Apple Must Develop a Digicam
Now that I think of it, there is one more reason I decided to revive my weblog. You see, like many Mac fans, I love to play armchair Steve from time to time and make grand pronouncements about which direction the company should take (witness Jason Kottke’s recent “Sherfari” mockups, for example). And lately, I’ve been developing an idea so good that I simply can’t keep it to myself: Apple should—nay must—bring their considerable ingenuity to bear on the digital camera!
Unlike the PDA, that perennial object of Apple rumor mongering, the digital camera is a device whose time has truly come. While the PDA market has become a particularly dreary sinkhole in a tech economy already full of them (see this article if you don’t believe me), digicams have experienced rapid mainstream adoption, which is likely to only increase in the coming years.
Indeed, from the snapshot-taking tourist to the fashionista shooting the next Vogue cover, the world’s photographers have seen the future, and it is digital!
However, as a serious amateur myself, I can tell you that there is only one problem: current digital cameras (at least consumer ones) are a lot like MP3 players before the iPod. There are many very good ones (I say this as the owner of a string of Nikons), but no truly great ones. Most have very limited storage space, offer hideous user interfaces, transfer through slow USB interfaces, and produce pictures that (let’s not kid ourselves) can’t compete with a simple 35mm slide for sheer image quality.
How can Apple solve these problems, you may ask? What might an “iCam”
look like? Well, if I was Apple’s digital photography product manager (and, God willing, someday I will be :-), I would start by doing a deal with Foveon and working to secure Apple’s place as the first to market with a consumer camera incorporating that company’s X3 imaging chip. Unlike the charge coupled devices found in most digicams today, the X3 is capable of making images without resorting to interpolation of red, green, and blue values that makes today’s digital photos look so digital. Foveon’s images look remarkably natural because the X3 chip is capable of actually assigning the proper color value to each and every pixel of the image. This may sound like a simple concept, but it is very powerful and produces images that truly rival film.
The rest, I suppose, should be obvious: incorporate the same Toshiba drives from the iPod for storage, include a Firewire interface, and build in that trademark Apple UI design that no one else making digital devices seems to understand. My only other request personally would be for a top notch lens—preferably a Leica (although they’re already working with Panasonic, unfortunately). Such a package would, like the iPod, be a quantum leap beyond anything consumers have ever seen.
If Apple was to create such a device, I find it very difficult to imagine that it would not be a monster success. Apple has already discovered through the iPod how attractive the consumer electronics market can be (for gaining both market share and mindshare), and this would have the potential, in my opinion, to make the iPod look like a sideshow.
If anyone from Apple is reading, however, and all of that is not enough to convince them, I will offer only eight more words of encouragement: Foveon has already been working with Microsoft. Wouldn’t want to see the boys from Redmond and their henchmen at Flextronics produce the next iPod, now would we?