Kodak packs two lenses in latest camera

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.

The new Easyshare V570 digital camera from Eastman Kodak includes a pair of lenses in a slim body.

Kodak calls the V570 the world's first dual-lens digital still camera. The device incorporates both a wide-angle (23 mm) lens and a 3x optical zoom lens, stacked vertically in the center of a black and silver frame that's less than an inch thick.

Besides taking still images, the 5-megapixel camera captures video at 30 frames per second using MPEG-4 compression.

A panorama feature lets users create 180-degree images from three shots. The camera has a 2.5-inch LCD screen for viewing images.

The V570 will be available worldwide later in January for $399, a price that also includes a docking station. The company will be showing it off at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.

Through the first half of 2005, Kodak was the top seller of digital cameras in the U.S., just ahead of Canon--with analysts predicting that Canon could soon claim the lead.

 

Correction: This story incorrectly described the capability of the EasyShare V570's zoom lens. It is a 3x optical zoom.

[jeolmeun]

aw, no 3D pictures?

When are they going to come out with dual horizontal lens cameras for those 3D pictures?

[fgoldstein]

Shades of Brownie!

Somebody at Kodak was probably walking around their collection of old cameras one day and had an idea...

Back in the early 1960s, I had a cheap Kodak Brownie camera. Good for a kid, not a big investment. Instead of having a regular focus mechanism, it had a wheel with three lenses, for close, medium and distant focus. This new camera looks a bit like the old lens-wheel design, though of course these lenses are no doubt a whole lot better than a cheap kids' camera (today's film disposables have about the same grade of lens as those, I'd guess). Credit to Kodak for clever recycling of the idea.

[Jay_in_FL]

Can a lense-less digital camera be made yet?

Remember the old box cameras with just a shutter, small hole (pin hole), and a glass cover over the hole? They took great photos, no need to worry about the quality of the lense or focusing. I do not recall the shortest range that the subject was in focus, maybe 4 feet?

Is the sensor technology good enough yet to make a pinhole camera??

Jay

[Razzl]

Reality will never be that virtual

You would never like the quality of image that comes from a pinhole, no matter how much software is used to touch it up. Remember, the hole is still a lense: it's still twisting light to get an image to focuse on the receptor plate.

No, photography will eternally rely on some method of converging the light onto a capture medium. Without a focusing device there is no way to screen out unwanted radiations to limit the image to the small slice bouncing off your intended subject. Modern lenses do miraculous things like filter out UV and correct distortion from image plane problems, so lenses are your friends in the fight to make good pictures. The analog part of photography is here to stay...

The Olympus Infinity Twin...

35mm P&S did this years ago.