Move aside Panasonic GF3, this is the world’s smallest Micro Four Thirds camera. Olympus took its Despicable Me-style shrink ray and reduced the Olympus E-PL1, E-P2, and E-PL2 to the size of an SD card for a promotion over in Hong Kong. They’re meant to be used as cute little cell phone charms, but they work nicely as tiny prop cameras for your action figures as well!
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What if you could take perfect group photographs by first shooting multiple frames and then selecting the best portions of each one? Microsoft amazed us with this concept last year with its Photo Fuse technology, and now we may soon be seeing something similar coming to mobile phone cameras (and hopefully compact cameras as well). Imaging technology company Scalado gave the above demonstration at a conference earlier this month showing off Rewind, a super-useful feature that shoots a burst of full-res photos, then lets you select the best faces for each person in the image. Next up on our wishlist: Content Aware Fill.
Rather than using traditional instant film that develops on the spot, newer instant cameras are using a special ZINK technology that prints digital photos rather than exposing special paper. As more and more consumers rely solely on their mobile phones for shooting casual snapshots, perhaps the Sophie concept iPhone case is the next step in instant film’s evolution: it’s a case with a built-in printer that turns your iPhone into a Polaroid-style instant camera. What do you think of the idea?
(via Yanko Design)
Cell phones are playing a bigger and bigger role in citizen journalism — just look at the imagery coming out of the Middle East protests — and universities are beginning to offer entire courses on using them for photography. A new class at Immaculata University is designed to teach both the ethical and technical aspects of cell phone photography. Communications professor Sean Flannery leads the students in issues including voyeurism, ethics, citizen journalism and the difference between public and private spaces, and professional photographer Hunter Martin teaches things like composition, lighting, and editing.
Images created by the current crop of students will be on display next month in a campus art show.
(via SilberStudios)
Image credit: Mobile phone camera by emrank
With the limited lens and sensor sizes of cell phone cameras, the megapixel race isn’t really doing much to improve the quality of the resulting photos. A new startup called Pelican Imaging thinks it can revolutionize the game by increasing quality without focusing on megapixels. Instead, they use an array of 25 micro-cameras to capture each image, processing the data into a single photograph with fancy software. If all goes well, future cell phones will be taking much nicer photos while still staying thin and compact.
Pelican Imaging (via GigaOM)
If you’re not content with having a massive telephoto lens for your DSLR camera, you can get one for your cell phone as well! The Conice Zoom Lens is a 6x lens for the iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S, or Sony Xperia 10 that makes your phone look absolutely ridiculous.
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In addition to slowly replacing the need for compact cameras, the cameras found on mobile phones will also have a huge impact on how we live our lives in the area of augmented reality. Word Lens is a crazy new free app for the iPhone that translates between Spanish and English in real-time in the video feed, allowing you to read the world in your language through your cell phone. As this technology becomes available for more and more languages, it will change the way people survive in foreign countries.
If cameras can have external flashes, why can’t mobile phones? The iFlash is a flash module that allows owners of older iPhones to illuminate dark scenes with a blast of LED light. iPhone 4 owners can also use it to gain some additional light.
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Earlier this month we reported that there was a star-studded short film being shot entirely with the Nokia N8 phone. It was just released, and gives a pretty interesting look at what mobile phone cameras are capable of now.
The groundbreaking film, directed by the McHenry Brothers, was shot in just four days with the Nokia N8 using no back up cameras, with the streets of London and St Albans providing the backdrop to Nokia’s story about one commuter’s eventful journey to work.
Watch it in HD mode if your Internet connection can handle it.
(via Small Aperture)
First there was the House season finale filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II to show the HD video recording potential of DSLRs, and now there’s a star studded short film titled “The Commuter” being shot entirely on the new Nokia N8 cell phone, which boasts a 12 megapixel sensor and Carls Zeiss optics. The project — directed by the McHenry Brothers — began filming at the end of September and stars Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), Pamela Anderson, and Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl).
By the way, the behind-the-scenes video shown above was filmed on the N8 as well.
(via Small Aperture)
