Greg Elin has some smart observations on the future of digital cameras. Among them, that the rise of digital signifies a paradigm shift in the use of cameras away from being image capturing devices and towards data gathering devices:
Already some still digital cameras record audio, or entire movies. But that is still thinking too small, too “pretty picture”. The digital camera is really a kind of universal recording and documenting device, a potentially multi-sensory device of which we are currently employing only its eyes and ears within the narrow bands of perception congruent to our own eyes and ears. Cameras could record tempature. Or infrared energy. Or location with the help of GPS. Or signal from bluetooth devices or RFID tags. We could use our cameras to interpret barcodes. Or measure distance. (Rather…TELL us distance. Even film-based cameras used infrared and sonar signals to establish distance for focusing and exposure.) Right now, we’ve designed our cameras more or less to see like we see. Thanks to the incredible invention of pencil of light, we’ve also grown accustomed to cameras as visual recording devices. But whereas film-cameras have been designed to control the exposure of a recording medium to light in order to create a perceptable image, digital-cameras are data-recording devices merely optimized for recording data from light in order to mimic the experience of film-cameras, including the production of a perceptable image.
