The prototype camera from Canon captures high-resolution video and stills.
Canon demonstrated a new concept camera that captures extremely high resolution video, from which still images can later be derived.
“The Wonder Camera” premiered at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, in the Japanese Pavilion — with word that the hardware itself is not due for decades.
Canon’s concept cam reportedly combines video and still image capture, although little information and no specifications were offered. The unibody device is around the size of an SLR.
“The massive resolution of the camera was demonstrated on several occasions during the show,” reports Mike Hanlon at Gizmag, “taking a still image and zooming in on a very small and quite distant object in that wide vista to reveal incredible detail. From one image taken by the camera, the presenters on stage plucked dozens of portraits of people in the audience, using the camera’s image recognition capabilities to capture just those people who had smiled.”
This device raises some interesting questions about what constitutes a camera in the future. Just because it has always been a still capture device doesn’t mean it will have to remain that. On the contrary just because you can now capture video with a still camera doesn’t mean that all cameras will be come video cameras. I think that the opinion expressed in some articles that “the Wonder Camera is a futuristic device which predicts the death of still-image cameras in place of high-resolution video cameras from which individual frames can be selected and used in place of a photograph” is inaccurate. The resulting device is not likely to be either a still camera or a video camera, but something else entirely. But whatever happens, this devices makes us Wonder.