Most high-end digital cameras (not named Ricoh) aren’t designed to be modular. If you want a new sensor in your camera, you’ll need to buy an entirely new camera. Want to use a different lens system? You’re out of luck.
What if there existed a universe in which all the major camera companies came together to form an extremely versatile modular digital camera? That’s what Korean designers Dae jin Ahn and Chun hyun Park are attempting to answer with their concept camera design, called Equinox. Read more…
Designer Andrew Kim thinks that point-and-shoot cameras aren’t simple enough for many ordinary consumers. After all, if you’re only looking to take snapshots of everyday life, having buttons and dials that can toggle undesired functions is more of an annoyance than a benefit. Taking a page from Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa’s book, Kim created a concept camera that he calls the Pentax Si. Read more…
Using the human eye to control cameras isn’t a new idea — Canon used to offer eye-controlled focusing in its SLRs — but designer Mimi Zou‘s Iris concept camera takes the concept one step further by having the camera be entirely controlled by the eye. Shaped like a lens, the photographer uses the camera by simply looking through it. Focusing, zooming, and snapping photos are done by looking, narrowing/widening the eyes, and blinking (respectively). Read more…
Ever since the move to digital, and especially with the advent of the camera phone, we’ve seen a huge spike in photography — everybody is taking pictures. But even so, our four legged friends haven’t really gotten in on the action. That may soon change, however, if a concept camera by designer Jaehwa Lee ever becomes a reality. Read more…
Concept products aren’t a rarity. In the world of cars and computers concepts usually make us ooh and ahh at their beautiful styling and implied functionality, but in the world of cameras things can get a bit, strange. Such is the case with a new SLR concept by industrial designer Arti Patel called the All.Round SLR. Read more…
Touchy, by Hong Kong-based artist Eric Siu, is one of the strangest concept cameras we’ve seen. Here’s the description:
Touchy is a human camera, who is blinded constantly until someone’s touch enables the opening of the automated shutters. While a continuous physical contact is maintained between Touchy and a user, the camera shoots a photo every 10 seconds.
Oh, and the user is blinded by the camera’s closed shutters until there’s “human interaction”.
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. Read more…
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. After spending months “learning, debating, modeling, and rendering,” the Canon AE-D was born. Inspired by the AE and AE-P cameras, Riesenberg’s camera features the same 18.1MP full frame sensor found in the 1D X, a new CM-D lens mount that supports EF lenses with an adapter, a 50mm f/1.0L kit lens, and a pentaprism electronic viewfinder that attaches via the hot shoe. Read more…
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. Read more…
