Panasonic Launches Beautifying Camera

The new Panasonic LUMIX FX77 camera can take the red out of your eyes and add it to your lips and cheeks. Released last Friday, the camera has a "beauty re-touch" feature that can whiten your teeth, change the size of your eyes, and can apply rouge, lipstick, or eye shadow. From the article: "There has been huge customer demand for such a product, said Akiko Enoki, a Panasonic project manager in charge of developing the camera. 'According to data we've acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,' she said. 'So we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don't like about their faces after they've taken the picture.'"

Comments

Ah, but...

[Haedrian]

Does it have a "Take image at amazingly tilted angle" feature?

Maybe she's born with it,

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's Photoshop

Beer Glasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! A camera with a built in "beer glasses" circuit!

Other features

[geekoid]

Makes criminals darker
Makes political figures evil looking,
Give women huge racks.
Adds tentacles to any pictures of a Japanese person,
When taking a picture of Soviet Russia, it shows you.
Any picture taken of Natalie Portman shoes her petrified and covered in hot grits.
When taking a picture of a Sony products, it roots itself.
When taking a pictures of Anyone at valve, it shows them wearing a hat.
When taking a picture of Micheal Bay, it shows explosion in the background.

Re: the world the way I think it was

[j-stroy]

In pictures, the beginning of our century may be looked back on as the time when everyone was happy (smile detection) and people had perfect looks (retouch).

We look at old photos of frozen lakes and giant crowds and consider them accurate. Tho, it turns out people took photos of the lake being frozen or the crowded streets because it was exceptional rather than that being the norm.

This can all be avoided

[ThunderBird89]

According to data we've acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph, so we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don't like about their faces after they've taken the picture.

Take it from a professional photographer, 90% of the time, the angle and lighting are all that matter between a good and a bad photo.
8% is mistakes and blemishes that can be corrected in Photoshop/Corel with a bit of cloning (probably going to be bloody hard to do it on a camera, even with a properly sized LCD. The mouse is simply necessary here.), Brightness-Contrast-Intensity modding, gamma, and a few other simple steps.
The last 2% are those who are incredibly ugly, and can't be helped...

Anyway, it's pointless for me: I won't buy a new camera, since my Canon 300D is still in perfect order, this feature will probably be incorporated into amateur units, and I can get Photoshop for free. ;)

Re:What is the threshold

[dkleinsc]

The camera can fix ugliness up to 2 anti-milliHelens (in other words, the amount of ugliness required to send 2 ships' crews running in terror).

Pictures or it didn't happen

[ath1901]

An article about a "beauty re-touch" function without pictures? How useless is that!

I found two examples on the internets and the most obvious difference is a blurring/smoothing filter applied to the regions with skin tones. I'm not convinced this makes anyone more beautiful (the womans white teeth look a bit creepy).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/workshop/5432481125/
http://panasonic.net/avc/lumix/compact/fx78_fx77/img/touch/retouch_image.jpg

I think I still prefer the brown-paper-bag-over-the-head approach for making people beautiful. That, or beer.

Re:This is why I don't like pictures

[Shikaku]

OK... this is totally going to sound racist: but does it work on black people?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM

I'm dead serious, there are cameras and software that have problems with this.

huge customer demand?

[kimvette]

huge customer demand? Really? I have never, ever seen even one single person ever make even the most offhanded comment "Gee, I'd like a camera that can apply makeup to the subject and automatically remove hideous blemishes." Not once. Even the most stupid camera users have figured out that's what the software that comes with the camera is for, even if they never heard the term "post processing."

Re:huge customer demand?

[tknd]

This is a Japanese article mostly about Japanese culture. The camera is obviously targeted at the Japanese population since they mention Bic Camera which is a popular camera store in Japan.

Over there women/girls love to take pictures. Picture booths called "purikura" (japanese translation/shortening of "Print Club") are in almost every arcade and sometimes even have their own stores. These are your basic photobooths but also add some effects. For example, skin tone always appears clear/white even if you're on the darker side of the skin tone spectrum or if you have skin blemishes. These effects are obviously tuned to what Japanese girls consider beautiful.

If you were to offer a camera that offered purikura-like capabilities, it would sell like krispy kreme donuts in Japan. They're very into the way things appear on the outside.

Despite that I don't know why they don't place more emphasis on straight/white teeth and plastic surgery modifications. Korea is more into permanent modifications like plastic surgery but Japan seems to only be interested in looks or appearances.

Re: the world the way I think it was

[Anonymous Coward]

when we correct for flaws in people, evolution stops and devolution begins to occur.

Anyone who thinks that "devolution" is a valid concept doesn't actually understand evolution.