Showing posts with label camera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label camera. Show all posts
Sunday, June 26, 2022
A sad farewell to an old friend and a warm welcome to a new one...
Sunday, November 27, 2016
"Lensless-camera technology for easily adjusting focus of video images after image capture"
Text and image from Japan Today, 11/26/16.
Hitachi Ltd has announced the development of a camera technology that can capture video images without using a lens and adjust focus after image capture by using a film imprinted with a concentric-circle pattern instead of a lens.
This camera technology makes it possible to make a camera lighter and thinner since a lens is unnecessary and allow the camera to be more freely mounted in devices such as mobile devices and robots at arbitrary positions without imposing design restraints.
Moreover, since it acquires depth information in addition to planar information, it is possible to reproduce an image at an arbitrary point of focus even after the image has been captured. Focus can be adjusted anytime to objects requiring attention.
Hitachi said it is aiming to utilize this technology in a broad range of applications such as work support, automated driving, and human-behavior analysis with mobile devices, vehicles and robots.
As for cameras mounted in mobile devices represented by smartphones and robots, which require designability, making them thinner and lighter while providing higher performance−without imposing restrictions on where they can be mounted−is being demanded. As a camera technology to meet that demand, there is an increasing anticipation of applying a technology called “computational photography” which is a scheme used in an optical system under the presupposition that image processing will be used after images are captured. As a camera utilizing this technology, a light-field camera, which records position and direction of light beams simultaneously and whose focus can be adjusted after images are captured, is well-known. However, a light-field camera is considerably thick since it needs a special lens. On the other hand, a lensless camera which is thin and light because it has no lens has been developed. Even so, processing of images captured by the camera incurs a heavy computational load.
Aiming to overcome the difficulties described above, Hitachi has developed a camera technology−based on the principle of Moiré fringes (that are generated from superposition of concentric circles) − that combines a function for adjusting focus after images are captured in the same manner as a light-field camera and features of thinness and lightness of a lensless camera which computational load incurred by image processing is reduced to 1/300.
Source: https://www.japantoday.com/category/technology/view/lensless-camera-technology-for-easily-adjusting-focus-of-video-images-after-image-capture
Friday, February 12, 2016
"Japan camera makers battle smartphone onslaught"
From Japan Today, 2/12/16.
High schooler Nao Noguchi is a perfect illustration of why Japanese camera sales have plunged the past few years—she uses her smartphone for everything and cannot understand why anyone would bother with a separate device for photos.
“It is easy to take your smartphone out of your pocket if you want to take a picture of someone or something. And you can send the pictures to friends quickly” on social media, said the 17-year-old on a day trip to Tokyo’s historic Asakusa district with her friend Rina.
The selfie-stick toting pair are the camera industry’s worst nightmare.
A rapid shift to picture-taking smartphones has torn into a camera sector dominated by Japanese firms including Canon, Olympus, Sony and Nikon—much like digital cameras all but destroyed the market for photographic film years ago.
And the numbers paint a grim picture: 130 million cameras were sold globally in 2011. Four years later, that figure stood at just 47 million.
The collapse was underscored this month as the firms published their latest financial results, with weak sales threatening a once-vibrant sector.
Now companies are having to scramble for a response, hitting back with upmarket options and offering web-friendly features, or in some cases simply moving away from the hard-hit business.
While Apple and Samsung recently pointed to slowing sales of smartphones, they have proved a mighty rival, offering an all-in-one phone, computer and camera with comparatively high-quality pictures and Internet photo downloading.
The answer, the camera industry says, is to innovate and convince smartphone users to climb up the quality ladder.
“It’s kind of life insurance for the camera industry to always protect this superiority in terms of picture quality,” said Heribert Tippenhauer, an analyst at market research firm GfK.
“The competition from smartphones has almost killed the cheapest cameras, but at the same time so many people are taking photos, as never before in human history.
“The smartphone is the first step into the topic of photography, then people want to upgrade, the potential is there.”
For Canon, whose Sure Shot digital camera has been hit by smartphones, the response is to offer what a phone cannot, such as more powerful zoom options.
“We have been offering cameras that offer features smartphones cannot provide,” said company spokesman Richard Berger.
“People who use smartphones are becoming interested in photography, they want to take better pictures, to be more creative so they are moving up to SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras.”
Another battleground has been in mirror-less cameras, which can be made nearly as small as compact cameras but with picture quality that rivals their bulkier counterparts.
Sony and Panasonic have teamed up with German rivals, including Leica, while Olympus is pushing further into the medical equipment business as a leader in endoscopes, which now eclipse camera sales.
But some like Konica Minolta have thrown in the towel on cameras altogether, opting to go into print and optical devices.
Fujifilm, which was nearly put out of business by the drop in photo film sales, has also shifted focus to other businesses, including the health sector—one of the companies it acquired has developed a drug to combat the deadly Ebola virus.
But Fujifilm has not abandoned the sector that made its name, and scored an unlikely win with the Instax, a nostalgic throwback to the retro Polaroid.
Users can sling the bulky gadget—available in a series of flashy colors—around their neck and print pictures they’ve just taken. The latest versions sell for about $140.
After a slow start, the camera’s appearance on a popular South Korean television series helped jack up Asian sales in recent years, with about five million units moved in the current fiscal year to March.
The appeal of giving friends physical photos sold Calvin Lau on the Instax.
“We never know how photos will come out until they’re fully ready,” said the 31-year-old Hong Konger who now lives in Tokyo.
“It’s fun and exciting for people taking Instax photos and those whose photos are being taken.
“I like the concept that the pictures you take are the one and only ones out there… We can give our friends unique, real pictures.”
Still, Seiko Mikie, who has about 20 years on Lau, thinks the Polaroid throwback is about as lame as it gets.
“I’m not the least bit interested in a Polaroid-style camera—that is something from the Showa era,” said the 50-year-old transportation company employee, referring to the last Japanese emperor’s reign which ended with his death in 1989.
“Back then, the picture quality was good enough for the time, but not any longer.”
Source: http://www.japantoday.com/category/business/view/japan-camera-makers-battle-smartphone-onslaught
High schooler Nao Noguchi is a perfect illustration of why Japanese camera sales have plunged the past few years—she uses her smartphone for everything and cannot understand why anyone would bother with a separate device for photos.
“It is easy to take your smartphone out of your pocket if you want to take a picture of someone or something. And you can send the pictures to friends quickly” on social media, said the 17-year-old on a day trip to Tokyo’s historic Asakusa district with her friend Rina.
The selfie-stick toting pair are the camera industry’s worst nightmare.
A rapid shift to picture-taking smartphones has torn into a camera sector dominated by Japanese firms including Canon, Olympus, Sony and Nikon—much like digital cameras all but destroyed the market for photographic film years ago.
And the numbers paint a grim picture: 130 million cameras were sold globally in 2011. Four years later, that figure stood at just 47 million.
The collapse was underscored this month as the firms published their latest financial results, with weak sales threatening a once-vibrant sector.
Now companies are having to scramble for a response, hitting back with upmarket options and offering web-friendly features, or in some cases simply moving away from the hard-hit business.
While Apple and Samsung recently pointed to slowing sales of smartphones, they have proved a mighty rival, offering an all-in-one phone, computer and camera with comparatively high-quality pictures and Internet photo downloading.
The answer, the camera industry says, is to innovate and convince smartphone users to climb up the quality ladder.
“It’s kind of life insurance for the camera industry to always protect this superiority in terms of picture quality,” said Heribert Tippenhauer, an analyst at market research firm GfK.
“The competition from smartphones has almost killed the cheapest cameras, but at the same time so many people are taking photos, as never before in human history.
“The smartphone is the first step into the topic of photography, then people want to upgrade, the potential is there.”
For Canon, whose Sure Shot digital camera has been hit by smartphones, the response is to offer what a phone cannot, such as more powerful zoom options.
“We have been offering cameras that offer features smartphones cannot provide,” said company spokesman Richard Berger.
“People who use smartphones are becoming interested in photography, they want to take better pictures, to be more creative so they are moving up to SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras.”
Another battleground has been in mirror-less cameras, which can be made nearly as small as compact cameras but with picture quality that rivals their bulkier counterparts.
Sony and Panasonic have teamed up with German rivals, including Leica, while Olympus is pushing further into the medical equipment business as a leader in endoscopes, which now eclipse camera sales.
But some like Konica Minolta have thrown in the towel on cameras altogether, opting to go into print and optical devices.
Fujifilm, which was nearly put out of business by the drop in photo film sales, has also shifted focus to other businesses, including the health sector—one of the companies it acquired has developed a drug to combat the deadly Ebola virus.
But Fujifilm has not abandoned the sector that made its name, and scored an unlikely win with the Instax, a nostalgic throwback to the retro Polaroid.
Users can sling the bulky gadget—available in a series of flashy colors—around their neck and print pictures they’ve just taken. The latest versions sell for about $140.
After a slow start, the camera’s appearance on a popular South Korean television series helped jack up Asian sales in recent years, with about five million units moved in the current fiscal year to March.
The appeal of giving friends physical photos sold Calvin Lau on the Instax.
“We never know how photos will come out until they’re fully ready,” said the 31-year-old Hong Konger who now lives in Tokyo.
“It’s fun and exciting for people taking Instax photos and those whose photos are being taken.
“I like the concept that the pictures you take are the one and only ones out there… We can give our friends unique, real pictures.”
Still, Seiko Mikie, who has about 20 years on Lau, thinks the Polaroid throwback is about as lame as it gets.
“I’m not the least bit interested in a Polaroid-style camera—that is something from the Showa era,” said the 50-year-old transportation company employee, referring to the last Japanese emperor’s reign which ended with his death in 1989.
“Back then, the picture quality was good enough for the time, but not any longer.”
Source: http://www.japantoday.com/category/business/view/japan-camera-makers-battle-smartphone-onslaught
Monday, September 29, 2014
"Own a pair of secret camera shoes? The police should be by shortly for a visit"
From Japan Today, September 25, 2014:
For most of this summer, Kyoto Prefectural Police have been carrying out an aggressive campaign of going to people’s homes and asking them to voluntarily give up their shoes with built-in hidden cameras. These house calls have resulted in hundreds of pairs of these “tosatsu shoes” (voyeur shoes) winding up in police custody.
The shoes contain a hidden camera in the toe behind some mesh which is operated by a remote control
This plan to deter the use of tosatsu shoes to illegally film in private areas such as up women’s skirts had proved so successful that police in Kyoto are spreading the word to other departments and will continue the same tactics in the future.
This strategy started back in mid-July when Kyoto police decided that rather than chase down individual peepers on the streets, they could hit the suppliers instead. On July 1, they raided a camera supply company that sells tosatsu shoes on the side.
They arrested the 26-year-old manager for “aiding voyeurism” which is a violation of the Nuisance Prevention Ordinance and fined him 500,000 yen. While putting the supplier out of the shoe camera business and confiscating their supply was a victory for the police, it later proved to be a mere drop in the bucket.
Several other tosatsu shoe vendors were still selling online with impunity and later that month an Okayama man was arrested while attempting to film up young girls’ skirts at the Kaiyukan Aquarium in Osaka. The shoes he used were from the same company the police had previously raided.
According to police, that company had sold about 2,500 pairs of tosatsu shoes from 2012 to 2014 for a total revenue of around 60 million yen. Setting the money aside for a moment, consider that 2,500 pairs of camera shoes were in circulation in a two-year period. Considering this is only from one company, think about how much pervy recording must be going on out there and get ready for a good boggling of the mind.
Luckily for the police, also seized during the search was a list of about 1,500 customers with their delivery addresses. By mid-August they came up with the plan to pay these former customers a visit one by one. This was tricky as simply owning a pair of camera shoes isn’t illegal and the owners technically didn’t have to relinquish them.
Nevertheless, the Kyoto Prefectural Police relying heavily on the fact that they are police and therefore intimidating, asked each customer to hand over their tosatsu shoes and fill out a “disposal request” on which they have to state why they purchased the shoes in the first place.
They went on, house by house, until, as reported by a police spokesperson, almost all of the shoes in Kyoto were collected – with the exception of a few who “threw them away.” They are also passing along addresses of customers outside of the jurisdiction to the appropriate authorities.
So if you happen to own a pair of tosatsu shoes, you may want to consider disposing of them before the police come a’knocking. But chances are if you were dense enough to buy them online and leave a record of the transaction with your correct name and address, you aren’t going to listen to me anyway.
Source: http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/own-a-pair-of-secret-camera-shoes-the-police-should-be-by-shortly-for-a-visit
See the shoes here:
For most of this summer, Kyoto Prefectural Police have been carrying out an aggressive campaign of going to people’s homes and asking them to voluntarily give up their shoes with built-in hidden cameras. These house calls have resulted in hundreds of pairs of these “tosatsu shoes” (voyeur shoes) winding up in police custody.
The shoes contain a hidden camera in the toe behind some mesh which is operated by a remote control
This plan to deter the use of tosatsu shoes to illegally film in private areas such as up women’s skirts had proved so successful that police in Kyoto are spreading the word to other departments and will continue the same tactics in the future.
This strategy started back in mid-July when Kyoto police decided that rather than chase down individual peepers on the streets, they could hit the suppliers instead. On July 1, they raided a camera supply company that sells tosatsu shoes on the side.
They arrested the 26-year-old manager for “aiding voyeurism” which is a violation of the Nuisance Prevention Ordinance and fined him 500,000 yen. While putting the supplier out of the shoe camera business and confiscating their supply was a victory for the police, it later proved to be a mere drop in the bucket.
Several other tosatsu shoe vendors were still selling online with impunity and later that month an Okayama man was arrested while attempting to film up young girls’ skirts at the Kaiyukan Aquarium in Osaka. The shoes he used were from the same company the police had previously raided.
According to police, that company had sold about 2,500 pairs of tosatsu shoes from 2012 to 2014 for a total revenue of around 60 million yen. Setting the money aside for a moment, consider that 2,500 pairs of camera shoes were in circulation in a two-year period. Considering this is only from one company, think about how much pervy recording must be going on out there and get ready for a good boggling of the mind.
Luckily for the police, also seized during the search was a list of about 1,500 customers with their delivery addresses. By mid-August they came up with the plan to pay these former customers a visit one by one. This was tricky as simply owning a pair of camera shoes isn’t illegal and the owners technically didn’t have to relinquish them.
Nevertheless, the Kyoto Prefectural Police relying heavily on the fact that they are police and therefore intimidating, asked each customer to hand over their tosatsu shoes and fill out a “disposal request” on which they have to state why they purchased the shoes in the first place.
They went on, house by house, until, as reported by a police spokesperson, almost all of the shoes in Kyoto were collected – with the exception of a few who “threw them away.” They are also passing along addresses of customers outside of the jurisdiction to the appropriate authorities.
So if you happen to own a pair of tosatsu shoes, you may want to consider disposing of them before the police come a’knocking. But chances are if you were dense enough to buy them online and leave a record of the transaction with your correct name and address, you aren’t going to listen to me anyway.
Source: http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/own-a-pair-of-secret-camera-shoes-the-police-should-be-by-shortly-for-a-visit
See the shoes here:
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