Powerful, Leading Edge Technologies Revolutinize the Point-and-Shoot Camera Market
As the DSLR market continues to steal most of the headlines in the imaging industry of late, the point-and-shoot market has become somewhat of an understudy the last couple of years. Several industry research groups had predicted sales in the P&S market would actually begin to decline rapidly in 2007 and that in 2008 those numbers would continue dipping. However, according to several recent reports, the market enjoyed a solid 2007, buoyed in part by strong Q4 numbers, as second and third time buyers simply couldn’t resist the amazing new feature sets, sleek/compact body designs and, quite simply, the chance to take better pictures.
“I’m actually on my fifth digital camera,” began John Dooley, of Birmingham, Alabama, a 45-year-old father of two. “I finally broke down and bought a DSLR but I also purchased a new point-and-shoot because I don’t carry the DSLR everywhere I go. My wife and I wanted one of the new smaller compacts because the features have gone way beyond what we have in our old one. I mean, face recognition, image stabilization…it was simply time to dive in again, and it was less expensive than the model we bought 3 years ago.”
Dooley is apparently no different than many second, third …and fifth time digicam buyers as a recent IDC report claimed, “new feature sets and lower prices” helped buoy the aforementioned Q4 surge in sales.
Speaking of features, what exactly is winning over consumers today and what does the future hold for a category that was supposed to have “matured” by now?
Intelligent Scene Analysis
In breaking down some of the new technology we’re beginning to see in point-and-shoot digital cameras, we’ll start with one we think will have a dramatic impact on the market moving forward, Intelligent Scene Analysis, a feature that will es-sentially take a considerable burden off entry-level users. Many next-generation cameras will incorporate this sophisticated feature so taking a high-quality photo really does become a matter of simply clicking the shutter. Gone will be the need to play with a mode dial to set the camera for action shots, low light, landscapes with distant focus, or close-up portraits. For example, if a face appears in the frame, Intelligent Scene Analysis will detect it and set the white balance to perfectly match the skin tone; if the camera senses motion, it will increase the shutter speed to eliminate motion blur. Unless the user wants to override the camera for special creative effects, such as turning off the flash to capture the ambience of a candlelight dinner, the camera will automatically adjust the settings to attain the best picture.
Furthermore, beyond just providing the opti-mum exposure, color and sharpness, the camera will actually be able to sense if the subject smiled or blinked, and therefore capture the perfect moment. Due to the simplicity of taking the “perfect picture”, consumers will not only share more of their pictures, they will likely be more compelled to tell a creative story with their memories by creating items like multimedia slide shows blending still images, movie, sound and music right on their cameras. For more viewing options, they can then transfer the images onto their computer, large screen HDTV or even a digital photoframe to provide as the perfect gift. The industry can also expect these vastly improved images to lead to consumers creating more photobooks and other print-related photo gift items.
These advanced features will be available in affordable cameras and not just in top-of-the-line models because they will eventually be hard-wired into the processors controlling the cameras. “New features often start out in software, and as they are fine-tuned to meet consumer desires and then become familiar must-haves, these features then migrate into hardware. For instance, face and motion detection will soon become standard hardware features in the next year or two. This is possible with the use of the latest processors, such as the recent Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM35x processors that provide the necessary computational power to implement the complex analysis algorithms,” explained Peter Labaziewicz, CTO, Digital Imaging at Texas Instruments.
FotoNation is yet another technology development company that continues to bring innovative “embedded” solutions to the digital camera market. Their recent FaceTime (self-portrait feature – shutter triggers when photographer’s face enters frame) and SmileCheck (shutter won’t fire until everyone in frame is smiling) embedded facial analysis solutions are having a big impact on the P&S market. “By offering the industry better tools for understanding the content of images, such as information about the people in photographs, we can continue to enhance the overall picture taking experience,” said Eran Steinberg, CEO of FotoNation, Inc. “And the really exciting part of all this is the fact research in face detection is still in its infancy and there are still a tremendous amount of new capabilities that can be brought to the mass market.”
FotoNation was recently purchased by Tessera Technologies, Inc. (a provider of miniaturization technologies for the electronics industry), a deal that should position the company well for future innovation in the digicam market.
High-speed Wireless Transfers
Another big boost to the P&S market is expected in the area of improved transmission and sharing of images. The first step involves transferring images from a camera to a PC. Today, this is done simply by removing a memory card and plugging it into a computer or connecting a cable between the devices. A few point-and-shoot cameras are starting to embed wireless capabilities, but today the transfer is slow and power hungry. In fact, in most cases it takes as much time to transfer images over a wireless link as to make a physical connec- tion so adoption here is currently moving slowly.
However, help is coming in the form of UWB— ultra wideband wireless connectivity. In the next two to four years, UWB in the form of wireless USB or UWB-based Bluetooth, will allow close-range transfer speeds up to 64M bytes/sec, far above the 6M bytes/sec with today’s cameras using Wi Fi. At the same time, PCs will implement UWB as a standard feature, as will photo-related peripherals such as printers and digital picture frames.
Intelligent Photo Tags
With so many consumers now storing their images on the PC, there are too many cases in which valued photographs seem to disappear into a “black hole,” – becoming extremely diffi cult if not impossible to fi nd at a later date. This has had a dramatic effect on the retail print market in this industry. Soon, however, new in-camera software currently in development will allow users to search for pictures based on a number of useful criteria such as for a particular person, subject matter, location or others. We have often shouted in this publication that images that are easier to find are images that will far more likely be printed.
Intelligent tagging of images will be a big part of what will make this possible. Cameras already on store shelves accept SD card GPS receivers or can communicate with a GPS unit. Soon, they will embed location information within the image file in what is known as “geotagging”. Questions such as “which city were we visiting when we took this photo?” will soon have quick answers. Further, a PC screen may also be able to display a map with dots indicating where photos were taken and by simply sliding the cursor over these dots, thumbnails of the images will be displayed.
This concept, however, holds far more promise, for instance with automated event recognition. Computer software could combine location data with the ability to examine image content to identify a particular popular location, such as a stadium. A program could further correlate that location with a specific time and tag an image as being taken at the Super Bowl, and as a part of the tagged data perhaps even include the final score. It could also use face-recognition algorithms to find all photos with family members at a favorite vacation locale.
This all sounds great, but will cameras from all makers be able to work with all software? Will there be proprietary file formats for meta-information? The quick answer is maybe not. But the still-image world has been very good at conforming to standards to ease the consumer experience. EXIF—Exchangeable Image File Format— is the standard for tagged image information. Since all camera manufacturers and software developers support EXIF there should be no compatibility problems and as this technology continues to evolve, the industry appears to making sure that consumer confusion is left out of the equation.
There has been significant progress in the development of all these features. Specifically, soon, users will be able to walk in the door after having been to a special event and at that moment, the PC detects the camera over a UWB link and determines that there are new images. In just a few seconds, the images are transferred to the PC, and automated image-organization software analyzes them and stores them accordingly, courtesy of a new technology we all saw at PMA, form Eye-Fi Inc. This new wireless technology is embedded in a new SD card they demo’d at the show. There is no need to hook up cables or wait for images to transfer and download. Now, users simply sit down at their PC to find their new images already properly stored and saved to the computer.
Sky’s the Limit
Other current camera enhancements include increasing the image-sensor technology with affordable megapixel counts going from 14 to 16 mega- pixels this year, to 20 megapixels, and beyond in the future. As for sensitivity, ISO 1600 has become standard, but look for cameras with ISO 10,000 functionality or higher in the coming years. On the resolution front, 720p 30 frame/sec HD video will be common on digital still cameras, and with a move to new CMOS imaging devices, 1080p will be possible on digital still cameras and become standard in camcorders. Memory cards are also getting larger and less expensive. Today $50 buys cards with 4 to 8GB capacity, and next year the same money will buy 16 or even 32GB. Even today it’s possible to store an hour of HD video to solid-state memory in a camcorder, so look for those units to rapidly migrate away from tape and DVDs.
“All these capabilities require increased computational power, but at the same time consumers are concerned about affordable prices and lower power consumption. This is a tall order but next-generation DSP technology is equipped to handle these requirements. The basic technology exists to implement all these fantastic features, but now, the task is automating them so that the average consumer finds them convenient and easy to use,” Labaziewicz added.
Recent portable applications with innovative touch screen GUIs and rich graphics have revolutionized consumers’ ease of use. Now, digital cameras are beginning to implement touch screen LCDs and enhanced user interfaces due to processors, and we’ll site another recent effort from Texas Instruments, the OMAP35x platform, which has a powerful 3D graphics engine.
It’s getting to the point that even Grandma can buy any camera, use all of its features without setting anything up, take a great picture and instantly share it with the whole family – no matter where they are. We have quickly moved from technology that allowed consumers to take a picture, to technology that is allowing them to tell life stories…as they unfold.
Peter Labaziewicz, CTO, Digital Imaging at Texas In- struments contributed to this story.
