I trust a more local security company staffed with real people than a huge one that makes cell phones and other products. But Apple will probably be competing with the cheap DIY solutions like Amazon ring and blinke stuff.
gdanmitchell wrote:
I’m not so sure about Apple entering the camera market. They would rather sell you an iPhone with th camera embedded, and I cannot see them coming out wth a camera competitor to the brands we usually deal with here.
However…
… software is a different matter.
There are features on the iPhone that probably should be integrated into mainstream cameras. Take, for example, the iPhone’s ability to let you pan your camera across a subject and instantly create a panorama… as opposed to how we do that with our cameras. Why wouldn’t a camera company adopt a feature like that? (I’m not saying that this method produces better panoramas, but it produces quite good panoramas with much less fuss.)
Speaking of panoramas, the phone will let me create that sort of panorama… handheld… at night. It is actually pretty remarkable. I know how to make panoramas, even at night, with my regular camera gear… but it would likely require a tripod, remote release, a series of overlapping exposures, and then some sophisticated work in post. ...Show more →
Wasn't that a bit what the Zeiss ZX1 was trying to do? Have an operating system capable of running various apps in-camera.
And yeah, phones can work some serious magic. I've gotten decent handheld shots of the Milky Way on my iPhone. If you could take the best and most useful stuff from phone cams and embed into a modern mirrorless we'd be onto something!
gdanmitchell wrote:
Heh. I have some stories about that. At the time I was in Apple’s “Apple Distinguished Educator” program, in addition to which I was working with a California Community College system project working to figure out how to get faculty to use web resources and train them — and I worked with a small team at times inside the Cupertino facility. (I was not employed by Apple. I worked on released time from my faculty position.)
So I got my hands on the first two models of the QuickTake. By later standards, it was a pretty awful camera. I think it stored something between 16 and 32 jpg images, IIRC. You offloaded the images by plugging the thing into your computer. It was essentially a very basic point and shoot camera. No one would want one today except as a historic object. (I think I may have at least one of them still lying around. I was cleaning the garage this week and I found two Newtons and an eMate. But I digress…)
In any case, a colleague and I were, at this time, realizing that a college could have a website — which back then had not even crossed most people’s minds. We secretly built one without asking for permission. When we showed it to the Chancellor of Technology, she first didn’t believe that it was even possible. (The site ran on a Mac SE on an AppleTalk network at that point.) When she found out that it was real, the immediate response was, “Well, we need to check with the lawyers.” To which we replied, more or less, “What website? Who said anything about a website.?”
Then we showed the prototype to a senior college administrator who said,”How soon can you put this online!!!?” My colleague and I looked at each other and said, “now.”
The QuickTake connection is that we realized that we needed imagery on this site — even in this 1990s era period when the web was not a very visual medium yet. So I took the QuickTake camera and started photographing all kinds of campus stuff — 16 or some images at a time — and uploaded them to our server. Back then, our trashy little jpgs were still a revelation. ;-)
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Apple actually has a history of doing photographic stuff. Obviously the iPhone is actually a pretty sophisticated piece of photographic technology, on both the hardware and software levels. Over a decade ago, just before Lightroom came out, Apple was developing and selling a very similar program (with some overlapping development staff, IIRC) called Aperture — which reportedly scared the hell out of Adobe, who quickly released their beta versions of Lightroom in order to head off Apple’s likely-to-succeed endeavor....Show more →
Just as quickly as Apple introduced Aperture…they abandoned it along with the herds of photographers that jumped onto it.
