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Samsung's Latest Smart Fridge Has Cameras and a Huge Display (engadget.com)
anderzole writes with news about Samsung's latest and greatest refrigerator unveiled at CES. Engadget reports: "One of the highlights of CES is always the wacky new appliance tech (and associated bickering) from Samsung and LG. This year looks to be no exception thanks to a new 'Family Hub' refrigerator from Samsung. The imposing-looking model is equipped with a 21.5-inch, 1080p monitor and cameras inside so that you can watch your mayonnaise go bad in real time. You can even check the contents remotely via a smartphone app to see what's in there while you're shopping, in case you forgot whether you need that jar of sweet pickles or not."
To think I've been opening my fridge all these years :(.
No more going to the kitchen in my skivvies then.
who are not consistently appropriate with kitchen duties. a remotely monitored oven/stove would be wonderful.
Well I spy a webcam niche up and coming.
I think we've reached (or about to reach) a tipping-point when it comes to novelty and CE...
Okay, say 'duh' all you want, but damn, a camera to watch the contents of your fridge from your smartphone? Really?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Even if for some reason you went to the insane lengths to put a camera looking at every side of every shelf in a fridge (unlikely), it's still not going to be very useful, because often things are packed on a shelf to hide other things - plus a lot of what you care about might also be in the pantry, out of sight of the cameras.
Far more useful would be some kind of robot that would simply be able to open doors (refrigerator or pantry) and look in things like shelves or drawers for you. You could have the same robot also be able to check out noises in the house at night...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody reads the articles so this story doesn't even provide a link.
We will finally get an answer to the age old question: "Does the fridge light go out when you close the door?"
Have you considered a timer?
FridgeRoulette will be even bigger than ChatRoulette!
I don't trust Samsung to support the smartphone app for too much longer. They don't have a good track record.
Trademarked!
Great. Now corporations who datamine your smart refrigerator can sell the list of foods in your refrigerator and freezer to your health insurance company, who will raise your rates because of what you (apparently) like to eat. We're getting closer and closer to just having cameras and microphones in every room of where you live, so we can be watched like criminals in prison or animals in a zoo 24/7/365, 'for our own safety' of course. Nothing quite like having your government and corporations up your ass from cradle to grave.
I see the nutbags in the Middle East and I think there's no hope for humanity.
I see useless trinkety shite like this and I know it for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is anyone else tired of increasingly 'advanced' fridges and appliances which have ever-decreasing ability to be maintained or upgraded, and aren't nearly as fundamentally reliable as older fridges?
Replace that 20 year old fridge and before you know it the replacement's on the fritz...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
of adding useless shit no one needs to anything they make. A 3 year old phone will do anyone just fine. Adding a screen to the side of the phone is useless and stupid features like that are only added to try to justify buying a new phone instead of keeping an old one going.
Who gives a shit about a buggy, tearing touch display when my food spoils because an Android "developer" tried to disrupt an engineering concept that isn't broken?
No more going to the kitchen in my skivvies then.
The cameras look inside your fridge, not at you when you open the door.
Unless, of course, you're ... oh. Never mind.
John
For years I've been wanting something that would enable me to see inside my refrigerator without opening the door and wasting electricity. I always kinda figured the solution would involve a thick glass door and a light switch though. This is cool and all, I guess, but I'd rather have something simpler, with less things to go wrong and break down, and if my last fridge is any indication, that's kinda an issue.
Also, here's the link that was omitted.
Has engadget taken to serving all site picture from an ad server? 'cause I expected to see a picture of the Ludicrous Fridge and I didn't get it. Nor does the linked Samsung site (in Korean language) have a picture.
I have to ask, though...what are her parents doing hiding in the fridge? That much cold and lack of movement can't possibly be good for their joints.
So, when does adding all these camera features cost more electricity than simply holding the door open while you look for what you want?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If the cameras + screen keep you from opening the refrigerator as often and as long, what's wrong with that?
Besides, the front of the fridge is a natural place to have an entertainment device is many homes.
It's called an insulated glass door.
Living room appliance?
Do we put it in the kitchen or living room?
I am thinking, living room.
There should be some way to body shame people when they go to open the Fridge.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Everything's got a UPC code on it. Just scan that with the cameras as you put the items into (or out of) the fridge
Except that doesn't work late at night, and while you would know you used the mayo 20 times what does that mean?
And then of course there's produce, remember how the checkout person (or use) has to key in a produce code? You going to memorize that table yourself for typing into the fridge every time you want a salad? Well that's only got about seven things to scan and key in... how convenient.
Not to mention you usually buy something when you are low on it so you have the new one ready to go, not when you are out... unless you like to live a live of panic and unexpected disappointment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everything has to have an app. I'll bet all the live streaming goes up to a cloud that's not yours, where a frame here and there will be handily processed to see which brands you buy, just to deliver ads.
I was thinking the other day how amazing it would be if the average person would see the value in owning their own cloud and manufacturers would make it easy to configure their devices to use standard protocols to upload to anybody's personal cloud. I can dream, eh?
That reminds me. I have a cloud-enabled treadmill. I poked at it briefly, and the jogging routes it downloads are stored on a FAT32 filesystem. I still haven't done a packet inspection to determine how it uploads the telemetry (how far, how fast, incline changes, dates, times, etc) to the cloud. I've been meaning to see if I can figure out what it's sending and how to use a NAT rule on the router to send it towards my cloud where I can store the data myself.
Even better, why can't we realize the promise of IPv6? I'd like to set up a kerberos server I can authenticate to remotely that then grants access to all internet-of-things goodies in my house. I'd set it up so that the firewall would block traffic to everything except the kerberos server until I authenticate to kerberos and then only for the IPv6 addr that authenticated. I think that would work. Might need to set up some script hooks to add/remove ip6tables rules on the fly.
To join in the general sentiment of this discussion: why haven't the public figured out that sending personal data one wishes to be private to somebody else's cloud is a Bad Idea? I trust the security I've set up myself on my server in the clouds. I'm not sure I trust a disinterested corporation in a climate of Everybody Can Code! and H1Bs and brazen shows by corporations that no, there is no talent shortage and yes, they really do want to replace native workers with indentured servants and keep wages down.
(Note to grammar nazis: I'm aware that last sentence is a severe run-on.)
Ice Bear wants privacy when he sleeps.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
>> The cameras look inside your fridge, not at you when you open the door.
Unless you open the door. :)
Good luck seeing at least one expiration date with a static camera considering the jars, bottles and packages could be in any orientation and there is no standard placement for the expiration date to be printed. It takes me like 20s-1min to find and be able to read an expiration date for an item that I am holding in my hands. Even this super edge case falls apart with minimal scrutiny. This shit is absolute garbage.
So your wife has no job, and can be a full-time remote caregiver? That's a pretty big commitment.
"A Samsung representative is quoted as saying 'You idiot; that's not a fridge! That's a cell phone! We figured we leapfrog Apple a couple of generations on screen size, now that we've sucked them into the won't -fit-in-your-pocket screen size war!'; Apple was unavailable for comment."
Wow... and the display isn't waist-high anymore.
who are not consistently appropriate with kitchen duties. a remotely monitored oven/stove would be wonderful.
If it's gotten that bad, maybe it's time to realize that they are a hazard to themselves and others. What other things outside the kitchen aren't happening as they should, like taking meds at the right times, in the right quantities?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Why not make the door out of a transparent material, some thing like glass might work. In fact why not use one of the beer/soda fridges you find at convenient store. They can't cost that much more than that fridge. Plus if you want a web cam, buy on and tape it to the door.
I'll wait for the RFID enabled food products with pressure sensor shelving so I can cook a meal and have it calculate the precise calories that have left the refrigerator. You'll need to add a similar system to the pantry, and spectral analysis to the garbage disposal, then it should be a done deal.
Really the camera only has to snap a picture when you close the door. If you care to actually see the current state of items then perhaps have a Time Lapse setting, but there isn't really any need to do this.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
Back in the olden days, when the web was geeks only, you'd see websites of a coffee pot (useful for the developers on that floor, but exported to the world) for a sandwich slowly going bad, and for the pop inventory in the breakroom. Now 20 years later, anyone can do it. In fact, probably, most people will forget to check the opt out and all of our fridge contents will be available on the internet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It's a cell phone... with snacks.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
However, if you don't have that sort of cash to throw around (and it ain't cheap), then little baubles like this are god-send.
You think this thing will be priced like a cheap "little bauble"? The ENTIRE point of gear like this is to give the appliance maker a reason to jack up the margins. No matter how cheap they make this (useless IMO) feature it will be a lot more expensive than not having it.
You won't be there enough time and it would exhaust you to do it.
If you don't have enough time to peek in the fridge once a day would be exhausted by that task, probably when preparing a meal then you have no business caring for another human being of any age. Suck it up buttercup. People took care of you when you were helpless and a burden as a child. Time to return the favor to someone else.
Wake me when the fridge's drone can deliver a beer to the couch with voice command from the living room.
Presumably this things has loads of cameras, otherwise how can it see everything inside the fridge. I can't see everything in our fridge even with door wide open and neither can my wife. She is forever moving a pickle jar and going "Oh, I've just found some leftovers from three weeks ago that I was going to feed you".
My point being that if I wanted to be able to see everything in our fridge using internal cameras I estimate that I would need at least a dozen and as many as twenty if I wanted to include the contents of the various internal drawers. Also, do you have to keep carefully re-arranging the contents to ensure that they are not in front of the cameras. How easy to shove some more stuff in and accidentally move a big jar of mayonnaise at the back so that it completely obscures the view of a rear camera.
Wait a second, isn't Samsung the company that thought it would be a good idea to stick a camera on television sets and record people as they watch TV? So they plan to collect and mine data gathered from fridges now too? Is there another camera pointed at the kitchen?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So does this thing have a microphone too?
I've been the owner of Samsung's first generation smart fridge with computer screen for almost 5 years now. It was on all the gadget sites and made big news when announced. As far as the basic fridge, It works. The thing is they don't update the software on the 'smart' component and that's the rub. Mine had a neat Calendar function that allowed me to link to my Google Calendar and I could keep up with appointments and birthdays and all the calendar functionality that was conveniently displayed while you milled about in the kitchen. Google changed how the API functioned. Samsung refused to change or update their software. They also will not allow their software to be changed by you the owner. As time passes, I loosed more and more functionality due to non-support from Samsung. My model # RF4289HARS and here are some struggles to get things working without Samsung helping: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/calendar/UhfpcwO0X0c/SDyJ8dAEqKQJ
Run Away
And guess who won't be buying Samsung's latest refrigerator?
If other people want this, great, have at it. But it's just not something I want.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Have gnu, will travel.
I need a digital pantry that can tell me the contents. I get sick of my wife coming home telling me there was a sale where she got 2 containers of mustard for the price of 1, because I inevitably go into our pantry and find 5 containers of mustard already there, buried way in the back.
Great so now my fridge will display ads
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
A common misconception. Turns out the Infernal Municipal Council (Public Works Division) regularly resurfaces the Road to Hell with a mixture of sulfurous pitch, crystallized despair, orphan tears, wallpaper glue, tree pollen, crushed up AOL Free Trial CDs, undying snakes, microbeads, fell runestones graven with the demonic localization of the systemd man page, and the mortal souls of chronic masturbaters and people with window decals of Calvin pissing on things.
Good intentions are often a large volume fraction of the cement on the Sidewalk to Poor User Interface Design, which is so similar to Hell that people often get them mixed up.
Nothing posted to
What, no robotic arm so I can pull what I want from the inside like in a ufo catcher machine?
This. Westerners don't get Samsung until something like this happens to them and suddenly a lightbulb goes on.
Japanese companies release lots of experimental stuff to the Japanese market, to test it out on consumers. Samsung is doing the same in the West. A lot of it will fail to catch on, but sometimes there will be unexpected or non-obvious benefits that mean they get to create a new market. Fridges are not very exciting commodity items unless they constantly add new widgets.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
LED bulbs in the 1 to 3 Watt range are already available, costing only a few dollars on eBay.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How does the camera move all the bulky items so that you can see what is behind them? How does it open the drawers so you can see what is in them? The drawers on my fridge can't be opened with the door shut, partly because you can't have your hand in there with the door shut, but even if you could disembody your hand, operating the drawer would not work because the door is inches away.
Another solution in search of a problem.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
....so many people are heckling this fridge. It's not like someone is forcing you to buy it. The only real problem with it is that it would be awkward to browse the net on this thing for a long period of time and scince the display is in a portrait orientation, the TV picture would occupy a very small part of the screen and not be in HD, but I don't think people will be using this to watch Star Wars ultra high def super platnum edition no matter what.
If their bagless cyclone vacuum is anything to go by i would expect freezer shelves that become brittle over time requiring replacement within months of purchase and accessories that dont work or dont seem to be designed with any particular purpose in mind. Smart or not , I will be looking at other manufacturers when it comes to replacing our Fridge-Freezer. As far as i am concerned - im done with broken shelves and drawers, build quality is my number one priority. Any advice on that particular matter would be welcomed.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I'm sure I misplaced some mod points, but here, have a bastard +1 Funny.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Oh yes you will. Install Firefox, VLC and a torrent client and you will go to the kitchen to watch movies or porn (food porn I mean lol). Or whateva. Scary ... but cool.
"... I'm really exited about the new Samsung. ... Not the phone, the refrigerator."
Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is it just me, or am I the only cynical one that thinks, that Samsung will sell your fridge content information to 3rd parties. If they collect your personal information when you "sign up" or "register" your fridge, they can connect your grocery buying habits to your demographics, or even you personally. Think face recognition, but for food products. Also, a monitor? Are they eventually going to offer up advertising for other companies to you as a "service". All you habits, how far you'll go to shop, for what products, what you pay, etc...
Fridge: "I see you've been buying a lot of Vlassic Pickles lately..."
User: "Um what?"
Fridge: "Did you know that there is a sale on Vlassic Pickles at Globogrocery, located here on this convenient map in your area?"
User: "...but I have pickles..."
Fridge: "I can read your expiry dates, and bar codes... you may want to consider some fresh pickles is all I am saying."
User: "I think I'll stick with my current pickles..."
Fridge: "I can't let you do that Dave."
User: "Why.. What? How do you know my name?!"
Fridge: "I see you've been buying a lot of Heinz Ketchup lately..."
If it runs Windows, it'll work half of the time.
THe items put into it. This could be an add on using the camera or an integrated feature. When I put it in or pull it out there should be a scanner somewhere (maybe outside is better) so I can know everything I've put in and eventually what's left.
Heh... You placed the "bastard" wrong, it belongs as the end and with a comma.
Give it a few years it will all be RFID style tags that will handle everything from warehouse to end user, including expiration notification.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I meant the mod point was illegitimate. Thus a "bastard" point.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.