cameras

Showing 7 posts tagged cameras

Wearing a Badge, and a Video Camera

Randall Stross of NYT looks at the growing trend of police officers wearing tiny cameras to record all of their interactions with civilians. It may sound intimidating, but at least one study shows this is a very good thing:

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often…

Part of this reminds me of Google Glass. Part of it reminds me of End of Watch. Also interesting: Taser makes these cameras — yes, that Taser.

[via @cdixon]

About that St. Peter’s Square Photo Comparison...

You know that amazing photo you saw everywhere a few days ago… Emi Kolawole of The Washington Post:

Post photojournalist Nick Kirkpatrick did a little digging and found that the lower photo (shown below this paragraph), which features a sea of smartphones and tablets, was, indeed, taken during the announcement of Pope Francis’s election. But the top photo (shown above), which shows an audience with far fewer gadgets was taken during the funeral procession of Pope John Paul II — a very different mood and event type. There was no one addressing the crowd from the balcony, for example. So, the comparison isn’t quite accurate.

We’ll call it correct in spirit, though.

[via scifi451]

Lytro's Camera Shoots First, Focuses Later

I haven’t used one yet, but this thing is fascinating to me. I love that they’ve made a camera with a totally new form factor rather than trying to cram the technology into something that looks familiar. 

Writes Sam Grobart for The New York Times:

Where a traditional image sensor (as in your point-and-shoot or DSLR) can only record where light strikes the sensor surface, Lytro’s image sensor can also record the angle that beam of light had when it struck it. By capturing that information, the sensor can pull in far more data about an image, allowing you to move through the picture, clicking and refocusing along the way.

There are additional advantages to a lightfield sensor. By capturing the angle of light beams, all pictures shot with a Lytro camera are natively 3-D (you still need a 3-D display and glasses, but the information’s already there). More importantly, the camera no longer has to focus because it’s capturing every focal point, which means there’s no focus lag. The camera can respond almost instantly to a shutter-release button.

And it has 8x optical zoom.

The downside is that it won’t be available until early 2012, and the cheapest version will be $399 (for the 8GB model, which can store about 350 pictures). 

Also awesome:

The Lytro only works with Macs, but Windows software is in development.

Imagine anything not made by Apple going that route even just 5 years ago. 

Update: This Is My Next gave it a try and said that it’s “not universally amazing”, but also notes that it’s still a prototype version that they tested out. 

Speed, Camera Speed

John Gruber in his iPhone 4S review:

I spoke to some friends familiar with the development of iOS 5 and the 4S, and word on the Cupertino street is that camera speed — time from launch to being able to snap a photo, as well as the time between subsequent photos — received an enormous amount of engineering attention during development. The stopwatches were out, and every single tenth of a second that could be shaved was shaved.

The iPhone is and has been my main camera for some time. The dramatically improved camera speed alone makes the upgrade from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S worth it for me. All the rest is just icing.