William Heuer, Senior Vice-President, Casio
If video is the killer app for point and shoot cameras, it will surely make it even more difficult for consumers to choose between a digital still camera with video or a digital camcorder with photo!
“The ultimate camera is the one who does both digital still photos and videos very well… This whole convergence of still and video is getting to a point when there will be a real blend, there’ll be video still. You’ll be able to take snapshots out of the videos for example”, said Casio senior vice-president, William Heuer, speaking yesterday at Infotrends‘ Digital Imaging ’08 conference in Burlingame, Calif.
So, tired of putting more megapixels and editing features in their cameras, manufacturers are now looking at video to try to differentiate from one another. And Japanese maker Casio is at the forefront of that trend.
Casio is already shipping two ultra-fast point-and-shoot cameras – the Exilim EX-FH20 and EX-F1 – that can record high-speed movies at up to 1,200 frames per second (fps) and can take digital still images at a rate of 60 fps. With high-speed video you can later play the movie in slow motion and see things you wouldn’t otherwise. But these high-end cameras are bulkier than the more consumer friendly cameras Casio is currently selling.
However at the Infotrends conference, the Casio executive unveiled that next Spring, the Japanese maker will launch a slew of consumer cameras with those same high-speed movie and picture capturing features as well as support for HD movie.
High-definition point-and-shoot Cameras to threaten video camcorders
For Heuer, the move by digital still camera makers to add high quality video might even threaten traditional digital camcorder specialists like Canon, JVC, Panasonic or Sony.
“It’s much more difficult to take a still photo than a video. With photos you need very high quality optics that you don’t need to do video. So it’s much harder for the camcorder guys to add high quaity photo capturing, than for us to add high quality video”, adds Heuer.
One other thing that Heuer sees Casio adding to its products is wireless.
Although the Casio executive didn’t go into specific, he mentioned Eye-Fi, a company that sells a Wi-Fi SD memory card that sends automatically and wirelessly pictures and videos from the camera to an online service. However, because of the very competitive market, Heuer didn’t think Casio will actually embed Wi-Fi chips into its cameras.
Super high-def cameras also means the end of optical zooms
Finally, with so much megapixels in cameras, Heuer sees a day where they will be no need for an optical zoom in a camera.
“Let’s say you have a 100 megapixel camera. With such a resolution and so much data, digital zoom actually becomes a very good alternative to optical zoom. We’re not there yet but it could happen”, said Heuer.
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Digital cameras can do things film cameras cannot: displaying images on a screen immediately after they are recorded, storing thousands of images on a single small memory device, recording video with sound, and deleting images to free storage space. Some can crop pictures and perform other elementary image editing. The optical system works the same as in film cameras, typically using a lens with a variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device.
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