Mayank's Viewpoint

(The original version of this article was written for the website Serious Compacts and published on May 8, 2008.)

An exercise often taught to young designers to break their mind block, or to think “out of the box”, is to envision how their design problems would be tackled by masters of design. “How would your creative director do it? How would one of the legendary designers do it?” Just imagining someone solve one’s design problem with his/her expertise or style is often enough to fill one’s mind with ideas.

Coming to cameras or compacts specifically, one can’t help but wonder if the camera manufacturers are currently going through a mind block. The variety and freshness of both form and function that one saw in compacts just a few years ago seems to have dried out (an article by Nikon guru Thom Hogan illustrates this point beautifully), and most compacts look and feel more or less the same; it’s like you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Upgrades seem a mere formality. Stereotypically speaking, 2006: More zoom + 1 more megapixel; 2007: face recognition + 1 more megapixel; 2008: wide angle + 1 more megapixel (if you know what I mean . Sigma DP1, for now, seems to be an exception.

Coming to the point, do camera manufacturers or designers need to think out of the box today and get out of their mould? I believe yes. And a very simple thing they could do is envision an “iCamera”! If Apple were to make a camera, how would they do it? Knowing that Apple rethinks from scratch every product they make, a few things immediately come to one’s mind:

- A simple, all encompassing compact exterior design, weather-sealed, sturdy, stylish.

- ONLY TWO models to begin with: one with 30-150mm image stabilized zoom and the other with a fixed 400mm f2.8 image stabilized tele.

- 8gb of internal memory + slot for flash memory card, 12gb of internal memory for the 400mm model.

- RAW (.DNG), JPEG and PNG image image formats.

- Part iPod like control wheel driven UI and part driven by an iPhone like touch screen.

- Large, wide screen, hi-rez touch-screen display with very quick, simple and customizable access to menus.

- Large (4/3 perhaps or larger), class-leading sensor technology.

- ISO 25-1600, no high ISO noise till 1600 but ‘extra’ noise could be added through a filter for those fond of “old world high ISO digicam or film look”. (This would also reduce dramatically the number of “high ISO noise” arguments on camera forums… just kidding

- 10 megapixel maximum image size, 6 megapixel sRAW.

- SLR style viewfinder (and not EVF) + Live view.

- 6 frames per second RAW capture in case of the 400mm model with extra-large memory buffer. 2 frames per second for the other two models.

- Durable shutter with 100,000 shutter cycle.

- The camera software would include Photoshop-like filters, eg:
a) Automatic correction of lens distortions
b) Polariser
c) Hard and soft neutral density and graduated filters of varying intensity
d) Extra dymamic range, which would stitch two exposures of same shot into a high DR photo
e) Bokeh enhancement

- Lightning fast start-up and response time.

- Built-in GPS.

- Class leading battery life, say 600 shots with live view.

- A comfortable, rubberized grip.

- Built-in speedlight in the 30-150mm model that would work with in-camera software to yield near-perfect flash photographs.

- Downloadable plugins and even an SDK (Software Development Kit) to enhance camera features and enable third-party developers to develop innovative camera features some of which could be used ‘during’ the picture taking process (and not later as is mostly the case currently). Here, the possibilities could be endless…. Eg: IR effect plugin, soft-focus portrait plugin, macro plugin and so forth.

- Sync and updates with iPhoto through USB or Wi-Fi (just like iPod and iTunes).

- Price: $999 for the 30-150mm model and $1199 for the 500mm model.

Well, just trying to think out of the box here… and lastly, this may be a strong feature exclusion but the camera would NOT have an iPod in it