http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august31/levoy-opensource-camera-090109.html
I really like the open source philosophy but I never thought it could be applied to a photographic camera. After reading the article I can’t wait to see the first production open source camera which should be on market by the end of the next year.
And if you think it’s a joke take a look on the companies that supports the project: Nokia, Adobe Systems, Kodak, and Hewlett-Packard!!!
The “Frankencmera” should cost 1.000$ only. But we stil doesn’t know what kind of specifications the camera will have.
3 Responses
An open-source camera operating system is a nice-idea.
In the article, there is a factual error:
They claim that combining 2 different exposures to create a high-dynamic image cannot be done in-camera with today’s commercial models. But Olympus, Pentax and Sony are already doing it (called “Multiple Exposure”, “HDR” and “Auto HDR”, respectively) !!!
Read the article closely and you’ll see that they are intending this solely as a test bed for computational vision research and similar “machine vision” applications.
For everyday camera users, an “open-source” camera would be exactly as popular as Linux is for everyday PC users — i.e., not so much — and for exactly the same reasons: most people just want good results without having to geek out over every detail.
“Hold the baby still, Martha, as soon as I update one more driver and edit a few config files, I should be almost ready to take the picture!”
Ranger 9, many people use open source firmware for canon cameras.