http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/2005/04/camera-phone-gets-major-upgrade.html
The above blog focuses on emerging mobile technologies (mobtech) by Vangorilla (only the author’s blog name I hope). The author cites Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs- The Next Social Revolution. book as his source of inspiration, and paraphrases Rheingold’s notion of Mobtech as Phase 2 of the internet. The blog currently has interesting posts on
• Carl Zeiss lenses for mobile phones
• the emergence as search engines as the most prominent current key advertising real estate.
Both issues present interesting departure points for my current research. Of equal interest is that the author has no apparent affiliation with a media program, likes to do triathalons and may have some primate attributes…but I digress.
Carl Zeiss is a heavyweight brand in photography and is recognised as a leader in the field of optics by photographers worldwide. In recent years Sony has traded on this brand in its range of one chip and three chip consumer/prosumer cameras and now with its HD prosumer camera the HDR-FX1 HDVcamera.
As an imaging professional it is difficult to dispute the importance of high quality lenses. Great lenses provide advantage through
• high-quality glass elements that increase sharpness throughout the full aperture range, and decrease flaws such as aberrations, coma and astigmatism
• elements made of fluorite glass that eliminate diffraction making for sharper, colour-accurate images
The low f-number prime lenses made by Zeiss are acknowleded as the best. And carry the price tag to match. So when they are to mass produce the tiny optical elements to be used in mobile phones, it is reasonable to expect some filter down technology. I don’t expect these lenses to match up to a four thousand dollar prime lens, but I do expect them to far surpass any existing mobtech currently available.
The convergence of Zeiss with mobtech is significant because of the affordance it provides consumers in capturing high quality images and video. It will allow imaging to become a P2P reality: the quality of the images most people can shoot on digital cameras is of a high enough standard that they feel quite comforable distributing them by email. With these values soon to become available in mobile technology it is reasonable to expect a dramatic increase in the distribution of images because the capture device is the distribution device. Immediacy is a driver of change.
