July 2003 Archives
For some time I've been wondering when the worlds of consumer digital cameras and camera phones will collide. When will consumers realise that (a) it's quite nice to send photos from where ever you are, immediately, but (b) the quality they'll get at present is awful. Camera phones basically ship with very poor quality VGA (at most) sensors, which are pretty much useless for anything other than MMS. However, at some point resolution improvements will become a driver for boosting upgrade desirability, and resolution will creep into the low end digicam range (1 - 2 Megapixel). At this point will we see "name" camera manufacturers such as Nikon, Fuji and Canon appearing in the cellphone market ? Actually one company is already there - Sony - but Sony has a lot of irons in the fire (and another - Panasonic... maybe a vanity camera phone with a Leica badge ?). The camera and Bluetooth equipped Sony Clie PDAs, associated with a small but well designed Bluetooth cellphone, would in my opinion make a nice combination. Then again SonyEricsson have the P800 ... a phone which manages to pack a lot of average to poor functionality in a fragile and clumsy form factor.
Any what about adding Bluetooth and a TCP/IP stack to a Sony digicam (actually I though this had been promised long ago...) ? Modularity seems way out of fashion at the moment. And at the consumer level at least, there doesn't seem to be any truly satisfying way (yet) to send photos on the move.
The Register today notes that a Dutch consumer group has been forced to reverse it's public position on boycotting Epson printers () due to to so-called deceptive chipped ink cartridges. Elsewhere, The Register has an article which claims that inkjet ink is 7 times more expensive than Dom Perignon.
Well so what ? You can't make very good prints with Dom Perignon. I could also compare with the cost of Coca Cola - the point is that it is completely irrelevant.
I have to say I've seen little to zero complaint from serious photographers about the running costs of Epson photo quality printers. Sure they're expensive - but they are much more practical and cheaper than any previous method of printing archival-quality colour photographs.
So it's really not so clear why all these bystanders are making such a fuss...
I'm a photography magazine addict. Actually I'm a magazine addict full stop. But I read a lot of photography magazines, especially Chasseur d'Images (France), Réponses Photo (France), Practical Photography (UK), Outdoor Photography (UK), and sometimes Outdoor Photography (USA), and if I'm really desperate, Popular Photography (USA) (and I always regret it). Generally these have interesting and sometimes very good articles on the art, craft and science of photography. But the reviews....
Hmm. Seems fairly straightforward. Ok, well I need to do a bit more tidying up of the layout, and so far only the index page is formatted, but not so bad for 1 hour's work.
This is basically a test post. Photoblogography is a place where I will publish whatever I feel like talking about that is generally associated with photography. It is also a bit of a test bed to see how Movable Type works and how I can configure it.
