News

• Smartphones Take a Bite Out of Digital Camera Sales
• Digital Cameras Shifting to become Household Items Unless DSC Vendors Respond
• From Consumers to Professionals, Video Capture Gets Hot
• 3D Flounders and Only Finds Limited Acceptance
• Cameras on Tablets Improve and Quickly Follow the Smartphone Path for Specifications
• Compact Interchangeable Lens Cameras Gain Traction Outside of Japan
• Metadata Gains More Attention: GPS Becoming More Common
• Computational Photography Gains Ground as Microprocessors Get More Powerful
• Hands-free Cameras Gain Attention

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Eye-Fi, the company that developed and markets the WiFi-transmitting SD card, alleges that the SD Association's recently announced “Wireless LAN SD” standard infringes its intellectual property. According to the SD Association, this standard is “the SD Association’s first wireless SD memory card standard combining storage and wireless capabilities. Consumers will be able to transfer pictures, videos and other content wirelessly from most existing digital cameras and digital video cameras to web-based cloud services and between SD devices over home networks.”

In response to the announcement (by SDA), Eye-Fi's CEO (Yuval Koren) wrote the following in an Eye-Fi blog post, "Several years ago, Eye-Fi’s founding team realized that capturing photos or video is just the beginning, and that in an increasingly connected world, the true magic is in sharing. We invested tens of millions of dollars and several years to create unique technology that lets people wirelessly transfer photos and videos directly from their camera and mobile devices…. As currently written, essential Eye-Fi patented technology would be violated by anyone implementing this draft specification".

Koren also indicates that the SDA misrepresented the standard as having been "adopted" because (at the time of the announcement) the membership’s intellectual property disclosure window had not yet closed and the Executive Members had not yet voted on its adoption. According to Koren, under SDA rules, "SDA members are allowed 60 days in which to respond with claims to patented intellectual property and plans around licensing that IP to the SDA. Should essential IP be presented during this process, and not offered for license, the SDA should revise the specification and begin the review cycle again. After this process, the SDA Executive Members have to vote on adopting the specification."

Eye-Fi says it has disclosed its intellectual property to the SDA, “detailing multiple patents essential to the current SDA draft specification.”

More than a quarter of all photos taken are now captured with a phone. The share of consumer photos captured in the U.S. taken on smartphones has grown to more than a quarter of all shots snapped, while the camera proportion has declined, reports market research company NPD Group.

Liz Cuting, NPDs senior imaging analyst, recently sat down with Paul Worthington (Senior Analyst, 6Sight) to discuss NPDs Imaging Confluence Study – click here to listen in on the interview.

Through a compilation of responses from more than 2,200 "2011 Holiday Photo Usage" survey participants and data from 100 million Photobucket users, Photobucket Corporation illustrates the current attitudes and habits of those capturing photos and videos throughout the 2011 holiday season.

According to the survey, consumers used mobile devices to capture video during the recent holidays at an unprecedented rate. In fact, of those surveyed, 80 percent took video via a mobile device at least once, and half used a mobile device to record video daily or multiple times per day.

This is an increase from the Photobucket Summer 2011 survey where only 59 percent of participants used mobile devices for video at least once and 25 percent used mobile devices for video multiple times per day.

Photobucket's internal data also show that video uploads to Photobucket.com have more than doubled in the past year.

Data from the 2011 summer survey suggested that there was a high threshold for adoption of mobile apps and that, once adopted, there was enthusiastic use; this assertion was again supported in the recent survey. Although 43 percent of respondents to the 2011 holiday survey indicated they have yet to try a mobile app for photos, those who use mobile apps at least once, if not multiple times per day doubled to 42 percent, up from 20 percent in the summer survey.

This enthusiasm is further supported by Photobucket's internal data, which shows that mobile app use has increased by 64 percent since the launch of Snapbucket, Photobucket's second mobile app that enables users to "snap" photos from their mobile device, personalize those photos, and then easily share them with their social community.

"We saw explosive growth in mobile in 2011; in fact, we topped 10 million mobile downloads to end the year," said Munro.

The 2011 holiday survey showed a significant decrease in the number of consumers reporting use of digital cameras for capturing the majority of their images throughout the season, down from 82 percent in the 2010 holiday survey to 64 percent in the 2011 holiday survey. However, 38 percent reported that they switched back to a digital camera for some holiday images. This may indicate that although overall digital camera use is declining, these devices still serve a purpose, perhaps for capturing what consumers consider their most important images.

Over the past year, the number of choices for capturing, sharing and storing photos online has grown extensively; however, despite consumers' tendency to fragment their online photo storage, survey results show a trend toward consolidation of digital memories.

In fact, the survey revealed that only 33 percent of respondents had images on three or more sites; well down from 50 percent in the Photobucket Summer 2011 survey and 52 percent in last year's holiday survey. Those reporting images on more than five sites have declined as well, from nine percent in both previous surveys, to just under six percent in the most recent holiday survey.

"The explosive growth in the photo-sharing market has shown how popular the market really is. Unfortunately, this growth has also overwhelmed people with choices for sharing and storing images," said Tom Munro, CEO of Photobucket. "We are happy to see a trend toward consolidation; consumers, after trying multiple options, desire a single place in which they can store and share the story of their life in photos and video."

Other interesting results from the 2011 holiday survey include:

* Sharing holiday pictures on social media sites is up — Year-over-year, growth went from 57 percent to 80 percent

* Use of images on holiday cards continues to be very popular: — 41 percent used an image for their holiday card

* Popularity of photo-sharing sites also remains high: — 83 percent of consumers report storing their holiday images online

Photobucket has provided an Infographic that further explores the survey results as well as additional data garnered from Photobucket's 100 million users.

Source: Photobucket

The ability to capture data from "visiting consumers" is no longer exclusive to on-line retailers. Thanks to innovative software that works with video from security cameras, brick-and-mortar businesses now have the ability to count, log, and track people who visit their store without compromising their privacy .

"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available," says Steve Russell, co founder and CEO of Prism Skylabs, the innovators of the new software.

Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing consumer movement but is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. The software can blur people into anonymous ghosts, show them in a pixelated image, or replace them with a "heat map," on which colors signal the density of people.

"We give the ability to go beyond the facades of businesses and show you the inside and even how busy it is, using very effectively privacy-protected imagery," says Ron Palmeri, Prism's president and other co founder.

Although security cameras are typically low quality, Prism uses computational photography techniques to combine multiple frames to produce images with higher quality and resolution than the original video. Software installed on a computer linked to the cameras digests the raw video into a compressed form that is sent to cloud servers, where Prism's software processes it and then sends the resulting visualizations, statistics, and other data to the shop owners PC, smart phone, or tablet.

Russell suggested that he hopes to eventually offer more sophisticated analysis by taking advantage of emerging computational photography techniques.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Biologists currently use techniques such as X-ray crystallography as a means of understanding and modeling the structure of proteins however, most proteins don't form crystals. One possible alternative is the use of x-rays or electron beams. However, beams with an energy of a few KeV tend to destroy biomolecules so the resulting images might not be accurate.

A team (lead by Jean Nicholas Longchamp) at the University of Zurich in Switzerland has found a solution — imaging proteins using low energy electron beams that don't destroy biomolecules. They have created an electron hologram of a protein molecule called ferritin.

The technique…
They mix ferritin and carbon nanotubes in water which they then allow to evaporate. The evaporation takes place in a sieve-like container and leaves some of the ferritin-carrying nanotubes suspended across the holes in the sieve which allows the team to send the low energy electron beam from one side of the hole and then record the interference pattern on the other.

Per Longchamp and his team, "We have reported the very first non-destructive investigation of an individual protein by means of low-energy electron holography".

They've even compared their images to ones of ferritin imaged with high energy electrons and are able to show the damage that the high energy bombardment causes.

They now want to improve the resolution of their technique and have a number of ideas that they will soon be investigating.

Source: MIT Technology Review

According to NPD Research, Smartphones accounted for more than a quarter of all the photos shot in 2011. Handset manufacturers identified image capture as a key application for mobile devices early on, and have been iterating the sub-webcam-quality cameras that graced the original cellphones ever since. Today, smartphone cameras include sensors, software features and lenses that rival the quality that was once only available in dedicated cameras.

According to Wired, the four key areas of development to watch are:

• New sensor technology: Sensor size is generally an important factor in final image quality, and we'll continue to see sensor technology improving so that smartphones can take better and better images.

• Name-brand optics: Companies are taking a name-brand approach to defining their smartphone cameras. Now it's true, just because a company makes superlative pro lenses, there's no guarantee that it imbues the same quality in its mass-market smartphone glass. Nonetheless, simply by employing name-brand lenses in their smartphones, companies send a very clear message to consumers: Image quality matters to us. Your smartphone is a camera, plain and simple.

• Packing in the pixels, pulling in the light: Eight megapixels is the new standard for smartphone cameras and we're increasingly seeing handsets go beyond that — regardless of whether we need greater image resolution numbers. However, what you might want to focus on is the capture of light rays. There's a new camera technology that eschews the megapixel arms race in favor of capturing more points of light, and we could be seeing it make its way into smartphones in due time.

• Improvements on the software side: To differentiate their camera offerings from one another, many handset manufacturers are adding personalized touches to their camera software. 

Other features to look forward to in 2012?

"We'll also likely see more features that have appeared in higher-end digital cameras, such as more sophisticated high-dynamic range or motion-blur reduction," NPD analyst Ross Rubin told Wired. This will be done by combining multiple rapid-fire exposures into a single image.

Wired also reports that "on the video side of things, we could see video capture move to 1080p at a rate of 60 frames per second or higher. Once you enter 120fps territory, slow-motion video becomes a possibility as well".

Source: Wired.com

According to a report by GBI Research, the diagnostic imaging market will be marked by an expansion of hybrid modality technology, the growth of imaging in emerging markets and negative growth due to reimbursement cuts in the U.S.

“The advantages of combining two different modalities have been manifold,” according to the GBI Research report. “PET/CT has been adopted across the globe given its advantages in imaging anatomy as well as the physiology of the organs which have been extremely useful in the imaging of tumors as well as in cardiac imaging.”

As technology marches on, the overall imaging market in the U.S. has taken a hit in recent years, largely as a result of reimbursement cuts, according to the report. In 2008, the diagnostic imaging market in the U.S. was worth $71. 3 billion, but that dropped to $61.4 billion by 2010.

However, demand in emerging countries could compensate for the decline of the American market and saturation in other developed countries.

“Emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil are witnessing a high growth rate in the diagnostic imaging market,” read the report. “The demand for diagnostic imaging equipment in emerging countries will offset for the low demand in developed markets.”

China is building approximately 30,000 hospitals in rural areas that will need imaging equipment, while India’s demand will be sparked by new hospitals in urban areas, according to GBI Research.

Overall, the leading vendor in the global diagnostic imaging market for 2010 was GE Healthcare with a market share of 22 percent, according to the report. Siemens and Philips Healthcare were next with 20 and 17 percent market share, respectively.

Source: Molecular Imaging

The latest forecast data from GfK Digital World, produced in partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), estimates that smartphones will account for 22% of global technical device (Smartphones, mobile phones, LCD TV, mobile PC, desk PC, digital still camera, tablet, and other devices) retail sales in 2012 – an increase of 4% against last year.

GfK Digital World has revealed global spending on consumer technology devices will surpass $1 trillion in 2012 for the first time, increasing by 5% over 2011’s figure of $993 billion.

The popularity of smartphones is significantly impacting the digital camera market. As new user groups continue to evolve and smartphone imaging features improve, we see a growth in sales.

In comparison to digital cameras, Smartphones have a large number of comparable features, but the ability to access the internet, is one of their main advantages. GfK figures show that in the first nine months of 2011, only 10% of digital cameras were equipped with Wi-Fi, however for mobile handsets, the share was 24% and for smartphones it was even better (87%). Direct internet access is a huge selling point due to the popularity of "social imaging" (sharing photos via sites such as Facebook).

However, mobile camera features have not yet matched those found on higher end photography equipment (HD video,analog zoom etc.). As consumers become more enthusiastic about photography, this increases the demand for high end cameras.

GfK reports that, as a consequence, SLR cameras and compact cameras with interchangeable lenses grew globally by 17% in the first nine months 2011 and so outperformed the market for digital cameras. However, with an increase of 81% in volume, smartphones were still significantly ahead and are likely to enjoy further growth in 2012. GfK experts predict a sales volume of approximately 600 million units, which equals an increase of 39% versus 2011.

Find out more on GfK Retail and Technology

One of the things former Apple CEO Steve Jobs wanted to "revolutionize" was photography. Jobs believed the iPhone was a vehicle for doing so, but current imaging technologies limit the photographic abilities of smartphones. A new book by Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple, indicates that Jobs may have found the solution he was looking for… Jobs purportedly met with Ren Ng, Lytro CEO, to discuss how Apple might integrate Lytro's light field technology into its products.

The iPhone cameras have undergone many revolutionary changes changes over the years, changes that have made the iPhone one of the most popular cameras for capturing images.

Jobs wanted to change users' expectations of photography, and he apparently believed Lytro's light field capture could do just that.

Lytro's technology relies on capturing far more information about a scene than a fixed grid of colored pixels. Using high resolution sensors combined with a specially designed micro lens array, the sensor captures the intensity, color, and direction of light rays entering a camera through a lens. That data can then be processed into the kind of flat, two-dimensional image that many of us are accustomed to. However, that data can be mathematically manipulated to change various aspects of the image, including focus point, focal length, depth of field, and even perspective shift. All these details can be recalculated after the image is captured, removing the need to think about them while shooting.

If Lytro's light field capture technology were placed into an iPhone, the iPhone's relatively bulky autofocus lens mechanism could be replaced with a sharper, more compact, and less prone-to-damage fixed focus lens. Without having to wait for the lens to focus, images could be taken even quicker and users would not have to give up the benefits of selective focus.

The folks at ars technica believe that an iPhone combined with a light field capture sensor could potentially revolutionize the way many people take and experience photos while on-the-go.

What do you think? Join I3A's "Mobile Imaging" conversation…