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Samsung Unveils Windows Phone 8 Device and Android-Based Camera
MrSeb writes "Today Samsung joined Nikon in announcing an Android-powered camera. The Samsung Galaxy Camera weighs 305g, features a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, 21x super zoom lens, a quad-core 1.4GHz SoC (probably Exynos 4), 8GB of internal storage, and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. This compares with the Nikon S800c which also has a 16MP CMOS sensor, along with a 7x zoom f/2 lens and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Since neither unit has shipped, we don't know anything yet about how good they are as cameras, but we do know that the companies are trying to regain some of the ground they've lost to smartphones by integrating sharing right into their cameras. For photographers, there are a couple of critical questions about these new models: First is whether these cameras will have enough additional functionality to justify the added cost and weight when most people already have a serviceable camera in their phone. Second, and more importantly, there is still a big question mark hanging over Nikon and Samsung's long-term intentions for Android. If Android cameras are just standard point-and-shoots with a smartphone OS bolted on for sharing, that'll be a wasted opportunity. It would have been easier to create a camera that instantly tethered to a smartphone instead, and let the phone do all the work. There is an exciting possibility, if Nikon and Samsung do this correctly and allow low-level access to the camera functions via Android, to really unleash the power of Android to enable new photographic solutions."
Samsung has also taken the wraps off the ATIV S, the first smartphone running Windows Phone 8. It has a 4.8" screen, NFC support, and a microSD card slot. Samsung plans to start shipping them in Q4.
I suppose they'll file a patent on "the process of digitalizing an object" when you target it and focus it then press the "take picture" button. Apple will have pain to start their iCam then.
...whether these cameras will have enough additional functionality to justify the added cost and weight when most people already have a serviceable camera in their phone...
Yeah, if you only want to take quick snapshots and you don't care about the quality, any phone camera will do. But even among phones, camera quality varies.
For a long time, I carried a Motorola Droid X with an 8 MP camera. I didn't buy it for the camera, but having the camera made me fall into the habit of taking pictures whenever I saw something interesting. (I'm a serious pedestrian living in a town with a lot of interesting architecture and views.) The results were pretty cool.
Then I had to replace the phone with a Motorola Triumph with a 5 MP camera. Picture quality suffered. Wouldn't have mattered so much to me if the previous camera hadn't introduced me to the joys of casual photography. When I have the time and money, I will certainly buy a more serious camera and take some classes.
Will that camera be Android-powered? The way the article goes at it (is there enough added functionality?) is exactly backwards. It assumes you live in an Android-powered world and are looking for the best way to integrate your picture-taking into it. For my part, I'll look at all low-end cameras, Android or not, and see which has the physical and electronic features that will work for me.
I suspect that Android is overkill for a dedicated camera and that one of those special purpose, nameless OSs that most cameras come with will suit me better. But I'm withholding judgment until the time comes.
Yeah, they call this one the Samsung Galaxy Fuck You Apple. And, of course, Apple is already preparing a lawsuit over the concept of, as Tim Cook put it in his response to the news, "it's... um... pictures... on a device. Yeah, pictures on a device. There's some patent or something we own on that, I'm sure", and bribing a patent-holder to shill for them at the trial from the jury box.
So they deleted the phone button?
If you miss it, you can install skype on it from the Android Market.
John
Think of this - an Android based camera, that had way more RAM than a smart phone so that image editing applications had a lot of headroom to play with, and an additional SDK with extra hooks into the camera controls.
You could do apps with custom capture abilities (based on time interval, or accelerometer changes). You could do apps that could slide into the image pipeline to do corrections to the image based on camera movement.
It might provide enough reason for a person to buy a standalone camera again, as long as the quality was significantly higher than most phones and as I said you had extra abilities to integrate with the camera controls through an SDK.
I don't program Android apps at the moment but being able to program custom apps tailored for just a camera would probably be too interesting to resist.
They could even have a camera specific app store...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not about general purpose computer but I can think of a few advantages:
- Touch screen vs ridiculous amounts of buttons.
- Easier ways to change settings that aren't changed frequently but are now buried in crazy hierarchical menus.
- Time lapse photography (most DSLRs require an Intervalometer)
- More complex control over slave flashes
A lot of photographers shoot tethered to a laptop as it is. This would hopefully eliminate that, too.
I am sure other serious photographers can think of dozens of other reasons. It's not that I want to browse the web on my camera.
I have the eye-fi card and never use it. Far too slow to be of real benefit during a shoot. If the demo you saw did it straight away they were likely shooting at some unbearably low resolution. Makes much more sense to shoot tethered.
What I'd like on my cameras is a low-level slave mode: it could still work with cameras if one was set as the master and others became the slaves -- you could use all their sensors for 3-D lighting analysis and distance/depth analysis, as well as true HDR, panoramics, and time-synching video. with spatial awareness.
I don't want my camera to become the editing and publishing tool (really... those features in prosumer models are just more junk I have to wade through to adjust my settings and take my shot; I'd rather not have it), as a computer is much better at editing and publishing.
But imagine a fleet of cameras at a public event, all with GPS, tethered together. You could even do a live feed, switching between views in real-time, as well as stitching together really innovative stills.
You're assuming that this device is intended to (probably unsuccessfully) take market share away from camera phones. More likely, it is intended to take market share away from other (non-phone) cameras by adding functionality that they lack. For example, if the camera has a GPS it may be able to display a map with your photos organized by where they were shot, similar to turning on the "photos" option in Google maps. Such functionality would presumably be much easier to add as an app on top of Android rather than building it from scratch on a simpler phone OS. Of course, what functionality they really plan to add is an open question since the article doesn't say very much.
I can't believe how terrible the mainstream coverage is of the current smartphone news. Why is no one analyzing the real technological battle being waged and the apparent winner, Qualcomm.
Half of the summaries of the announcement simply say that the Ativ S is "dual core," as opposed to I suppose "quad core." What does that mean? I instantly thought, are they using the Qualcomm processor, perhaps even the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4? But then I also knew that since it was a Windows Phone, there is quite the chance it has to be Qualcomm, the one maker Microsoft currently supports.
For this generation of phones, not only is Qualcomm making many of the baseband chips, certainly those for LTE multimode, but they're also successfully selling the entire SoC even in European markets? For Android, Samsung has already had to produce different phones same model Galaxy SIII, one for the US with Qualcomm processors, one elsewhere with its presumably preferred own ARM processor.
Articles such as http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2009/02/nokia-st-ericsson-qualcomm-broadcombye-bye-texas-instrument-and-hello-to-the-new-nokia/ claim that in the previous generation "Nokia was designing the core chipset and letting Texas Instruments finish the integration and physically produce the chips: Nokia has been mastering the whole hardware IP of its phones, and has not been relying on generic chipsets for the vast majority of its production, with all the margins this implies ..." Qualcomm and Nokia settled their lawsuit in July 2008, but look what has happened since then. Now it is Nokia that for the Lumias and presumably for their next generation Windows Phones are having to rely on Qualcomm processors and chipsets.
The mainstream press for some reason has missed the single biggest IP story the past decade, one that has destroyed at least one major company Nokia and has established another Qualcomm as a re-emerging hegemon on a world-wide scale. It should be obvious that if one tries to predict the future, the Chinese at least are not likely to meekly accept a Qualcomm monopoly without somehow getting their own capacity to export similar technology, which then leads one to read about China's TD-LTE ongoing effort, and other companies trying to partner with the Chinese in one last stand against Qualcomm.
There's a lot more going on in mobile IP struggles than what is happening with a certain company with a fruit in its name.
Buttons, knobs, and scroll wheels are one of the best things about a DSLR - there is no way I would want them replaced by a touch screen.
"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania or teria." - H. Simpson
The camera comes equipped with WiFi, and 3G or 4G cellular optional. Nice. An app that allows direct uploading from the camera to flickr or dropbox will be a great feature, especially against those authority figures who would wish to delete your photos when they don't like you taking pictures in public areas.
Yes, but automatic upload means that your credentials are stored on the camera... so if instead of destroying it they grab the credentials and use them to access and wipe/close your account, including all the stuff that has nothing to do with the current event, well, it seems to me that'd be even worse.
They're losing ground to camera phones - so they apparently came to the conclusion the reason for that is the OS that's on some of those phones?
A different take is that they realized people like to take photos with smartphones because of the large choice ot applications you have to take the photos. Some apps do filters, some do panoramics, some do selective coloring, etc.
When you can do all that right as you are taking an image, who wants a boring old camera where you do that later?
I think it's about as good idea as can be had to revive the concept of a separate compact camera, which otherwise will be totally subsumed by smartphones in short order.
What would be really interesting, is a DSLR that you could program in this way... You could even have the normal camera control software just as one app, but allow people to write others. As long as other apps could take input from all controls on the camera you could get some great alternate takes on control software for a DSLR.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I really expect some kind of Android derivative desktop OS to be popular by 2020.
btw am I the only one who would like to see OSS repos become common on Android? Play store is all fine and good, but I prefer to run software where I can see the source.
expandfairuse.org
Why? I don't really understand why people want their cameras to be general purpose computers to start with.
It's not that they necessarily want the cameras to be computers. It's that they want a different specialized device than the manufacturer chose.
Haven't you ever looked at a camera menu and thought, this is horrible, I could do better? Potentially with an Android based camera you could totally replace the native menu structure with your own.
The key would be that you have to be able to get input from all camera controls (every wheel, button and slider) in any app. Then you could have a variety of applications to fully dedicate the camera to a specialized task.
This would really bring a lot of excitement back into DSLR's (or mirrorless cameras, don't want to leave them out) in a market that is increasingly tantalized by the huge number of ways they can make use of a camera on a smartphone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would buy a "Samsung Galaxy Fuck You Apple". Not sure what it is or what it costs, but I'm pretty sure I need at least two of them. Are the specs going to be better than the "Google Nexus Fuck You Apple" or the "HTC Retribution Fuck You Apple"?
Looking through the apps on the screen, you've got (in order of appearance):
Usability FAIL. It looks like you've got two competing app stores on your camera (Google's and Samsung's), and how are you going to find your files (is it in my files? gallery? dropbox? Oh, wait, maybe they're in camera?)? It never ceases to amaze me that huge corporations spend all this money developing and releasing these products and it's like no one ever bothered to pick it up and try to use it first. They work so hard to copy Apple, and they can't even do that properly.
I have a Samsung home theater system with an "iPod Dock" that disables the iPod interface and starts playing the first song on the device in alphabetical order. To choose another song, you have to hit the >> button, wait two seconds for it to load and then a few more seconds to figure out if it's something you want to listen to. With over 2,000 songs, it takes about 15 minutes to find a song on-demand.
I have a Samsung TV that doesn't come with a printed manual. Users are expected to read it on the TV, yet the manual includes a troubleshooting section devoted to "The TV will not turn on." If you can't get the TV to turn on, you can't read the manual. I guess they expect you'll go back to the store and read the manual on the floor model to get your TV to turn on. Or you figure out that they have a very nice PDF file on their Web site.
- Touch screen vs ridiculous amounts of buttons.
I understand that moms and pops buy DSLRs, but for their primary audience this is a bad thing. It's a feature that the more expensive cameras have more buttons. I started out an ameteur, and the 2 reasons I chose a canon 60d over a canon 550d were the size (the 60d is bigger, fits better in your hand) and that it had an extra wheel and about 5 more buttons.
Buttons/sliders I need to have available without looking:
-ISO
-focus (seperate from taking photo)
-meter/take photo
-choose focus point quickly
-choose full autofocus quickly (so seperate from choosing a single point)
-aperture
-shutter
-metering mode
- Easier ways to change settings that aren't changed frequently but are now buried in crazy hierarchical menus.
- Time lapse photography (most DSLRs require an Intervalometer)
- More complex control over slave flashes
I agree with all 3 of these 100%. It could also possibly give the ability for "better" or more customisable in-viewfinder UIs.
Time lapse is one that always comes up, and "magic lantern" supplies.
i'm guessing that Microsoft is paying some very serious money to hardware manufacturers to build Windows phones. I can't see them doing it out of any vision of the platform succeeding.
Every time I google I find another interesting story that was lost in regular news: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/fujitsu_nec_docomo_mobile_chip_venture/ At the start of this year it was supposed to be Samsung, Docomo, Fujitsu, NEC, and Panasonic in alliance to develop an LTE alternative chipset to Qualcomm. Then only a few months later that alliance fell apart. Now beginning in August Fujitsu, NEC, and Docomo are allying by themselves to form a new joint venture.
So where does that leave Samsung? Perhaps Samsung has already made its peace with Qualcomm, as indicated by its producing Windows 8 Phones, with supposedly many more on the way customized for the US market, and by its using Qualcomm's SoCs in its Galaxy SIIIs sold in the US. But it is hard to imagine Samsung being satisfied with being dictated to in this one technology versus its apparent mission to acquire competence in every other aspect of manufacturing electronics.
Also to remember how we got here, backwards compatibility with previous generation radio tech is how next generation tech is sold. Qualcomm had an inherent advantage over say Nokia in the US at least because of Qualcomm's role in CDMA. The patent fight between Qualcomm and Nokia was caused by the expiration of a 15-year cross-licensing agreement. So now years later we see Qualcomm leveraging backwards compatibility with 3G or 2G either CDMA or GSM-based while pushing its own LTE chipsets. The one limitation is how many frequencies can one chipset support, which presumably is increased with each process shrink. Whoever controls the previous generation with mobile radio technology should have a great shot at controlling the next generation.
And at that point governments start making it their business much more than which phones are being sold.
features a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, 21x super zoom lens
I, for one, welcome our social cloud overlords, and look forward to sharing my pictures to [G+ | Facebook | Twitter | Picasa] directly from the camera.
Cameras aren't general purpose devices, why would they need a general purpose OS? Buttons and knobs make for easy and fast adjustments without having to look at the camera. As soon as you have to take your eyes off the subject/out of the view finder you have negated any of the advantages that android could bring to a DSLR/Mirrorless camera. Keep the gimicky stuff in the phones and point and shoots.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
I agree on the editing right now but what if Nik decides to start developing Silver Efex for droid or Photomatix puts HDRPro on there. Right now the editing tools suck because they are put there by Nikon or Canon. With an Android OS you have a world of top notch developers adding new functionality.
The editing tools suck because you're editing in variable light on a tiny screen. Having powerful software isn't going to fix this.
Although I guess it would be neat to create a few intelligent post-process templates on your computer and upload them to your camera to selectively apply.
Now... if the Nikon and Canon devices started running Android with a high-definition touch screen and had a viewing hood, third-party lightroom software might start to look desirable, as well as support for the other features I suggested. For editing though, it's still going to be a pain with the small screen and a finger or stylus.
It looks like it's a proper camera, with proper optics
But it also seems like they're missing the point. OK, so actual photographers need better optics than you find in the typical phone. So why don't they just make a phone designed for photographers, which includes a camera with better optics and a more professional photography UI?
Or to put it a different way, this interesting product is conspicuously missing the ability to make cellular voice calls for no apparent reason.
I had a Samsung W850 on my short list a few weeks ago. I almost bought it but went with a Panasonic TZ30 instead (no WiFi) which had slightly superior optics and an easier to use GUI.
The W850 has GPS and WiFi and very similar specs to what you quoted. The Sony H30v also has WiFi etc and there's a few other travel cams out there with similar specs. To me, the android version of this phone would be nice to have except for the biggest downfall being poor battery life.
The current models of top end travel cams can only do around 250 shots, dropping to around 150 with the GPS on. It takes 4 hrs to recharge, so you need to spend more on a spare battery and maybe a cradle style battery charger as the only way to recharge is via the camera.
You can imagine how the battery would fare trying to upload pics and HD video with 3/4G! You might as well connect it to a computer when you get home, in which case you really don't need WiFi.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The point of the physical controls that they all have is that you don't want to be looking away from the subject for any reason other than moving around. And even that you wouldn't want to do if you could do so safely. Touchscreens are crap for anybody that needs to get things done without looking at the screen.
Not to mention the fact that now you have a screen that's taken up with widgets rather than with the actual image. Or worse that burns through your battery life much quicker than a traditional interface would.
After using the same body for years, I just know where to put my fingers to control everything that I want to control. The other things come up via a menu and at no point do I need to remove either hand from the camera, except to replace memory card, add or remove the tripod, battery or put the lens cap on.
Not to be elitist, but I take it you've never been a serious photographer either professionally or as a hobby, because what you're proposing would be a huge headache for anybody that's taking a lot of photos.
Just last night I was stuck between taking a picture on my DSLR--archival quality, creamy bokeh, tack-sharp foreground, superb color saturation etc.--and having to walk up stairs, plug it into my computer, process the RAW file, and upload it versus snapping picture on my Android phone--blurry, washed out colors, throwaway quality, near-infinite depth of field, etc.--and having it pop up on the Internet almost instantly. So Nikon and Samsung are definitely on to something here, except that there is no way I would consider buying a PAS camera with Android built in because it is the worst of both worlds. Sure, you get more megapixels, but the effective f-stop is still f/55, the colors are less washed out, but still nowhere near a decent DSLR, you can't use a bounce flash, and you still have to drag around another brick in addition to your phone (assuming you use your phone to make phone calls). Plus you still need WiFi to upload the pictures. I think this Android/camera is a nice upgrade path for people who use PAS cameras because it eliminates the PC from the equation, but it is certainly no more interesting to actual photographers than any other PAS on the market. Modern (Nikon) DSLRs can be controlled from a PC via a USB tether. Just let me tether my DSLR to my Android phone. I can shoot RAW+JPEG, use the (fantastic) post-processing in the camera, upload the JPEG for instant-gratification and keep the RAW for later; problem solved.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.