Scanning ahead…
Jon Devo looks at the cameras that are adopting the best features of smartphones
Brands have flirted with connected cameras a few times over the years. Samsung made the initial thrust with the clunky but funky Samsung Galaxy Camera in 2012. Its slogan was bold: “Camera. Reborn.” It was ahead of its time, pre-empting an age where photography would be the main use for phones, and phone calls would become Zoom meetings.
Sadly, the Galaxy Camera was relatively overpriced, too slow, and released at a time when the trend was towards smaller devices.
Panasonic tentatively embraced the connected camera concept in 2014: its Lumix CM1 was an Android-based device with a one-inch sensor and a fixed Leica DC Elmarit 28mmequivalent f/2.8 aperture lens. The CM1 offered unrivalled image quality compared with the best smartphones of the time – but again, it was too slow, too niche and considered overpriced by many. It received strong reviews, but the masses weren’t convinced.
If you look at smartphone releases in 2020, their camera specifications are the main tool used to convince consumers to upgrade. Previous attempts at connected cameras fell short because they couldn’t do the job of smartphones well enough. But the processing chips powering today’s smartphones and the engineering capabilities of today’s camera manufacturers could see connected cameras become more standard over the next couple of years.
Zeiss announced the connected ZX1, a smart camera with a 37MP full-frame sensor, in 2018, and it’s finally been released. It runs a custom Android OS and has Lightroom built-in. It has no memory card slot, but instead comes with 512GB of storage. This connected camera has been created so that you can edit and share images directly within and from the ZX1. There are some innovative ideas in the ZX1, such as baked-in Lightroom editing. But at $6,000, its pricing again puts it in the niche category.
With Zeiss seemingly repeating the past mistakes of others, where does that leave the future of the connected camera? I believe smartphones have already got the answer, but there’s a disconnect between these two worlds. Traditional cameras are getting smarter, but the heavy lifting on the software side has been done by smartphone makers, just as the design and optics side has been mastered by camera manufacturers. What we need is for these two worlds to fully collide.
Smartphone power and user interfaces combined with camera build and optics will usher in the next leap in camera capabilities. We’re tantalisingly close.
“Connected cameras could start to become more common”