Any
doubts that marketing departments are driving digital camera
development have now been completely dispelled with the arrival
of yet another doubtful feature designed to attract purchasers
who hate taking photographs.
Well, okay, perhaps today's fourth or fifth wave of digital
camera owners don't actually loathe the process of capturing
images, but they'd certainly like snapping pictures of their
kids to be as simple as picking up a tall mocha at the neighbourhood
Starbucks. And, like assembly line coffee, what they end up
with might not be thrilling, but it will most likely be better
than what they could do on their own. Best of all, it requires
little work and no mental effort.
In
a previous rant about barely useable digital camera features
I included face recognition technology, which was introduced
in the past year or so. But even this development had some
justification. Camera owners might actually use it.
At least in theory, face recognition allows harried parents
and grandparents to make sure that the essential facial features
of their tiny subjects – their eyes, nose and mouth,
if not their ears – are in focus before the final fatal
push of the shutter button. With a couple of clicks the cheerful
grins from yet another birthday or holiday gathering would
be captured and collected without a blurred face to be seen.
Adding
facial recognition to auto focus gave users the true belt
and suspenders solution. If one failed the other would
kick in.
And it wasn't just older folk who benefited. All those pictures
of people doing goofy things that were uploaded to sharing
websites like Flickr would contain faces that were sharply
defined, even if the rest of the image was blurred. The same
was the case for those fleeting moments at retirement parties,
weddings and summer barbecues.
Face recognition ushered
in a new era. For a short time everyone (at least those in
the marketing departments) was overjoyed
at this latest breakthrough.
But then, apparently, there
were those among the throng of new digital camera owners
who were, despite the clear focus,
less than satisfied with their results. I seems that some
of the sharply defined faces in their photos were, gasp,
not smiling.
That's right – even though this
is hard to believe – some
people had not moved their lips into the happiness position
quickly enough.
And, as everyone knows, the whole point of
a photo is that at least the main subject should be grinning
from ear to
ear. Otherwise how would we know that
they were having a good time?
In fact, it was noticed that the faces might even
be, if the shutter had been tripped at an inappropriate moment,
expressionless or, much worse, frowning
or sad.
This discovery, I can only conjecture, caused a flurry of
dismay among the marketers. After all, to them the whole point
of a digital camera is that users should expend as little
effort as possible, beyond hitting the "on" button and pointing
the camera, to get their images on to a memory card and from
there to a computer, and beyond to a web site.
That's why every camera these days has all of those special
settings like "candlelight" and "fireworks" and "sunset" and,
for all I know, "family arguments." It is simply unthinkable
to marketers that anyone be expected to learn anything about
their camera beyond the basics, because they know from surveys
that everyone thinks that digital equipment of any kind is
too tough to learn to use properly, especially if all you
want to devote to it is the process of opening the box, inserting
the batteries and putting in the photo card.
So, the marketers decided, something must be done
about the lack of smiles in the photos captured with the aid of face recognition.
The result is what
some
manufacturers are calling the "smile shutter" or the "smile
shot" a setting that detects when a subject's cheeks and cheekbones
are going higher, when teeth are actually showing and when eyes are narrowed,
all signs that they are grinning at the photographer. Then the shutter
trips automatically.
As Olympus says in a recent press release: "Smiles
are infectious, seductive and a sign of happiness. But they can also be
fleeting. Until now, capturing
a smile at just the right instant was a serious challenge.
" Until now, that is, because Smile Shot from
Olympus has solved the problem. Five new models feature
this new
scene mode that works with
integrated face detection
technology to identify people in an image and then waits until
they smile before taking a photo. Automatically, perfectly
focused and
exposed, and at precisely
the right moment."
Happy talk from the marketing department, indeed.
I have
to disagree slightly here with the suppositions inherent
in the promotional material from Olympus. I don't seem
to have any problem getting my oldest grandchild to smile.
In fact, she has had, at the age of two, so many photos
taken of her (likely three times as many as have been shot of me in
an entire lifetime) that she actually stops whatever she
is doing when a camera is out.
She then turns to the lens and smiles with absolutely no prompting.
She is always ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille.
Many times,
in fact, when what I really want is a look of rapt concentration,
as she discovers some new activity, I
have to wait to capture her when
she is unaware of the camera. Otherwise she will never stop grinning,
sometimes twisting
her face into a parody of a real smile.
In a good recent piece in USA
Today, technology writer Edward C. Baig writes that the
new Sony smile shutter technology — which can be set
at low, medium or high detection levels — works off
just a single face in your LCD, so that at least you don't
have the wrong person triggering the shutter.
My suspicion is that after a few tries (unless they can't
figure out how to shut it off) the smile detection feature
will go unused after the first couple of tries just as most
people forget about those "fireworks" and "sunset"
settings once they discover they don't really make that much
of a difference in the final product.
By the way, another recently-introduced feature,
this one from HP — the
folks who also brought you the ability to make people appear thinner — allows
you to smooth the faces of less-than-young subjects without having
to resort to Photoshop after the fact.
All of this makes me wonder
what possibly could be coming next from our friends in the marketing
department, who it would seem
must be
constantly
bombarding
the camera company scientists with suggestion after suggestion
to make camera use easier for those who don't want to think
while they take photos.
In order to help them along, I've
come up with a few possible features that might be helpful:
- A people eliminator, that automatically removes relatives
you don't like
from group photos. This would be would allow the user
to place a red X over the face detection box of, say,
the aunt
who always complains that you never quite
manage to capture her looking at her best or that second-cousin
who likes to make strange faces just as you depress the
shutter button.
- Built-in, highly lifelike sounds of birds that are played
whenever you halfway depress the shutter when you are taking
pictures of your cat, thus attracting its attention as you
snap the photo. In fact, a whole library of sounds could
be added for various animals, even those at the zoo or ones
photographed in the wilds. Perhaps, for safety's sake, it
would be best not to include ones that might attract bears.
- The ability to send an e-mail message
to your computer or phone that would tell you when either the batteries
are getting low and need a recharge or that
they
should be replaced. Now that I think about it, this
feature sounds so real that it's probably already in use in some manufacturer's
cameras.
- An anti-drunken-stupidity mode that uses a built-in breathalyzer
to stops party-going users from taking humiliating photos
of their friends and
then uploading
them
to web sites. It shuts down the camera completely
for 12 hours after its user is detected to have a blood
alcohol
reading of .08, which
would prohibit them
from operating a motor vehicle and would indicate
that they were essentially too smashed to think straight.
- An electronic counter that tells doting parents and grandparents
when they have taken absolutely too many shots of one particular
child and they should begin concentrating on photos of the
other youngsters in their immediate family.
- Notification through the LCD screen that your camera
has been replaced by a newer model with far more features,
which
means
you should throw it away
and buy the
latest version. Now that's a feature that should
really appeal to the marketers.
Links to Peter's previous commentaries:
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