What software exactly are modern DSLRs or mirrorless cameras missing? I know, picking at software is a favorite past time on HN, but most of the time it is missing the point. Examples for this include: ERP systems, embeded and or safety relevant software, software in highly regulated markets or sectors. And, it seems, cameras. Computational photography is all fine, on an iPhone.
The most glaring is just good integration with phones and cloud services. From what I've seen, none of the systems that offer WiFi/Bluetooth integration are actually any good.
In terms of computational photography... I think they're fine... a lot of things can be done in post-processing, which is fine, and there's been amazing advances in autofocus and stabilization.
Pro photos are too large to be any good with syncing to a cloud service while you are on the go. My 16mp camera is considered old at this point but still makes 34mb raw files. 15 photo burst is a half a gb in other words. now measure your lte upload speed.
Agree. If I were Canon, I’d try backing a truck full of money up to Apple in order to secure an API connection through which their cameras could have the user authenticate securely with Apple and throw photos into a black box, which would spit them into the user’s iCloud Photo Library exactly like an iPhone pic. It may be too late though if Apple thinks people might delay iPhone upgrades (since those are so often camera-quality-driven) if they had a better-quality way to take pictures.
Eh. Shuffling pictures from my G9x MkII to my Android phone is pretty simple enough. I do wish the data transfer speeds were faster, but it is still stupid simple to pair to the phone. From there I can see the photos and choose which to download. Or I can select them on my camera and send them to my phone or laptop. I've often taken the camera with me on a trip with some friends and shuffled the photos into group chats the next time I had a few minutes of downtime.
The camera which is several years old at this point already has some good video stabilization. The AF is backed with good hardware, its pretty good and can even do face detection. Its far faster and more accurate than my much newer Pixel.
I wouldn't really care to do much post processing on the camera itself other than the basic filters and affects it can already do, as the interface is pretty small so it is hard to get details. If I'm really going to do some post-processing I'll be pushing it to my desktop with a large monitor so I can really see what I'm doing. But honestly if I'm going to work at it on my desktop I'll more likely just pull out the SD card and stick it in the computer and get far faster transfer speeds.
About the only feature I'd personally like would just be some kind of direct camera integration with Google Photos/OneDrive/iCloud/OwnCloud/whatever, have it just start syncing photos the moment it detects its online. That and good built-in GPS support. Apart from that I don't really know what else I'd do with more "smart" connectivity. I bought a camera like this because I wanted to manually adjust things instead of having some AI model twist and warp the photo into whatever the training data suggests looks good.
Interesting. I posted on the micro four thirds subreddit recently asking if the Panasonic app integration was any better than Olympus' (which ... isn't good) and commenters seemed to agree it was not.
I'll consider a switch to a Panasonic for my next camera, since OM Systems seems mostly moribund.
FWIW I don't know if they'll make another G9x. The most recent similar camera would probably be the G7x Mk III. I think that's probably the camera I'd get if I were to replace my G9x tomorrow. I'm a huge fan of the small size of this G9x though.
I had a Panasonic (GX85) and have since switched to Fujifilm, but I found the menu system UI and phone/app integration on the Panasonic a lot better and more usable than many other cameras I've tried (including Sony's and Fuji). The Fuji (X-T30) makes up for it on the UX front through by exposing more of the settings via external controls.
I’ve got an old t3i running magic lantern that has features camera makers still refuse to integrate, such as punching in digitally to check for focus while recording video, zebra stripes, and focus peaking. Admittedly most the stuff I want is related to video but I was sideloading firmware with these features (the aforementioned Magic Lantern) in 2013.
My Pixel takes reasonably good images, even printed some in A4, at A3 they suffer. That is for the camera generated JPEGs, the RAW files are all but unusable.
It shows that smartphones use small, and crappy, sensors behind even smaller, and crappier, lenses. Phone got a long way, and there is a reason they replaced point-and-shoots. They are still a far cry from "real" cameras.
> A camera should be by definition running on dedicated camera firmware, and nothing else.
Says who? There's no intrinsic reason a camera couldn't run with an Android OS. In fact, there's a lot of good reasons why you would want that - simpler development platform, reusing existing drivers, etc...
> There's no intrinsic reason a camera couldn't run with an Android OS.
There is: battery life and startup time.
DLSRs have no problem being being on standby for weeks if not months with minimal battery drain and then springing to life within a second at the press of a button. Android phones do no even come remotely close to that level of efficiency.
A lot of that comes down to the always-on radio on the phone... When I've done road trips, I've used my phone mostly as an mp3/podcast player and had it in airplane mode, and it lasted much longer than when it was just in normal operation. Standby for several days.
My M1 air is in standby for weeks at a time on a single charge. There's no reason you can't do similar with a phone. Maybe not months, but definitely for extended periods of time.
E-readers running Android can last forever on a single charge, too. The biggest drain on most phones' battery are the wireless radio (like you described) and those big, beautiful screens :) But certainly not the OS itself!
A DSLR has the added benefit of not needing a screen to be on for it to work (this is why they still have better battery life than mirror less as well). Then again, SLRs have even better battery life (it's only used for the light meter and on newer models autofocus motor and film advance).
Sure, a camera is a specialized tool doing a limited set of functions. It does not need the vast majority of functions Android offers: phone, 5g, internet, app stores... No nerd for that on a camera.
What camera needs: fast "boot", stability, reliability, ability to run offline for decades.
And no, I don't want all software being developed the way a social.media app for a phone is.
Also called sanctions (we do those all the time, and it is usually only the poor suffering the most) or the morally superior prime directive.
Sanctions can be necessary, and usefull, but incredibly hard to do right and target them correctly. Sanctions also suck at changing whomever is target for whatever.
Based on a book by Dan Drezner, sanctions aren't impactful. However, the threat of sanctions is. In order for the threat to be credible you need to follow through with actual sanctions whenever they are threatened and the other party is non-compliant.
Well, what Lilium is flying is a demonstrator, not a prototype. The difference is that a prototype is close to the final product and test flights can be used in the early phases of the certification path, demonstrator flights cannot. Or to put harsher: all Lillium has is two model aircraft that have close to nothing in common with the 7 seater they are selling.
And one could call it a scam, when tuh product you sell has nothing to do with the product you show (and no, mock-ups at airshows don't count at all), and the product you sell has, so far, no clear timeline until certification. The aerospace version of vaporware. Whether or not it amounts to an actual scam woupd be for courts to decide. Right now it looks a lot like Nikola, without the option to use a hill to fake the product demo.
As a sidenote regarding test flights: last time I checked, those were unmanned, with a demonstrator and not a prototype and no longer than 6 minutes. Which is as far from what serious people in the field call a test flight of it could be. Good for PR and investors so, it looks cool.
Also, one can make everything fly, if you put enough thrust to it. Doesn't mean you have product that can sustain a business.
That prototype/demonstrator (let's not get silly about words here) looks like it's actually flying properly though. Transitions to horizontal and vertical flights and all. They are planning to have the first manned flight end of this year.
A scam would be intentionally misleading people about the ability of this thing to fly at all and then grabbing the money and run.
scam would also involve disgruntled investors trying to sue and getting their money back. There have been a few such cases about investors wanting their money back. But the headline is that Lilium is continuing to raise lots of money and making steady progress to getting their products launched. And those court cases seem to be going nowhere so far. The nature of VC funding is of course that things don't always go to plan.
Just because this company isn't satisfying your need for instant success and instead is following an entirely reasonable path to certification, which is slow for any airplane, doesn't mean it's a scam. By that logic anything is a scam until it emerges fully designed and manufactured on the market. That's not how things work in the real world.
This thing has investors, prospective customers with letters of intent, and flying prototypes.
Nikola is actually shipping trucks at this point too. Yes, they got caught with a non driving prototype running downhill and they got punished for that and the CEO might do some jail time for that. But the thing works now and they are selling lots of trucks that actually move cargo around. A scam would have been if the thing proved to be vapor ware. As it turns out, it wasn't. It was just running a bit late.
I haven't been following those, but the GP's question wasn't about any of the things you enumerated.
The big question is: have they demonstrate a loaded plane flying through a useful distance while keeping enough reserve energy for satisfying the safety requirements?
Their videos are very well produced explanations about everything but this. There's some stuff about a few changes that reduce the reserve requirements, but still, I couldn't find anything about range.
Nah, China already sealed of their internet as did Russia and to a degree India. If we have, in the end, a dead US-centric internet, well, as soon as people start ignoring that it wpuldn't be a real loss to humankind. Until we reach that point so, we are in deep shit. And LLM spam and crap content being US centric is least of our problems.
Bandwidth in and out of the country is heavily throttled in both directions and packet filtering applies on both. It's very hard to crawl the Chinese internet from the west and it has always been that way. If you want to do it you have to do the crawl from inside China, and then you're open to having your datacenters raided and software stack stolen (this isn't a theoretical concern).
A) Copyright laws exist for a reason, even big tech should respect them (considering their utter disregard for anything but money, well...) B) Especially Meta knows aleeady too much about everyone, now they can add AI trained on all of that (but what could possibly go wrong with that, right? C) I don't want AI to be trained on my stuff, to the point I don't share anything publicly anymore and only use encrypted clouds for back-up (and not even sure I'll do so any longer)
By the way, not everything is about money. Convincing people it is, is even a better trick than the devil convincing people he doesn't exist (that is assuming one believes in such things, and then considers the devil to be evil instead of the people ending up in hell, but I digress).
That depends on tge terms of service and the jurisdiction you are based in. And whether or not you want to go to court over it or not. IANAL, but I am fairly certain terms of service do not trump national copyright laws. At max, you might forgoe some usage rights, copyright will stay with you (at least were I live, as you cannot sell copyright, only usage rights if I understood, and remember, the finer points of our laws aroubd that stuff correctly).
That bog tech gets away with, is not necessarily because it is legal, but rather that people don't care, law makers only start to care and even if people would care, it is nigh impossible to successfully litigate.
None of the above is written in stone, nor should it stop us from doing something about it.
IANAL either, but AFAIK you grant meta an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license over your content. Meta isn't likely to have overlooked such a basic legal requirement. What they were doing wasn't illegal.
I'd very much prefer my privacy to be respected universally. One has to note so, that there is a very significant difference between a democratic government having rules in place to intrude on it and some capitalistic corporation doing it for profit.
I'd prefer it too, and sure, but it's not that the EU pays lip service to defending your privacy against corporations. They actually do defend you, very effectively.
Maybe what is missing is some simple rules, that we should all follow, with a good reason why they matter.
The only way to achieve that is to make the laws enforceable. They should probably try hard to fine some government organisations as well. The laws though littered with necessary exceptions for government are a step towards respect for privacy.
