Jeff sent me following mail and I found his proposal very interesting. That’s why I ask you your opinion!
“Hi , i had an idea , be it a crazy one. But since this is one of the more prominent sites for 4/3 photography , im sure olympus itself veiws the site.
Here is my idea , you should create a poll asking the olympus user base on what they think of olympus “re-inventing the 4/3 brand” through a sharp marketing campaign and camera redesign incorperating open source camera bodies.
If it gets a good positive response , it could spark research at olympus about adding open source bodies.
The problem is that companies think their profits will be destroyed by this since they cannot release annual body updates. they are partially correct , but the current robbery that happening to photographers is disgusting. If actual important things were applied to camera updates (actual hardware such as better sensors and screens) instead of art filters and stuff that can be added by the user with a computer. They could instantly gain a fanbase who would fall in love with the olympus brand and actually take a chunk out of nikonon since they will be the last to experiment with such technology.
Just imagine pulling out your ep2 , going through a menu and clicking the time lapse app you downloaded from a community website and placing it in your window. The software would put the camera on a timer and take a picture every 20 mins and then go back into sleep mode until the next shot, you get back from work and you have a time lapse of the day and you didnt have to do a thing.
that is the future of technology and i think olympus should capitalize on it and beat the other manufacturers to the punch.
make a poll and see if it peaks the interest of olympus”
[poll id=”23″]
28 Responses
Open source? No. Updated and easy to access SDK so the cameras can be controlled by computer? Yes.
maybe not the operating system itself but to provide knowledge for programmers for creating downloadable plugins/widgets/applets (no matter how we call them…). Look for the iPhone/iPod success now Sony PSP GO and others…. It can be even a profitable business to sell small applications that extends the possibilities for 1,99$ 🙂 So YES!! I hope Panasonic will foollow this path too! Definitely YES!
I can see now how even film/photo industry could react to such new features, they can write their own software for their own specific tasks easily… Very good idea indeed!
I don’t know about open source, but all 4/3 should use DNG.
Exacly omox
just think of all the possibilities it would open up
This is already happening on cell phone market!
Great idea… unless picture-taking is important enough to you that you need for your camera to actually WORK — for sure — whenever you press the shutter button… rather than throw a dialog box that says, “Syntax error in /etc/config/camera/util/getshutterclick.ini”.
(Or “gEt Ur M3dz 4 lEss.” Or “B3 l@Rger 4 Her 2nite!!!” Or “Hello, we are being PayPal Security department. Please to verify your user ID and password or your account will be frozened.”)
In other words, “open-source” might just as well mean your camera’s operating software is written by a 15-year-old guy named Dwayne who stays up all night playing World of Warcraft and is scared to talk to girls. Or by a Beijing technical institute affiliated with the Chinese army. (“Hey, how come my pictures of the Dalai Lama all got spontaneously erased?”)
Remember WHY Steve Jobs said Apple’s App Store is so darn persnickety about approving submitted applications? It’s because sometimes people really NEED for their phones to work. For me, same goes for my camera.
So I’m with omox. Wide-open source, no. Easy-to-use developer toolkit, yes!
For that matter, it couldn’t be that hard for some camera maker to offer a “configuration utility” that would be simple enough for computer-savvy photographers to use, but limited enough to eliminate the risk that they’d screw up operation of the camera. For example, I’d love to be able to plug my camera into my Mac and drag around some icons to set up a menu that would contain JUST my most-used options, or re-assign the “Function” button, or whatever.
I also advocated this a while back, see:
http://martinbudden.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/improvement-suggestions-for-the-olympus-pen-e-p1-camera/
in the section “Software Improvements”, item 10.
I hedged it a bit, since I thought the idea might be a bit too radical for Olympus. There are three stages of increasing openness
i) produce a software developers kit, to allow people to write applications for the camera (think of an App Store for the camera). I think its extremely possible that Samsung might do this – they have an App Store for their phones, and with the convergence of camera phones and phones at the low end, we could see an App Store for their cameras.
ii) open source the camera UI. This would also facilitate camera applications.
iii) open source everything.
If Olympus don’t open source, or at least produce a developers kit, they might find Samsung does it first, and they loose the lovely new market that they have just found.
Apps on a camera? Come on, people. Do the work yourselves.
Applications don’t require open source, they require APIs, a programming tool, and an installation tool. And they’re coming sooner than you think.
Hi,
open SDK and/or APIs should have been available from years, if not decades! Instead, we are still asking 🙁
Canon is already there, although unofficially and only for some compact models: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
I think now is the time to open the whole camera, not just give an API (which is also required).
I’ll bet they won’t do it 🙁
But if they do, I’ll buy all the open models they’ll put on the market 🙂
I’m with Thom all the way!
I’ve been raving about this on dpreview’s forums for some time. This is going to be the real Pandora’s Box. BTW what do you know about this Thom?
Give me an API with direct access to camera functions and I can make the whole E-Px line focus in half the time it does with 30 minutes programming.
This would allow for incredible camera flexibility. Just think about what could be done with multiple captures and a few camera plugins: Focus Stacking, Defocus Stacking (à la Fuji Pro Mode), SuperResolution, Noise Reduction, Your favorite monument tourist nuisance removal, even the sky isn’t the limit …
davide, which exactly SDKs and APIs have in mind?
chdk isn’t official and by no mean any sdk was provided by canon.
ah, sorry davide, misunderstood. need to read more carefully
I think you could allow the sale and free distribution of both open source and closed source apps through an Apple App Store like model. Open source has nothing to do with how the apps are approved or disapproved or how heavily tested they are. It just relates to how you can view and modify the code. You could potentially force the any of those apps to go through an iphone app store so only approved (tested) apps get this method.. if you choose to use alternate routes.. its at your own risk.. much like the iphone..
I think this is a great idea..and they would probably even profit from such a venture, They should however do it fairly soon before Apple buys some camera company and does it themselves.. they are not too far from this with there camera phone apps.
Nice idea. Maybe a tightly controlled app policy ( a la Apple ) would be better, because a camera is a much more specialized tool than a phone or a PC. But it would be nice to be able to customize settings a bit – alter button functions or flash strength, enable custom image/video resolutions, extra optical zoom on Olympus etc.
Although, how much more popular would that make the system is doubtful. Many people that buy a smartphone rarely if ever install an app …
This is a great idea. Open source the somewhat moribund classic four thirds and it would totally rejuvinate that format. Especially if combined with fully featured adaptors for third party lenses. The ideas that work can then be borrowed and adopted en masse bu the consumer friendly micro four thirds system.
There was a ‘camera OS’ available in the 90’s. Kodak and other makers did use it. It had an API, and installable applications.
http://www.videogameobsession.com/videogame/kodak.html
Cheers Jón!
I’m old enough to remember that Kodak, so I doubt it was more 10 years ago…
Damn it! I’m getting old…it was 1999: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/kodakdc265/
What A pearler of an idea….. now that is forward thinking!!!!
I think it’s a terrible idea, and one that really only appeals to a very small percentage of photographers, and one that even these photographers would abandon after a short trial tun.
For taking pictures, I honestly don’t think there is any benefit. Time exposures on the 20 minutes, who cares?
I guess it could help cameras take the place of computers for running photography, for people who really hate the two minutes that takes. But come on, there’s natural limits. It’s a tiny screen with tiny buttons, and there’s no way around that. The processors are severely limited, they’d have to have a custom OS that would probably be awkward. There’d be additional hardware required.
Really, think of all the internet people complaining about DSLRs implementing video, or Canon upgrading video in their software update – it’s a very minor expense in terms of research, hardware, or required space on the camera. Whereas these sort of upgrades would be much more “expensive,” and would only appeal to a small set.
Hej,
I use CHDK on my canon compacts for some years now, and I won’t buy any camera without it now !
Motion detection is my favourite, it’s so fast it can shoot lightning, an ice cube falling in a glass, it’s so good it catches close up of birds if you put your camera where birds come…
Of course you can also create new shortcuts for your needs (hyperfocal for exemple), display more infos (histogram, time, grid…), program a timelapse…
I don’t even understand how canon hasn’t used CHDK more, even non officially, cause that’s a reason many people would buy only a canon compact.
I suppose the same is possible for any given brand, you just need the enthousiasts to do the work.
Respectfully Jeff, if you don’t see the point then I think you are not pushing your/the camera limits far enough!…
There are lots of examples where this could be useful even if not for your style of shooting.
Over 1000+ votes and a resounding 75% of YES answers and only 17% against, I think this result should be forwarded to Olympus…
Duarte: Pushing the camera? I can’t see it as anything more than a gimmick. Some better examples of how it would be used would help…
But look at chdk. People already have the ability to easily hack/re-program Canon compacts – but it’s an extreme niche item that is really only used for adding RAW abilities to low-end cameras, or for people who just like the idea of hacking their cameras and installing solitaire on it.
The idea is nice in theory, but not very practical imho.
The JPEG engine, AF code, etc. is all very valuable to manufacturers, so going entirely open source is not really an option at this point I’d say. It is also quite possible that the firmwares contain 3rd party code that can’t be opened up due to licensing restrictions.
Opening up the firmware by adding APIs and allowing user installable modules would be an option, but would require a significant development and support effort from Olympus’ side with probably very little returns.
I don’t think 1000 internet votes will convince them.
I’d rather send a request for them to have shutter half-press exit mf assist for legacy lens…
This is on the way to being a great idea – in my opinion they should not go fully open source, otherwise badly designed & written software will cause problems for which Olympus will unjustly get blamed. However, the notion of 3rd party plugin apps built to a consistent specification with quality control in place, along the same line as iphone apps, would be absolutely brilliant; and, far from reducing profitability, provide an additional revenue stream to Olympus. The app store could also offer online albums, photo printing services, tutorial videos and other value added features both free & paid for, and become a much bigger draw to users than manufacturers websites currently are.
Speaking as somebody who has been working professionally in open source (the GCC compiler) for 22 years or so, I think this is just a pipe dream. In general, for an open source project to succeed, you typically need to do it from the start. Management at Olympus would have to embrace this completely new way of working, and there would have to be a big enough space of people wanting to work on this, to dive into code with a very steep learning curve. I’m amused by the number of people who assume it is easy to add new features via software who don’t program themselves.
Also, in embedded programming, a company often times changes the computer chip from platform to platform. If you are lucky, it is a newer processor in the same family, but it is not unheard of to switch processors altogether. So, even if say Olympus opens up the E-1, it might be a completely different system underneath for the E-3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware
@Jeff:
yvesson has given quite a few examples but I’ll give you another: how about having an app that probes a scene and then automatically bracket with enough pictures/EV compensation in order to give enough room for a lattger HDR?
@hexatron:
Requests to have shutter half-press exit mf assist for legacy lenses have been sent several times (one of them endorsed by the Olympus UKPSG). Have you seen any progress? Neither did I.