Canon Wonder Camera Concept at Expo 2010

Interesting demonstration of a ‘Wonder Camera’ concept from Canon at the Japanese pavilion of the Shanghai World Expo. It is Canon’s imagining of what a camera will be like around the year 2030, but what is really interesting is that most of the technology they show appears to actually work today. This camera of the future would have a single touch-controlled, image-stabilised megazoom lens going from extreme macro to 5000mm super telephoto and everything would be in focus. One assumes that to get shallow depth of field the camera would apply some kind of computer algorithm and not actually use optical techniques. It would feature a super high definition sensor and only capture video, using the video to generate stills if needed. If you observe carefully, the camera is tethered to a backpack worn by the presenter. One can assume that much of the camera’s electronics are really in a computer in this backpack which may be linked wirelessly or tethered to even more computing power behind the scenes. Even so, I’ld love to take a peek inside and see what makes it tick. At one point they show off multiple faces in the audience being tracked; later, these are turned into individual portraits simply by cropping the high resolution sensor. I assume that what is holding technology like this back is storage capacity and computing power – and given how quickly these are increasing you may not have to wait until 2030 for the chance to buy something like this.