[BruceBanner]

Many of you might not be aware but before I got into photography seriously I was a quite well known little 'mp3 player' reviewer. I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile but I did put out some reviews of DAPs (Digital Audio Players) that saw hits (views) reaching into the high tens of thousands. I never liked getting into reviewing sound quality per se (as I feel that is quite a subjective talking point) but instead stuck to a lot of the facts about a player such as fully exploring its features and whether there were any little hidden quirks to the player that the menu forgot to mention (the brand Cowon were infamous for this).

I was there from the start, I saw the rise of mp3 players and ultimately the demise (or semi demise.. they do still exist but the smartphone has done a lot to kill that market... making a similar dent that the point 'n shoot market has experienced). At the beginning these mp3 players ran their own software, their own in house operating system, many times the player missed out on some crucial features that were deal breakers for many buyers. It could have the best sound quality in the world for example, but if it did not support on the fly playlist building then many users passed on the device.
For awhile there was a fantastic initiative called 'Rockbox', a free customisable community UI/Firmware that had a rich feature list that many players could adopt, in essence the audio community were able to fill the gap on what the player natively could not do by offering a new OS for the player to run on.
Eventually this died out, and nowadays you will see a lot of the mp3 player market running on Android. We saw with our own phones how paid for App developers were themselves being competitive and releasing updated versions of their App with continuing feature requests being completed to stay competitive in the market. Eventually the mp3/DAP market took noticed and started making their own players Android, a wise move say many.

And so it has made me think recently, about such things as Face/Eye Detection and 'Animal Face Detection' as being requests that many photographers would like, I wondered how the phone market is doing in this regard, has their Face/Eye recognition systems been significantly better than well known camera brands for a long time now? Would our camera experience be better if it was running on Android and we could choose certain applications to handle our shooting experience? Would it become more open source, and you could get a Pentax App from the store that was even more customisable, and those hear within our community who have coding and app developing skills could also assist in feature requests? Would that be better?

And then comes the social media side of things. The WiFi option on the K-1/KP I find truly abysmal, I now carry a small usb C>usb 3 cable and a SD Card reader for when I am in a hurry and want a picture off from my camera and onto social media. I don't even have to transfer the picture to the camera, I just need to connect things up and I can navigate to where the image is on the SD card and share, I guarantee I can do all of this far quicker than using any wireless app transfer/Image Sync

So then if the cameras had Android installed, a choice of Apps to use for the shooting experience as well as access to common social platforms (flickr, fb, insta etc), would this not make more sense? What then also about certain photography apps like Golden Hour and star tracking apps? I dunno... to me it just seems like an obvious direction to take the dslr cameras (in the same way high end mp3 players have demonstrated), but obviously there are issues here because no well known brand is really embracing the idea. We're still stuck with our in house menus where feature requests are ignored and firmware releases are only pushed out for new lens support...
Would we not have a huge pocket of Android App developers able to improve the shooting experience vs looking for specific fewer people that know their way around the Pentax OS?

I think people will be reading this and worry that I am suggesting that to go Android would make the shooting experience wildly different to what we have now, somehow like a phone app stuck on the back of our LCD screens and have to do everything by touch No no no no! This is not what I mean at all. You could have exactly the same kind of menu system that we have all come to know and love, exactly the same kind of shooting experience, all the dials and such do what you expect, its just that it's sitting on Android instead, which means more app development support and all the other things mentioned above. We'd still need Pentax to give us an official App that already mimics what we have, it's just I think it would open up the entire app development market to giving us more, or if Pentax made the source code open so we could improve upon what they give (instead of relying on them for feature requests we do it ourselves).

Thoughts? Do we think this is the direction all brands will finally head down eventually? Is it just a case of proper implementation or is there another reasons why you think this will never happen?

Cheers,

BB

[Beepaitch]

There’s this: CP+ 2019: Zeiss ZX1 - hands-on with the full-frame Android camera: Digital Photography Review

[mlt]

Basically, you’re asking for a dslr with a built in Android phone. Not going to happen since phones, particularly Android devices are basically disposable. Locking a camera user in to the same communication device for the lifespan of the camera or telling consumers they need to replace their camera in 1-2 years to keep up with Android changes would not be a good marketing plan.

[luftfluss]

Yuck.

[BruceBanner]

There’s this: CP+ 2019: Zeiss ZX1 - hands-on with the full-frame Android camera: Digital Photography Review

Ahh interesting..

Basically, you’re asking for a dslr with a built in Android phone. Not going to happen since phones, particularly Android devices are basically disposable. Locking a camera user in to the same communication device for the lifespan of the camera or telling consumers they need to replace their camera in 1-2 years to keep up with Android changes would not be a good marketing plan.

No, I'm not. If you read my post you will see your argument is thin because the mp3/DAP market is already on board with Android and these players are not trying to replace your phone at all. And they may run behind iterations of Android but don't ever mistake the idea that people don't want to upgrade! It could even be another incentive for camera manufacturers to be releasing their cameras running Android as it's another reasons to keep churning out a new camera every year or two to continue supporting sales. No camera manufacturer wants you to buy their product and not rebuy again for 5yrs lol.

This is purely about the OS that the camera is built around, why are Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Fuji, Canon, Olympus... why are they all propriety? Why have none of them thought it a good idea to embrace Android, in terms of 'features' they would have a massive advantage over their competitors. The level of customisation for their cameras would be a massive selling point. Heck... you could dumb the camera down if you wanted and streamline you menus. The possibilities are endless...

[K1N8]

Please, just no.

I'm ever so often surprised about the excellent quality of the K-1 firmware. It's stable! Not even once has it frozen on me.

The usability is well thought through, with a lot of attention spent on (undocumented) details.

For example in multi exposure mode, the K-1 overlays the already taken photos in live view.

It's flexible, it doesn't get in the way, it does things the right way.

Pentax obviously spent a lot of time developing that firmware, something that rarely happens in today's IT world.

I would highly doubt that any Android app would even make 1/8 of that effort.

Also, I really do not want any ads distract me from shooting.

There are so many reasons not to.

[Adam]

I think apps in cameras will eventually make an appearance. However, right now Android is still too heavyweight for this purpose. Perhaps a better solution (or an embedded version of Android) will present itself in the future.

Adam
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[K1N8]

No camera manufacturer wants you to buy their product and not rebuy again for 5yrs lol.

Actually when I spent that much money on a camera I expect it to hold for 10 years. The durability of Pentax is a reason to buy it.

[ben.p]

An embedded lightroom will be nice

[BruceBanner]

Yuck.

What's yuck? Imagine you're holding your Pentax camera right now, it has all the same buttons and dials that you're used to, the menu looks the same, you even navigate the same way. But now... thanks to the community you can choose to upgrade to the next firmware and that has an added a feature of allowing you to hide certain menu items that you feel you never use and are just additional annoyances to scroll by/over. Or... that now... thanks to the community you can upgrade to the newest firmware where they have added the 'Aperture Bracketing Shooting Mode' that currently exists only on the KP. Now you can use it on a K-1 or K3 etc etc.

The point is you don't have to make the leap of Android>Phone/Social Media/pure touch screen interface, that's now how this works at all (or shouldn't work). It's about bringing in more app development, more choices, greater community development, more features, less features, basically taking the power away from a couple of firmware guys at Pentax HQ and passing that stuff back onto us. At least that is very much how I have seen it done and implemented within the portable audiophile industry. I'm not making this stuff up, so I am now curious as to what the hurdles have been for camera manufacturers, they must have been having these conversations in their meetings...

Please don't mistake what I am suggesting as a kind of user experience as the Zeiss zx-1 suggests below, that indeed does look yuck

There’s this: CP+ 2019: Zeiss ZX1 - hands-on with the full-frame Android camera: Digital Photography Review

This looks badly implemented purely from the minimalist bland lack of tactile button setup. My idea would be not to do away with any of that. You need tactile buttons and dials. It feels as though anytime I have seen some camera manufacturer do a lame Android thing they completely fail to see that, they think somehow that the consumer will be happy touching a screen all the time <sigh...>

[photoptimist]

It's an interesting possibility. Nikon did try it with the COOLPIX S810c but it did not seem to catch on.

I can think of three issues that might make using Android for ILCs some combination of unpleasant, impossible, or just not likely to gain adoption:

1) Is Android real-time enough? If a phone app stutters occasionally, the user might be annoyed. If an ILC camera app fires the flash after the second curtain starts to close, they will be more than annoyed. Android is written in Java and Java has automatic garbage collection. That's great for developers and for freeing up memory resources in a light weight device. But automatic garbage collection is not something a photographer wants in the middle of a shot.

2) Can Android handle exotic VLIW (very long instruction word) processors? The image processors inside ILCs are not ordinary multi-core CPUs. The Milbeaut processor uses 256 bit instructions that enable it to execute up to 112 instructions per clock cycle. It's a special kind of computer core in which the instruction typically encodes hardware connections between data buses and logic units to do several computations on a single piece of data at once while doing that to several pieces of data. Its' common is specialized signal process system but not general purpose computers. Can the Linux kernel in the core of Android handle that easily or how much R&D woudl it take to fork Android for a version that can? Or maybe camera makers could rewrite all their code to run on ordinary CPUs and GPUs, but that's not going to be cheap.

3) Can Android (and apps) handle complex physical UIs? Android devices typically have the same very simple physical UIs: a touch screen, power button, up/down volume buttons, and a home button. All the phones and tablets pretty much have the same UI elements that are used in the same ways. In contrast, the K-1 has something like 21 physical buttons and 7 selector dials. Other cameras have different numbers of buttons and dials and there's often no analogs between models. The OS, it's APIs, and the apps need to know whats what and provide appropriate functionality to all those elements. Otherwise you'll have apps that do not use most of the buttons and dials on the camera, use them in inconsistent ways, or fail to work on some cameras because that camera lack a third control wheel.

I'm not say it can't be done but those may be some of the obstacles.

[tokyoscape]

It would be nice if more developer can develop apps for the camera. But from my own experience in everyday life here in Japan, I can understand... maybe not but a kind of get it from looking at myself back when I just came here. Japanese design UI are so complicated, make little sense for usability or many times I will just say it is a mess!
I guess, even they run a camera with Android, they will find a way to make the UI very hard to use anyway.

[BruceBanner]

Please, just no.

I'm ever so often surprised about the excellent quality of the K-1 firmware. It's stable! Not even once has it frozen on me.

The usability is well thought through, with a lot of attention spent on (undocumented) details.

For example in multi exposure mode, the K-1 overlays the already taken photos in live view.

It's flexible, it doesn't get in the way, it does things the right way.

Pentax obviously spent a lot of time developing that firmware, something that rarely happens in today's IT world.

I would highly doubt that any Android app would even make 1/8 of that effort.

Also, I really do not want any ads distract me from shooting.

There are so many reasons not to.

'stable'... ha! yeah... sure...

let me present to you a couple of nice quirks I've had;





K-1 decides it's from 'Stranger Things' and is in upside down land... Not only upside down but the colours are way off from how they were at the time the shot was taken. Cute.

K-1 decides to do a full hard reset during a wedding I was shooting back in April. Hard reset, meaning upon salvaging I had to select Language and re input all my User Modes back in again... on a wedding shoot. Brilliant!

K-1 this past Friday at a wedding shoot locks up, on/off dial doesn't work, only course of action is to eject the battery, after my aforementioned experiences you can imagine the beads of sweat on my brow as I hope that when I place the battery back and turn on I am not presented with my second full hard reset...

So no... it's not stable. If you think its stable you're likely not pushing the camera hard. I've come to experience more quirks when the camera has been pushed than those times I just casually take it out for a walk.

There are bugs also that I have nowhere to report to be fixed. Under Live View, with flash or trigger mounted, the camera will lock up when trying to take multiple shots with AF Cancel button held down, you have to release it, which is a pain. With no flash or trigger mounted the problem goes away.


I think the problem here is you are relating Android to a specific kind of experience to date, I'm not suggesting anything changes in terms of how we interface or navigate a menu we have come to learn and love (and I agree Pentax does better than most). But that doesn't mean it couldn't be improved.

Android is an fairly limited programming interface closely bound to a variant of the Java programming language both internally and externally. Its features closely match the devices on which it runs and no, it is not an operating system per se. It is just a way to write programs against compatible hardware and deep firmware.

The larger question might be why cameras don't run on embedded Linux.


Steve

Yeh well that then too.

Actually when I spent that much money on a camera I expect it to hold for 10 years. The durability of Pentax is a reason to buy it.

Oh I do too, I hope to shoot my K-1 for another 5yrs, but you know Pentax will go out of business if every fan behaved like that. They do need new customers as well as existing ones to upgrade to stay in business. I'm saying that the fact Android is an OS and gets improvements over time could be another motivating factor for them to adopt as they can increase features or performance based around newer and better OS options.

An embedded lightroom will be nice

Steady on...

It's an interesting possibility. Nikon did try it with the COOLPIX S810c but it did not seem to catch on.

I can think of three issues that might make using Android for ILCs some combination of unpleasant, impossible, or just not likely to gain adoption:

1) Is Android real-time enough? If a phone app stutters occasionally, the user might be annoyed. If an ILC camera app fires the flash after the second curtain starts to close, they will be more than annoyed. Android is written in Java and Java has automatic garbage collection. That's great for developers and for freeing up memory resources in a light weight device. But automatic garbage collection is not something a photographer wants in the middle of a shot.

2) Can Android handle exotic VLIW (very long instruction word) processors? The image processors inside ILCs are not ordinary multi-core CPUs. The Milbeaut processor uses 256 bit instructions that enable it to execute up to 112 instructions per clock cycle. It's a special kind of computer core in which the instruction typically encodes hardware connections between data buses and logic units to do several computations on a single piece of data at once while doing that to several pieces of data. Its' common is specialized signal process system but not general purpose computers. Can the Linux kernel in the core of Android handle that easily or how much R&D woudl it take to fork Android for a version that can? Or maybe camera makers could rewrite all their code to run on ordinary CPUs and GPUs, but that's not going to be cheap.

3) Can Android (and apps) handle complex physical UIs? Android devices typically have the same very simple physical UIs: a touch screen, power button, up/down volume buttons, and a home button. All the phones and tablets pretty much have the same UI elements that are used in the same ways. In contrast, the K-1 has something like 21 physical buttons and 7 selector dials. Other cameras have different numbers of buttons and dials and there's often no analogs between models. The OS, it's APIs, and the apps need to know whats what and provide appropriate functionality to all those elements. Otherwise you'll have apps that do not use most of the buttons and dials on the camera, use them in inconsistent ways, or fail to work on some cameras because that camera lack a third control wheel.

I'm not say it can't be done but those may be some of the obstacles.

Hmm yeh.

One thing that occurred to me would be start up time, we couldn't cope with a camera that takes 5-10secs before we can take a shot. It's why perhaps we need a dual OS system or something. Dial 1 is 'Quick Shooting' mode, and is essentially everything we have right now. It means you can shoot straight away and not boot Android. Dial 2 is Android, and you have to wait for this mode to load. Once in you get app support and a better review/editing/playback/development resources (as well as direct social media outlet support). Dial 2 could update the features and firmware for Dial 1, so that next time you use Dial 1 it's improved over etc.
That's just me thinking outside the box but I think it order for it to be successful it would have to work like this.

It would be nice if more developer can develop apps for the camera. But from my own experience in everyday life here in Japan, I can understand... maybe not but a kind of get it from looking at myself back when I just came here. Japanese design UI are so complicated, make little sense for usability or many times I will just say it is a mess!
I guess, even they run a camera with Android, they will find a way to make the UI very hard to use anyway.

I can understand that! Cowon (a South Korean DAP maker) could be very bizarre with it's UI, making for at times a very unintuitive approach to usage, an absolute perfect example of prioritising form over features/convenience.

[D1N0]

Samsung had one: Samsung Galaxy NX: 20.3MP, 4G, HSPA+, WiFi Digital Camera & 18-55mm Kit - Samsung UK

I think the question should be why they are not using phone processors with the computational photography capabilities.

[mlt]

If you want social media apps and screen based editing, including image resizing for those apps the current best interface on a small screen is a touch based phone. Buttons and knobs for editing and app usage would be clunky for anyone used to doing it on a phone. The idea of using a common os (possible) and easily upgraded feature set across an entire camera line would limit the reasons to upgrade. Let alone the time spent on testing every possible add-on app and update with the camera’s hardware and for security issues would just further drive users to give up on cameras and just use their phones.