BRAINS FOR YOUR CAMERA

Wenger in or Wenger out? This camera-topping gadget might share a name with North London’s most deluded football team, but it has a much better grasp on reality than the other Arsenal – using AI to assess the scene you’re trying to photograph and suggesting the best camera settings for the shot. It sits in the hotshoe of pretty much any DSLR or CSC, talking to the camera via the USB port and to your phone via Bluetooth, giving you full remote control from up to 100ft away. It essentially takes the guesswork out of photography. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the object? You could see it like that, but it won’t tell you what to take a photograph of or how to compose it. That’s still down to your organic intelligence to work out. Once you’ve managed that, the Arsenal takes 18 environmental factors into account and uses an algorithm not dissimilar to the one that controls self-driving cars to compare your shot with a library of snaps taken by pro photographers, copying the settings used to take the most suitable one and adjusting your camera accordingly. Sounds like wishful thinking, but the sample shots suggest it really works. What else does it do? Stuff that usually requires out-of-camera editing can be done by the Arsenal and fed back to your phone to be reviewed at full resolution, before firing it straight to Instagram to farm those sweet, sweet likes. It can do smartphone-style HDR, focus stacking, long exposure astro shots and timelapse video. If there was a camera with an auto mode this intelligent it’d be filling in the form for Mensa. Want one? The Arsenal’s Kickstarter closed last month having raised over $1.2m, but you can expect to pay about £175 for one when they go on sale. Say cheese!