Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Digital Cameras and Wireless Technology
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 01:00 PM
Today happens to be the 5th Anniversary of Pocket PC Thoughts , and when I was looking up the original Blogger HTML pages, I noticed this post I made on Friday, October 13th, 2000:
"Imagine a digital camera running Windows CE. Imagine snapping pictures and having them automatically emailed to you via a Bluetooth chip on the camera that talks to your cell phone on your hip. Storage becomes a thing of the past - the CF card in the camera is more of a buffer for your cell phone than anything else. Or imagine having a built-in FTP program that would automatically push your images up to a web site as you're shooting them - real-time photography and events coverage could usher in a new era of photo journalism. Raw, unedited, up to the second coverage. Imagine having Pocket Artist on your camera - you could crop, edit, and tweak your images before uploading/emailing them. The possibilities are so endless here - if anyone has any upper-management contacts with Kodak, Olympus, Nikon, or any other major digital camera OEM, tell them I want to speak to them."
Maybe I should have filed a patent. :lol: It's interesting that it took five years to see the first step toward making this a reality: we're only now just seeing cameras with built-in WiFi, which have limited usefulness unless you're shooting with range of a WiFi network. There are a lot of holes in my original concept - Bluetooth 1.x is too slow for large images - but the concept is sound. Imagine if you still had local storage but the camera would wirelessly upload each image so you'd have an off-site backup. GPRS would be too slow for this, but with EVDO it would be workable. Toss in Bluetooth 2.0 or a point to point WiFi connection between the camera and the phone, and we're cooking. The pieces aren't all in place yet, but I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities with wireless-enabled cameras. What kinds of scenarios can you envision?
"Imagine a digital camera running Windows CE. Imagine snapping pictures and having them automatically emailed to you via a Bluetooth chip on the camera that talks to your cell phone on your hip. Storage becomes a thing of the past - the CF card in the camera is more of a buffer for your cell phone than anything else. Or imagine having a built-in FTP program that would automatically push your images up to a web site as you're shooting them - real-time photography and events coverage could usher in a new era of photo journalism. Raw, unedited, up to the second coverage. Imagine having Pocket Artist on your camera - you could crop, edit, and tweak your images before uploading/emailing them. The possibilities are so endless here - if anyone has any upper-management contacts with Kodak, Olympus, Nikon, or any other major digital camera OEM, tell them I want to speak to them."
Maybe I should have filed a patent. :lol: It's interesting that it took five years to see the first step toward making this a reality: we're only now just seeing cameras with built-in WiFi, which have limited usefulness unless you're shooting with range of a WiFi network. There are a lot of holes in my original concept - Bluetooth 1.x is too slow for large images - but the concept is sound. Imagine if you still had local storage but the camera would wirelessly upload each image so you'd have an off-site backup. GPRS would be too slow for this, but with EVDO it would be workable. Toss in Bluetooth 2.0 or a point to point WiFi connection between the camera and the phone, and we're cooking. The pieces aren't all in place yet, but I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities with wireless-enabled cameras. What kinds of scenarios can you envision?
