concept

Touchy, by Hong Kong-based artist Eric Siu, is one of the strangest concept cameras we've seen.

Researchers at Osaka University in Japan have created a new camera that makes …

Apollon is a concept camera designed by product designer Gordon Tiemstra for his industrial design university project. The big concept is that the camera can be physically combined with your friends' cameras, allowing them to snap photographs together to create things like panoramas and 3D photographs. The images captured by any camera in the cluster is wirelessly transferred to all of the others, giving everyone the complete set of images that were snapped.

Last November we featured a concept camera called Air that is worn on your fingers and snaps …

Olympus recently rebooted its OM line of film SLRs with the OM-D mirrorless camera, and many photographers are hoping that Canon will follow suit with one of its film bodies. Industrial designer and photographer David Riesenberg is among them, and recently decided turn what he wants to see into a concept drawing.

Designer Jean-michel Bonnemoy thinks that traditional camera designs are wrong, and that form factors were driven more by technical necessity (e.g. the need to hold film) than by ergonomics and ease of use. Instead, he proposes that modern digital cameras should be cylindrical and resembling a handheld telescope. A lens cap is built into the front, a viewfinder and LCD screen are built into the back, and the controls are in easy-to-access locations on the side of the camera.

The T-Bike is a concept bicycle by designer Reza Rachmat Sumirat that's inspired by the camera tripod. In addition to having three sliding bars that can help riders easily adjust the bike to their desired size, the bike also doubles as a tripod for active outdoor photographers. The handlebars provide a tripod mount, and the kickstand on the front wheel helps stabilize the shot.

Singapore-based design agency One Paradox came up with this nifty idea for a …

The Apple iCam is a concept camera by Italian designer Antonio DeRosa that imagines a future where cameras are modular and powered by smartphones. Smartphones have already invaded the compact camera market in recent years, but their small lenses and sensors keep them from being seen as suitable alternatives to more advanced cameras. The iCam camera changes that by adding a large sensor and interchangeable lens system to the mix. Simply attach your iPhone 5 to the case and you'll have yourself a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with a huge LCD screen, fast processor, internet connectivity, and countless photo apps!

What if framing a scene with your fingers actually caused photos to be created? Air Camera is a clever camera concept by designer Yeon Su Kim that would make that idea a reality. It consists of two components: a ring-like camera worn on the thumb, and a tension-sensing device worn on the forefinger. If the tension unit senses that you're making a camera gesture, it triggers the camera to snap a photo. Make a video camera gesture, and it begins recording video! The resulting photos would also be synced automatically with your smartphone.

During the World Series last month, Chevrolet aired a new commercial that might have felt familiar to many of you. Featuring old photographs overlaid on their modern day locations, the concept is identical to the images found on the website Dear Photograph, which we featured back in June.

If for some reason you hate both buttons and touchscreens, then Rotor is …

Designer Miha Feuš doesn’t think the user interfaces on low-end compact cameras are …

Sling Shot is a concept camera that’s designed to capture expressions of fear …

Light painting is sometimes called light graffiti, but who does graffiti with flashlights? Halo is a neat light-painting tool designed by Aïssa Logerot that makes painting with light feel much more natural for people accustomed to creating... less-legal forms of art. Shaped like an aerosol can of spray paint, the tool includes interchangeable LED lights for painting in different colors and a battery inside that recharges when the can is shaken.

If Apple ever got into the photo printer business, this SWYP …

Here’s a super creative video that attempts to capture 100 years of East London fashion, dance, and music in …

The Appcam is a new concept design for camera controls — and supposedly …

We've shared a lens cap and hood hybrid here before, but this one is much nicer. "Flower", dreamt up by designers Rhie Hyi Joong and Lee Sang Hwa, is a concept lens cap that blooms into a hood by simply turning a ring.

The WVIL concept camera that made the rounds on the Internet featured a lens that could operate separately from …

Here’s a concept for you to play around with over the weekend: give your shadow a real camera to …

At the Hello Demain (Hello Tomorrow) exhibition in Paris, France this year, Nikon showed off a number of strange looking concept camera designs. While it's pretty unlikely they're actually planning to release any of these designs, it's interesting to see what they would come up with for this kind of exhibition.

The Canon EOS-0 is what you get at the Apocalypse when all the major camera, software, and operating system companies get together to unleash unspeakable evil into the world. It's a camera with a little bit of everything: support for every major lens mount, a drive for various kinds of discs, Windows Vista as the operating system (shudder), Photoshop available on the giant widescreen LCD, etc... Pretty much the only thing you won't find on this camera is a toaster.

Cars can have pretty creative paint jobs, but it seems like the best anyone can do with a DSLR is do a messy DIY repainting or buy a Pentax with ridiculous or nasty-looking designs. Sherwin Sibala came up with these unique design concepts showing what a DSLR (specifically a Nikon D7000) might look like if people chose to personalize the body.

Illinois industrial design student Ned Mulka created this Nikon D5R concept camera for his senior thesis design project. While the design itself may be pretty iffy for a camera, the main idea behind it is pretty interesting -- instead of having to rotate the camera itself for portrait orientation photos, why not only rotate the sensor, mirror, and viewfinder? An even crazier design would involve only rotating the sensor, allowing the camera to shoot any orientation without having to change how you hold the camera -- though this would probably be an engineering nightmare for the camera makers.

Rather than using traditional instant film that develops on the spot, newer instant cameras are using a special …

The Leica i9 is a concept camera case dreamed up by design firm BLACK Design Associates for the iPhone 4. Unlike the Slow Photography Camera we shared last week, the i9 is actually an independent camera that simply uses the iPhone as a giant touch screen and as a modem for the web.

With the recent craze on mimicking retro photography through phone apps, it's only natural that someone would take it a step further and design a retro way to shoot with the phone as well, right? The Slow Photography camera concept by photographer David McCourt is a medium format-style box that lets you use your phone as a digital back.

We covered the WVIL (wireless viewfinder interchangeable lens) concept camera at the beginning …

At weddings, guests are often given disposable cameras that they can use to capture memories from their vantage point, but collecting and processing them afterwards can be a hassle and it's definitely not something that has caught up with our digital photography age. Hitch is a concept camera idea by industrial design student Martin Spurway that makes a lot of sense -- guests at an event are given simplified digital cameras, and photographs from the cameras are automatically collected when the camera is placed on a special dock.

TechnoFotografia created a concept design for the yet-to-be-announced Nikon D800 DSLR. One of the novel features dreamed up for the design is a LCD screen that can be detached from the camera and used remotely (seen above). If this were to ever exist on a DSLR, losing the screens would be an issue, and replacing them would likely cost a fortune.

One of the biggest hits this past April Fool's Day was RE-35, a futuristic cartridge that transforms any 35mm film camera into a digital one. As the website went viral, many people actually thought it was a real product, prompting the design company behind the design to issue a notice on the website explaining that it was fake. As stated by numerous readers, digital film isn't exactly a new idea -- an actual company called Silicon Film attempted this product about a decade ago (and even gave a demo at PMA 2001) but ran into "storage, battery, environment and sensor size limitations".

Judging from the response to this April Fool's Prank, however, it's pretty clear that this is an idea that would be enormously popular with photographers if it were to actually exist and perform reasonably well. The above illustration is another concept design for "digital film", created by students of Hongik University for the iF Design Awards this year.

When a fake camera technology is unveiled, it’s normally called a “concept”. When it’s published on April 1st, however, …

The Flashkus by Art Lebedev is a …

Elizabeth Clark, an industrial design student at the California College of the Arts, was given the assignment of designing …

Pirela Neuman created this 3D concept design of a Leica R10 camera, a …

You've probably heard of EVIL cameras already, but how about WVIL? The Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens is a concept camera design by Seattle-based design firm Artefactgroup. What's novel about the design is that the imaging sensor is situated in the back of the lens rather than in the camera body, allowing the lens to be detached and used apart from the body wirelessly.

The "Flutter in Pinhole" is a beautiful concept camera that combines a cardboard pinhole camera with instant film to make sharing memories a breeze, and could be the high-tech postcard of the future.

In the current world we live in, it’s often the case that one person taking photographs for a group …

It's always fun thinking about what photography will be like in the future, and the direction camera technology will go. What's even cooler is seeing these ideas turned into concept drawings or videos. The Capture180 is a concept camera by Lucas Ainsworth that takes a 180° hemispheric photograph with each exposure in addition to the ordinary, framed photograph. When viewing the photographs with the camera, you can "knock" the camera into a viewing mode in which it acts as a small window into the giant scene that was captured.