What will the camera of the future look like? Young Australian designer Corey Sanderson hopes it will look something like this. Story by Andrew Fildes and James Ostinga.
Remember when the three most visible controls on a camera were the aperture ring, the shutter speed dial and the ISO wheel?
Somewhere along the way those controls made way for four-way controllers and buttons that could control multiple functions at once. We got fireworks mode. And aquarium mode. And face detect. And somehow, in the push to make cameras simpler, well... they got more complicated.
As more and more features are added to cameras, the useful stuff gets harder to find. To adjust the basic controls - aperture, shutter speed and ISO - most cameras require you to press one button while simultaneously turning a dial. Want to change the aspect ratio of your images? Just hope that command hasn't been buried three levels down in the menu system to make way for the new "Misty Mountains in the Rain" scene mode.
In technology, some products do "simplicity" better than others. The iphone revolutionised mobile telephony because it did really complex things very simply. Learn a few basic routines and you're in business. Cameras haven't been like that. They should be.
Enter Cory Sanderson, a talented 23-year-old Australian industrial design student who hopes to do for the camera what the iPhone did for the mobile phone.
His design for a new kind of camera, the AvTv challenges a few rusted-on conventions of camera design and is a contender in the Australasian Student Design Awards later this year...
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Good Gear Guide; Canon EOS 1100D; Compact cameras go head to head; Sitegrinder 3; How to create tonally rich high-dynamic-range images; How to take a blurry background.
