camera is able to use it to capture his/her vision without much thought about the gear at hand. The whole conversation of these VDSLRs not being user friendly enough is due to the transitional nature of the VDSLR technology.

Outside of tiny user base, there is simply no need for a "Lego Mindstorm" type of camera. That being said, I don't doubt more advanced features can aid the acquisition process - Such as localized exposure control. I'm sure the camera manufactures are working on those too.

I saw the article on /. this morning, but was surprised that there is no acknowledgement of the other open source camera projects: CHDK (or my Magic Lantern firmware) for existing Canon hardware, and Elphel, which is building their own hardware based on the Axis ETREX FPGA.

Using the "imaging chip is taken from a Nokia N95 cell phone" doesn't sound like it will produce very high quality still photographs. Starting with even the lowest end camera supported by CHDK seems like it would have better results.

Peer -- if you know the guys at Stanford, I'd love to chat with them about things they could do with a much fancier camera body!

The Sony HX1 does "HDR", and I believe their latest DSLR's have the feature... too much time in the labs, not enough in the real world = interesting academic exercise, but I don't see the value offhand other that getting some press.

The problem I see is that you HAVE to have hardware - sensor tech changes rapidly, and the engineering of the sensor block is (unfortunately) not something you can do just anywhere on the cheap, nor is the lens/glass/mount - it takes a bit of a machine shop, and a chip foundry... at the least.

Beyond that, it would be nice if manufacturers would "open" their firmware, but the fact is that the average user would just create more support calls, not better results. Magic Lantern is an awesome example of how users (I almost used the word "consumer", but enthusiast is probably closer...) can "hack" a piece of equipment, but the average guy isn't going to be doing these sorts of things, or even know it can be done.

We have a handful of creatives with tech skills here who CAN do these sorts of mods/hacks/upgrades and while the idea of using a cell phone sensor is very "common", I don't see it as being even worth wasting the time...

Me too. It's like coming out with a story that says "New GNU/Hurd open source operating system could revolutionize computing" without mentioning the fact that we already have several of those, and they are far more practical.

On the other hand, look at what Apple is doing by opening up some of its dedicated hardware devices programming interfaces.

Ordinary people aren't going to be programming in the first place, so won't be generating support calls.

Providing people like Tramm with some very basic support seems to me would just further enhance the value of the products.

In a sense, a camera is just a computer with some specific hardware built in, so why not... 'Developers, developers, developers!' seems to have worked ok for at least one company. . ;-)

I see no significant difference between a general purpose computer, a cell phone, and a camera. To the general public, they are all three just appliances. To a programmer, they are all three just computers.

-MD

Actually, one of the guys working on this project does mention those by name in his comments.

You can't really expect a short, cursory article to go into such details.

Look for:


Re:hackable cams already available (Score:4, Interesting)
by mrmojo (841397)
on Thursday September 03, @10:43PM (#29307303)
The existence of prior art doesn't mean we shouldn't try and do it better. There's plenty of related work and similar projects.

We're aware of chdk (and have used it for a bunch of stuff), and it's close in some respects, but it's not the same thing. Chdk doesn't turn your camera into a fully functioning linux box...


(and more)

Not that this sort of thing will be immediately useful to people here, but I wouldn't dismiss it over the long term either.

Linux didn't look too promising when I first saw it, and if I wanted free, there was already freebsd, etc. Not likely he would catch up with that...

Let's see how they are doing in 10 years.

-MD