CJC.org

Here’s an article I found on Gizmodo. The main thrust of the article (and presumably its followups) is that we’ve been too limited in thinking about digital cameras. We’re locked into the notion of digital camera as “camera”, not as a general purpose data gathering device. Because the “capture” of information is separate from the “recording” of information on digicams — on film cameras it’s simultaneous because of the nature of the medium — you can trivially do stuff to the information before it’s recorded. Most digicams do the simple photo manipulation stuff of correcting color levels, rendering in black and white, and so on, and some of the more sophisticated tasks like averaging a number of images to remove digital snow (my Sony does that for low light shots).

But what’s just starting to be done is combining the image information with other data. Trivially, we can put time stamps on the image. Ricoh is deploying a digicam with GPS, so location information can be included with the image. The spectrum can be broadened to include UV and infrared light. Barcodes and RFID can be processed with the image, and so on.

But whereas film-cameras have been designed to control the exposure of a recording medium to light in order to create a perceptable image, digital-cameras are data-recording devices merely optimized for recording data from light in order to mimic the experience of film-cameras, including the production of a perceptable image.

Even for simple picture taking, people have been coming up with ever clever uses for instantaneously available images. The article and its followup comments note that people now take pictures of signs instead writing down what the sign says, and people are using cell phone cameras to send pictures of landmarks to friends to indicate where to meet. Cell phone cameras are now being used to send x-rays to radiologists for preliminary evaluations of fractures, and there’s a report of a shopkeeper quickly snapping a digital picture of a would-be robber and giving the photo to the police immediately. Photo cameras had a huge impact on how stories are told, how people are recognized, and so on. Digital cameras will have as great an impact. It’ll just take some time for people to figure out how to use them in ways that don’t necessarily have to do with the film paradigm.

Posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2003 at 11:03 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.