True story: After reading about the camera launches at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, I decided to write a blog post titled «The Future of Cameras». Granted, this year’s CES wasn’t too exciting from a camera perspective, but I still think that we could see the contours of the future of cameras.
But as I sat down to write this, I noticed -- much to my surprise -- that Mike Johnston had posted an article named The end of Cameras over at his blog The Online Photographer. Mike sure is certainly more of an industry expert than me, but it’s still interesting to see that he and I interpret the admittedly somewhat dull news from CES so differently.
To be specific: In a sea of ordinariness, two cameras stood out. (Text continues after the image)
Casio Tryx
Now, this camera certainly doesn’t look much like a camera in the traditional sense. I’m personally not sure what would describe it best. I’d be wrong to call it a traditional camera; and it’d be wrong to call it a camcorder. It’s a little of both but most of all like a picture frame with a lens mounted on top, or a camera with a built-in tripod. But even all that is a too simple explanation I think.
The thing I like about this is that it’s all about fun and unexpected usage. You can carry it like a purse, or angle the screen outwards and leave the camera on a table while shooting video or photos of yourself, or hang it from a branch to film your garden party. It twists and angles in many shapes, and very few of them reminds you of a traditional camera.
Spec wise it’s got very few of the usual goodies, most notably a zoom. What it has, however, is an ultra wide 21mm equivalent lens. This camera is more about it’s form factor and the obvious unusual (for the target group) photographic effects the wideangle can achieve. It’s also got lots of stuff you seldom or never see in other cameras: A self timer with motion detection; no shutter button (touch the screen at whatever you want the camera to focus on, tap to release shutter); ultra slow motion video -- 240 fps (albeit at a low resolution); direct uploading of videos and photos to YouTube and Flickr; a slide show/picture frame mode, etc.
I can’t imagine this selling like hotcakes, but I do appreciate camera makers who tries to think out of the box: In a world where more and more people use and are satisfied with their cell phone cameras, point and shoot cameras has to bring some kind of unique value proposition to the table. I’d sure like to try this one to see what it’s all about.
JVC GC-PX1
This camera, on the other hand, may not ever come on sale. The only place I’ve seen it mentioned at length, is at The Photography Bay. (The thumbnail on the right is by them)
It is a point and shoot camera with a point and shoot sized sensor, but it can -- style wise -- reminicense a little of Sony’s NEX cameras. A very thin body with a lens that’s a little too large.
The lens is a fixed 10x zoom lens. So far none of this is impressive; most camera makers have 10x zoom P&S cameras that are much smaller than this. I would imagine a lens sized like this to be really bright, although no details about that were reavled.
What I know about the specs are nothing short of impressive:
- 1080p/60fps HD video
- Slow motion video (300 fps at VGA resolution)
- What’s more impressive is still shooting at 30 fps/10 megapixels!
- There’s even bandwith and processing power left for encoding 6 MP photos continously at the same time as shooting HD video.
- Time lapse video recording (something I honestly don’t understand why other camera makers haven’t built into their cameras)
It seems to be equipped with all kind of exposure modes; the usual PASM and scene modes of course.
We know nothing about image quality either, but this most of all looks to be a video camera with high quality, ready-for-print frame grabs. Imagine shooting your kids’ soccer games with something like this: It’s as far from the Henri Cartier Bresson school of «the decisive moment» as you can come. Just point, record and pick the frame with the decisive moment afterwards. Print it, frame it on the wall.
I can almost hear traditionalists cringe all over the world at the thought of that. But for the rest of us this may open a world of possibilities! In the end, the revolution here may most of all be the advance in microprocessor technology -- JVC’s new Falconbrid (sic!) signal processor, as that’s the key to the features mentioned above. But the GC-PX1 is still a camera I hope will come to fruitition, and a camera I’d be *very* interested in testing.
The main drawback of the camera is its ridicilous name. Why do camera makers have to use these tedious and cryptic names just consisting of arbitrary letters and numbers? Why not call it the Falconbird 1 or something? That’s at least a name a person could remember.
The award goes to...
Of the two cameras I mention here, I think JVC’s offering is the one that points to the future the most. But both cameras deserve praise for thinking out of the box and for trying to bring a different kind of value proposition to consumers.
