Tech Speculation III-ish

I know when I started this series I had three technologies in mind… for the life of me I can’t remember what the third one was. I’m taking that as a sign that it probably wasn’t an important trend.

So instead I’ll submit a rant about digital cameras in its place. I’ll try and format that rant so it feels like an extension of the technology speculation series.

At some point digital camera manufactures are going to have to face a grim realization. Increasing the number of mega pixels a camera can capture is going to result into no perceived value for the end user. There should be some point when having a bazillion pixels and having a bazillion and one pixels makes no difference to the user. It may be possible to construct an argument that we’re already there.

I think that once manufactures accept that the race to have the most megapixels is over the first chapter in the book of digital camera development will be finished. Since their introduction digital cameras have been striving to reach parity with their film camera cousins. Film cameras set the standard of what a camera should be and digital cameras did their best to live up to that standard. Film cameras captured more detail than digital cameras so digital cameras kept increasing their pixel counts. I think now we are close to the point of parity (whether we’ve passed it or not I’m not sure). Can anyone successfully inspect a picture and be 100% sure that it was taken with a film camera?

Now it is time for digital cameras to surpass their analog forbearers and do things that film cameras simply cannot. They will expand the definition of what a camera can do. Here are a few features that I look forward to in future generations of digital cameras. Some of these features have already started to appear in one form or another.

GPS enabled cameras. I remember back when having a camera that could do a date/time stamp was a cool thing. Sure it marred the corner of the photo, but at least you’d know which Christmas the photo was taken at. Digital cameras fixed the corner marring issue by simply encoding the date and time in the photo’s metadata. Now I want my digital camera to have a built in GPS so it can not only record when the photo was taken but where it was taken. Besides simply being cool, this will give us another way to sort our photos, geographically in addition to chronologically. Think of how powerful of a search tool that is. As things get further back in your memory which is easier to recall, the exact date something took place or the location it took place? Combining the two you should be able to construct a pretty tight set of candidate results.

I want my digital camera to have wireless connectivity. There are a bunch of different media card standards (compact flash, SD, SmartMedia, MMC, Memory Stick, etc) and it shouldn’t matter which one of those the computer I’m currently at does or does not support. The camera should support Bluetooth or similar technology and simply be able to connect to the computer wirelessly (I don’t want to have to carry around extra cables) and make my photos available. I suppose the reason this isn’t more common is the fact that due to the increased number of megapixels a single photo is often a couple of megabytes. I guess we need to wait for a wireless Bluetooth-like standard that can move a serious amount of data around.

I want magnetic induction charging. This goes for all gadgets, not just cameras. For years I’ve kept my electric toothbrush on my bathroom counter on its little stand. While it sits there it charges itself up. I don’t need a special cable; I don’t have to plug it in. Why aren’t all my gadgets charged thusly? A camera (or any gadget) should be able to sit on a little pad that keeps its battery topped off. Then when I pick it up it should have a full charge and be ready to go. I dream of a day when you just place your gadgets on a table or in the console of your car and they call start charging automatically and wirelessly.