Wireless USB and Cameras
As photographers in the digital world, cameras are always associated with computers at some point. Whether you are taking family pictures and sharing them on the internet, or are developing commercial photography for Fortune 500 companies, you are using a computer to manage and share your images, whether it’s with Aunt Gertrude or Getty.
As technologies advance, the interaction between cameras and computers becomes even easier and additional features become available en masse. While this photo blog has endeavored to minimize technology discussions, an emerging technology I recently read about in a tech magazine (Maximum PC) could revolutionize the way we use our cameras, and as such, is worth a post.
The technology is called wireless USB (note the spacing as there is another technology called wirelessUSB which is very different), and offers the potential for transferring very large amounts of data across short distances without the need for cumbersome cables (We’re talking on the order of almost 500 MB/s over distances of up to 3 meters. This drops off to about about 110 Mb/s over distances of 10 meters.) The potential here for cameras and photography are quite amazing. We could easily see cameras that use this technology to immediately save the image upon capture to a wireless datapack attached to the shooters belt. This data pack could then incorporate the technology of cell phones to call to a web server for instant uploading to a web site. The same theory could apply not only to still photography, but also to videography. Instant videos!
As we navigate and sift our way through the SD cards, CF cards, memory sticks, hard drives, storage networks, and strive to keep all our images organized among all these different media types, promises of new ways to store, manage and publish photographs are on the horizon…and closer than one may think.
