Above: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the early days of Apple.
The iPhone is beginning to eat into the profits of other companies in all kinds of markets – compact cameras, music players, and traditional mobile phones. EOSHD.com wonders whether the future of the camera is in fact the computer.
The purist photographers, forum fanatics and Leica lovers are not going to like this one! Cameras are dead. The future of photography is the mobile computer, not the camera.
I believe that almost all cameras will be replaced by mobile computing devices. They will have a huge array of hybrid functionality and will run off ever evolving apps. App stores will exist with numerous applications related to the world of imaging – which will evolve at a greater pace than ever before.
Once image sensors and optics reach a certain level, the hardware will plateau and software functionality will become more important, just like it is doing for computers now. Software as a concept is much more powerful than the silicon which supports it and makes it possible.
Articles like this really resonate – ‘How the iPhone 4 killed my Canon 5D Mark II’. I used my iPhone 4 last weekend in London not just as a laptop replacement, but as a DSLR replacement. I shot 10x more stills using the Hipstamatic iPhone App than I did with my DSLR. And even though it is such early days for Computer Imaging Devices, I enjoyed the experience.
Right now it’s a great compact replacement. Sure image quality is worse than a DSLR, and it goes without saying that we lack the choice of lenses and the handling of a ‘real camera’ but all this will change in the future. I soon think that narrowly focused ‘one-purpose’ dedicated cameras will die out. They will be replaced by versatile machines in the way that mobile phones are now also cameras, internet browsers and games consoles. Camera technology is becoming more and more electronically advanced, and there are applications like those on the iPhone creating more and more uses for the basic hardware.
Already on the iPhone 4 I can mimic several functions of other items to the extent where the other devices are replaced altogether. I loved Sony’s Sweep Panorama on the HX5 compact. Now I have an app which does the same using the iPhone 4’s HD video recording function, producing sweep panoramic photos or electronic fisheye snaps. It does so just as well and now I don’t need to use a separate Sony camera. The software is becoming more and more flexible.
I love the retro feel of a Polaroid camera, an Instamatic or a fun Lomo camera. Well there is an app for that too and this is all VERY early days in the computer powered camera.
The strength of a hybrid device which is not stuck with the dogma of one particular usage is that it can combine functions to produce a device which is more powerful overall. For example, since the iPhone is also a phone and is online, I can instantly upload my photos to Facebook, Twitter or a myriad of other sites. I can’t do this directly from my DSLR – dedicated equipment designed exclusively ‘for the purpose intended’ aren’t always more powerful because of their narrow focus.
The stuck-in-the-mud ‘real camera club’ guys laugh at all this hybrid technology, and point out the compromises necessary to ‘shove all the uses into one box’ and the low quality of compact camera units. But they forget that technological leaps has a habit of snuffing out compromises.
Soon we will have tiny zoom lenses based on liquid elements, global shutter, faster processors, aspherical sensors and more creative apps coming along – the list is endless! These mobile computers will also be much better connected – better controls and better connected to our blogs on the net!
For the DSLR companies, Apple may soon even have the likes of Canon worried. Already the iPhone 4 is eating into Canon’s compact target audience. I think twice now about needing a point and shoot, because the iPhone’s quality has improved so much and it is so much more fun to use. Bye bye plain old Ixus.
In the old world, companies used to find it beneficial to specialise in one type of device and to perfect it, to put it ahead of the competition. In the new world, if camera companies remain conservative in design but excel in technology, they will probably end up simply as parts suppliers for someone more innovative (like Apple).
Remember – Nokia didn’t think their mobile phones had much competition from nerdy smart phones. Now look at them.
