Nikon’s President Makoto Kimura did an interview with Reuters a couple days ago in which he stated that Nikon is trying to develop a camera that creates a new camera market.

A lot of companies make bold claims about their upcoming products “changing photography forever”, but the products usually don’t deliver much beyond increased megapixels, improvements in quality, and flashier specs. Sony actually succeeded in changing the landscape of DSLRs recently with their new pellicle mirror cameras.

In addition to Nikon, Pentax is also rumored to be developing a camera that is unlike any existing camera on the market.

Here’s the specific quote made by Kimura,

We want to propose another type of photography. I don’t think there is any need to limit it to two categories. We want to create a new market.

Let’s put on our thinking caps. What do you think these companies might have up their sleeves? Can you think of anything they might be building that might actually change the digital camera industry?

Nikon says preparing camera to create ‘new market’ (via Nikon Rumors)

Canon is showing off all sorts of crazy hardware at Canon Expo 2010 over in NYC. One of them is an omnidirectional camera (shown above) that shoots a 360° photograph in a single exposure. It creates the seamless panoramas using a 50 megapixel CMOS sensor and an aspheric mirror.

Note that this is a 360 degree panorama on a single plane, as if you used a tripod and turned it in every direction. I wonder how long it will be until there’s a camera that can literally shoot in every direction (i.e. up and down) to create a spherical panorama with single exposures. Maybe we’ll have spherical sensors and cameras in the future that somehow levitate and beam photos wirelessly?

(via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Gizmodo

Another Nikon patent discovered recently provides yet another sneak peek at their yet-to-be-announced mirrorless, interchangeable lens camera.

This one seems to be for some sort of system that protects the inside of the camera body from dust and foreign objects when the lens is removed. It does make sense though, and I wonder why DSLR bodies don’t already do this?

It would be great if the camera automatically closed some sort of protective barrier whenever it detected that the lens was being removed. If you needed to actually see the innards of the camera, you could expose it via some option inside the menus, similar to how the sensor is exposed on DSLRs. Thoughts?
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The above photograph was recently posted to Korean forum Samsung SLR Club, and was supposedly captured during a commercial shoot for the Samsung NX100.

It wasn’t too long before the thread (and photograph) was removed from the forum. Photo Rumors was also asked to take down the photo after posting it, suggesting that the image does indeed show an upcoming — and yet-unannounced — camera.
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At SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles last month, Microsoft researchers showed off some new technology that improves existing digital blur reduction techniques by outfitting a camera with motion detecting sensors.

The team created an off-the-shelf hardware attachment consisting of a three-axis accelerometer, three gyroscopes, and a Bluetooth radio, attaching the setup to a Canon 1Ds Mark III camera. The researchers then created a software algorithm to use the motion information captured during the exposure to do “dense, per-pixel spatially-varying image deblurring”.
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We’ve already got plenty of gadgets designed to facilitate photography: there’s auto-focus, face detection, and some crazy features in Photoshop that can effortlessly add and remove entire elements (and people) in photographs. So now why not have a camera that tells you whether you’re taking an aesthetically pleasing photograph?

Designer Andrew Kupresanin created this project camera that utilizes the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine Acquine to judge photo quality even before you take a photograph. The screen in the back of the camera simply shows a percentage rating, in lieu of an LCD display. The camera is actually a Nokia N73 camera connected with a Mac over Bluetooth. Kupresanin seems to be using his experimental project to make a poignant statement about the automation of photography and aesthetics. Kupresanin says on his site:

Within pop culture and society artificial intelligence has been a topic that is approached with hope, fear, cynicism, curiosity and caution. However many intelligent devices have already been effortlessly absorbed into our culture and everyday lives.

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Today, Canon Japan’s Image Communication Products head Masaya Maeda said that Canon is working on a smaller version SLR to be released in the near future. In an interview with Reuters, Maeda said the idea behind the small SLR is that it could compete with Nikon’s future mirrorless system and other existing EVIL systems that are inherently more compact than most current mid-level DSLRs.

Maeda did not reveal whether the new Canon camera would include a mirror, but he suggested that the company has their focus elsewhere. Maeda said:

It’s not a question of whether or not you have a mirror. There is a consumer need for good-quality cameras to be made smaller … We will meet this need.

Still, Maeda did not commit to a solid answer about internal mirrors, though he suggested that there may be more ways to reduce the size of SLRs without removing the mirror.

Reuters cited an analyst, Kazumasa Kubota of Okasan Securities, who believes Canon may be wisest in sticking to traditional SLR designs. Kubota added, “Looking directly at something through a viewfinder is different from seeing it indirectly via semiconductors.”

What do you think? Is Canon on the right track, or are they missing the next gravy train?

(via Reuters)