The Future of Photography?

[Mike Farley]

The introduction of digital revolutionised the way images are captured, but what has not really changed is the shape of the cameras* we use. According to this article at Inaging Resource, Olympus could be about to change all that.

http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/20 ... f-the-year

* The exception is mobile phones, although that is more a case of a device originally designed for one purpose taking on the role of another and is just as revolutionary in its own way.

[Mike Farley]

Since I wrote this post, DxO has produced its own version of a camera without a viewfinder - viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1656&p=7879&hilit=dxo#p7879 - and we already have the Sony QX models which are designed to be used in conjunction with a mobile phone. Now Olympus has put its Air offering on sale in the US, but it is unclear whether it will make it across the pond to the UK and Europe.

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/la ... -far-55066

For me the appeal of this camera lies its open platform, which means that how it fares will depend more on the uses third parties develop for it, unlike the other systems designed solely for use with mobile phones.

[davidc]

The DxO one is interesting but at that price? Wow. If it was several hundred dollars cheaper then maybe it'd be worth a look - as is? No thanks!

[davidc]

And in a seamless and fortunate segueway, I had a chance to play with another potential future of photography. The new Sony cameras, the RX100-IV and RX10-II, have a new sensor which is capable of 1/32,000th sec shutter speeds, 1000fps slow motion and 4k video. Interestingly, 17mp stills can be extracted from the video, so the question now is has the era of capturing the decisive moment passed and are we now capturing the decisive 5 minutes of footage and cherry picking the best scene? (I know it's been possible for a while but to my understanding the previous best was 8MP, so this is quite the improvement)

I had a chance to play with them today, it was admittedly very cool shooting at 1/32,000th sec and though I'm not a huge videographer, the slow-mo and still image capture was impressive.

Here's a photo @ 1/32,000th -


Water Sphere by David, on Flickr

More info and a link to the 1000fps video I shot is on my site -

http://davidcandlish.photography/news/2 ... on-preview

[Mike Farley]

The DxO one is interesting but at that price? Wow. If it was several hundred dollars cheaper then maybe it'd be worth a look - as is? No thanks!

And it has to be paired with an iPhone which are not cheap either. The underlying technology looks interesting and the price will probably fall to a more reasonable level once the early adopters have bought in.