Slashdot Mirror
Cell Phone with Camera = Scanner
An anonymous reader writes "TechJapan has posted a translation of an Impress Watch Article regarding a new technology developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, that lets people use their cellular phones with cameras as scanners. It says all you have to do is move your phone over the surface of the piece of paper while recording a movie, and the technology (some sort of software I presume) will construct a high resolution image from the individual frames of the video.
Here is the original (Japanese) NEC press release." I'd love to see before and afters to see how well this works.
Why make a hi-res image, why not just OCR it? That could probably even be done on the phone. Then you could email or send it as a plain text document, much smaller file size then an image.
My ghEtt0 webpage.
I remember seeing news about Japanese scanner pens (smaller than any cell phone nowadays) that would let you write with it, OCR scan text, and it store the text. I don't have a link right now because I'm lazy. But those were a few hundred dollars back then - maybe eight years ago.
This is probably just a combination of that technology (which never took off here) and the cell phone feature craze.
It's funny, but it also is true. I would love to have a cell phone that is small, nice looking and JUST MAKES CALLS AND STORES ADRESSES! Why must we overpay for tons of features that we don't want or need.
Last July there was an article here on /. about Japanese publishers' concerns that people were using their phones' digital cameras to photograph magazine pages. I'd bet they are really worried now.
Bureaucracy loves company.
Let the market dictate what sells - not some demand that phones remain phones and nothing more.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
It's different because it's not just making a bunch of small pics into one big one, it's making a bunch of lo-res pics into a hi-res one. It's also different because it doesn't require YOU to do any alignment or adjustment of your composition.
In theory, you could take a 320x240 movie of the *whole page* at once, moving around, and when the movie got sufficiently long the software would reconstruct a high-res image of the whole page, as in 300 dpi or some such scanner-type resolution.
I realize that this is Slashdot, but you might try RTFA. You won't lose karma for that, I promise.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
This Washingtonpost article(blah blah reg req'd) may shed some light for you.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I seriously doubt that you are *overpaying* for features.
Compare the situation to PC hard drives: You can get a 120GB HD for something like $80. That's like $0.67/GB. By that logic, if you only wanted a new 10GB HD, you should be able to get one for $7, right? But you can't. There's about a $30-35 minimum outlay for a harddrive. Once manufacturers have the basics in place, adding extra/bigger platters in almost *free.*
Near about the same thing with phones. You can probably get a barebones, does nothing but make calls and store numbers cell phone for about $75. But since all the electronic components are already there, they can easily add in a gazillion sotware features for very little $$ and charge $100 for it, which they vast majority of people will pay for.
The article talks about having a single OS ala MS. To see what the cell phone companies are actually doing, see this article. As you can see, they want to impose even more DRM on the consumers. And once the DRM has been implemented in the single chip phones, there is virtually nothing you can do about it. One factor is that due to the closed nature of these systems, the cell companies can get into the action (selling ring tones etc.). As it stands, they have even more of an incentive to lock down the systems.