Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Digital Cameras & Shooting Techniques => Topic started by: jmb on September 04, 2009, 04:45:06 pm
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I just saw this (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august31/levoy-opensource-camera-090109.html) on another forum and thought others here might also be interested...
JMB
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The engineers at Canon and Nikon must be apoplectic. If this transferred over to consumer cameras, they would be reduced to just selling hardware, and competing on the quality therein. "Features" would be limited only by the imagination of the open source community. Mirror-lockup buttons would be freely available to all!
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Mirror lockup buttons are far too dangerous to put in the hands of consumers!
For those who don't know about it, there is an interesting Canon software hack that is just a little bit in that direction. Gives you inkling of what it might be like if truly open source camera hardware were available.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK (http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK)
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Mirror lockup buttons are far too dangerous to put in the hands of consumers!
For those who don't know about it, there is an interesting Canon software hack that is just a little bit in that direction. Gives you inkling of what it might be like if truly open source camera hardware were available.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK (http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK)
Whoa! That is really cool. Now those guys just need to write something for the Canon DSLRs that turns the print button into a mirror lockup button. I'd pay real money for that.
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The engineers at Canon and Nikon must be apoplectic. If this transferred over to consumer cameras, they would be reduced to just selling hardware, and competing on the quality therein. "Features" would be limited only by the imagination of the open source community. Mirror-lockup buttons would be freely available to all!
damn, you made me go look up "apoplectic".
I don't think they are apoplectic. Their consumer base is huge, the open source community is certainly much smaller- I'd go so far as to say tiny.
The one thing I think this does give them is a huge test market that they don't have to pay for, they merely have to observe. If they see something that everybody's doing on an open source camera, they can build it into an off-the-shelf. Think Adobe here- they encourage outside development, then snap up the good stuff.
Nothing here to get apoplectic about. Not even upset...
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Camera makers love this idea. Other people do the software engineering for free, and they profit from it. Kinda a win-win.
As far as a mirror lock up button, on the newer Canon DSLRs I think you can set the mirror lock up and then save that as a custom setting, or better yet, as a file with the mirror lock up in it. then you just "load" the file back and the mirror is locked up. that way you don't need to dig for the ML setting in the menu. Not as good as a button, but closer.