Where Are Digital SLRs Going?A conversation with Canon’s Chuck Westfall offers a glimpse of the future |
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Page 6 of 6 Westfall: Wireless transmission will become more standard across the board with digital SLRs. Currently, one of the obstacles has been the slow transmission speeds. This starts to interfere with performance, especially when you’re dealing with higher-resolution images produced from a digital SLR, which currently takes pictures faster than they can be uploaded. We anticipate that there will be a big jump in wireless transmission speeds, with wireless technologies such as 802.11n promising 10 to 12 times faster data transfer speeds than 802.11g. PCPhoto: This wireless technology affords the ability to quickly download not only to one’s computer, but to virtually any server connected to the Web. This potentially holds the promise of freeing photographers of the limitations of the size or speed of their memory cards. How do you see this impacting photographers? Westfall: This will definitely offer increased storage for users. If it becomes easier to save images to Web servers directly from digital cameras via wireless communication, I believe that this technology will add an element of reliability that’s missing from today’s cameras. Also, more sophisticated metadata stored with each image could potentially make it easier to archive images and search for individual files. Why should photographers be limited to the capacity of a memory card in their cameras, when they have the ability to be virtually anywhere and upload images on the fly?   |
