VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM SUMMER WORKSHOPS
BICYCLE
FARNBOROUGH AIRSHOW 2008
CERAMICS AND SOUND EXHIBITION
100 PERCENT DESIGN SHANGHAI
HAMBURG HARLEY DAYS 2008
BERLIN DESIGN FESTIVAL 2008
NEW YORK DESIGN WEEK 2008
MAKER FAIRE 2008
Back when photographers had to throw a black sheet over their head to take a picture, their bulky accordion-looking cameras still had something in common with today's most advanced digital shooters: the user had to depress a shutter button.
That crucial interface device, present on every camera with a mechanical shutter, may soon go away. As Casio product planner Jin Nakayama explains, "A shutter button [might] be one of the principal causes of bad pictures. If users did not release a shutter, there [would be] no camera shake." And how will a camera compensate for this? Well, Casio's new EX-F1 camera shoots sixty 6-megapixel frames per second, and one of those frames is bound to be the one you're looking for.
No word yet on how Casio might plan for the user to trigger the camera into action. Perhaps it will just start shooting the second you take the lens cap off, and we'll all be resigned to TiVo-ing out individual frames?
100% Shanghai Gallery
Steve Portigal
It's the economy, stupid
Dunne and Raby
Comments
I'm not sure I see how eliminating a shutter button will eliminate camera shake altogether. In compact point-and-shoot types, the ergonomics of the top-mounted 'shutter' button may cause increased shake, but with a reasonably grippy super-zoom such as the Casio shown above I fail to see how the shutter button could be the primary cause of shake.
Any camera is going to shake while being hand-held, shutter button or not. Perhaps a way this Casio camera could compensate for the shake using it's fast frame-saving rate is by analysing the frames taken in a given time after the shutter button has been depressed, and choosing to save the steadiest?
I would've thought the best way to minimize the effects of camera shake on a consumer point-and-shoot would be to increase the high-ISO quality (i.e. decrease noise in high-ISO shots) so that faster exposure times could be used for a given light level.
Show me a way to vastly reduce camera shake in a DSLR (which, by definition, needs a physical shutter), however, and I'm all ears...
Now, that's interesting. If Casio can be creative and come up with an effortless way to weed out the unwanted images, they might be on to something. Otherwise, it's not really fitting a need (as in, I never hear anyone say that they wish their camera didn't have a shutter button).