Camera
Alice MFT camera combines smartphone AI with interchangeable lenses, now live on Indiegogo
Photogram has launched a pre-order campaign for the Alice camera — a camera it says will combine the AI and computational photography characteristics of a smartphone camera with the larger sensor and interchangeable lens system of the Micro Four Thirds system.
The concept was announced back in September 2020 and the UK company says it intends to begin shipping the camera in the autumn of this year. Photogram is keen to point out that its Indiegogo campaign is for pre-orders rather than a funding exercise as it already has funding from various UK government agencies and industry bodies, but with the camera still at the working-demo stage there a degree of risk all the same.
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The Alice is designed to be coupled with a Wi-Fi connected smartphone that mounts on its rear and which acts as the camera’s screen and control point via a dedicated app. The camera will use a MFT 10.7MP Dual Native ISO Multi-Aspect Ratio sensor that will be able to record C4K/4K 30p video in 17:9, 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, and which can provide still shooters with DNG RAW and JPEG files. As the camera will be connected to a phone it will also be able to be used to live stream video content directly to social media.
The key difference between Alice and other regular cameras though is that it will use AI learning to adjust images as they are being recorded in the same way that smartphones do, to brighten shadows, to increase saturation in blue skies and to use multi-shot techniques to reduce noise and improve dynamic range. AI will also run exposure, AF and White Balance, while computational photography techniques will optimise noise and dynamic range.
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Photogram says the algorithm it will use is being trained to understand what processing adjustments need to be made to an image to make the picture look as though it has already been worked on by the photographer, the algorithm will run on Google’s Edge dedicated AI Tensor Processing Unit machine learning chip.
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Users will be able to let the camera work automatically in the Quick Mode or by switching to Pro Mode will be able to take full control of the camera and image settings themselves. A series of slides will also allow users to accept varying degrees of input from the AI algorithms, while open source software will allow them to customise their camera and to write new applications for features that can be shared with other users. Photogram promises constant updates to the camera as the AI algorithms become more advanced and plans to add new features as they are developed.
Via the Indiegogo campaign the Alice camera can be pre-ordered for an early-bird price of £550 (approx. $760) with a projected shipping date of October 2021. For more information see the Alice camera Indiegogo campaign page.
DPReview has spoken to the team behind Alice to find out a bit more about how the camera will work and what it will be capable of — expect an article with more detail soon.
Disclaimer: Remember to do your research with any crowdfunding project. DPReview does its best to share only the projects that look legitimate and come from reliable creators, but as with any crowdfunded campaign, there’s always the risk of the product or service never coming to fruition.
Press release:
The AI Camera content creators have been waiting for is officially available for pre-order
Alice Camera combines the experience of a smartphone with the quality of a DSLR.
February 9th 2021, London, UK: Photogram, the organisation behind the eagerly awaited Alice Camera has today announced that you can pre-order the AI-accelerated computational camera now for a super early bird price via its online pre-order campaign. The Alice Camera is what content creators have been lacking. As content platforms evolve, the camera market needs to adapt – the Alice Camera brings together the experience of a smartphone with the quality of a DSLR camera to shoot, edit and share high-quality 4K content instantly.
In Europe alone, there are 20 million income-generating content creators, which include Photographers, Videographers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokkers and Twitch streamers to name a few, yet most are working with devices that do not maximise their potential – smartphone sensors are not up to spec, yet DSLR or mirrorless cameras lack computational photography capabilities.
But all that is about to change. The Alice Camera gives total control to the user and works with their smartphone to shoot and share better content in a fraction of the time – simply point, shoot and share or live stream to your audience on social media in high-quality full-width 4K video.
Its sleek design mounts to the back of most smartphones (although it can also work unattached) and its native iOS and Android app will connect to and control the camera via the touchscreen interface, giving users a smooth user experience and a faster production workflow. Fast wireless data transfer between camera and phone gives users a seamless real-time viewfinder on their smartphone screen.
Alice’s unique selling point is that it harnesses the computational photography that you see in the latest smartphones but applies it to professional quality optics. The Alice Camera also offers:
- A 4/3 image sensor, eight times bigger than the ones in smartphones. The sensor’s dual native ISO and quad-bayer structure gives users excellent low-light performance, high dynamic range and exceptionally low noise;
- The ability to attach your favourite Micro Four Thirds lens, the most flexible and compact interchangeable lens system around, with over 50 professional-quality lenses available, or attach an adapter to use lenses with different mounts too;
- A dedicated AI-chip will run the company’s patent-pending end-to-end deep learning pipeline on-device for innovative computational photography features to automate scene capture and enhance image processing.
Being a computational camera, Alice will be regularly updated via software updates, meaning that content creators can stay on top of their game without constantly purchasing new devices – just lenses of their choice. In addition, Alice’s open-source software can be customised like no other camera — others will be free to build add-ons and features that will benefit all Alice Camera users. An open-access environment means creators can deeply customise their creative process, encouraging collaboration and software development.
The Alice Camera will be shipped to pre-order customers in the Autumn when the RRP will be £750 for the body only. However, content creators can order the Alice Camera via the Indiegogo campaign which launched today and benefit from a special pre-order price starting from £550 (26% discount).
Vishal Kumar, CEO and Co-founder of Photogram said, “Today’s announcement comes after 18 months of liaising with over a thousand content creators, taking part in extensive accelerator programmes and building prototype Alice cameras. We are so pleased that we can bring to market a product that has been built from the ground up by creators for creators.”
“Over the next decade, the creator economy driven by the passion economy is set to grow rapidly. Creators are growing at 15% annually and the market for digital photography more broadly will reach $150bn by the end of 2026. Creators need a tool more suitable for our new world of content creation; imagine the future for creators and the industry with the Alice Camera’s features and functionality?”
About Photogram
Photogram was founded in June 2019 when it’s co-founders Vishal Kumar and Dr Liam Donovan met on the Entrepreneur First London 12 cohort. The company secured a £175k innovation grant from Innovate UK, the UK government’s innovation agency, and joined the Micro Four Thirds System standard run by Olympus and Panasonic. The Alice Camera will be manufactured in Britain and is the first device launched by Photogram.
Follow Alice Camera:
Twitter: @thealicecamera
Instagram: @thealicecamera
YouTube: The Alice Camera
Facebook: The Alice Camera
Photogram founders
Vishal Kumar is a cultural data scientist at The Bartlett, UCL and he is one of a handful of people in the world pioneering the application of data science and machine learning for art and culture. A content creator himself, Vishal has over 30,000 followers on social media. He previously worked at Sotheby’s auction house as one of the company’s first Data Scientists.
Dr Liam Donovan is an experienced engineer with particular expertise in building AI-accelerated embedded hardware and software for creatives. After completing his PhD Liam did a year-long fellowship at Royal Academy Engineering looking at building a business around selling computational hardware to the creative industries.
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| Photo: Mitchell Clark |
This year we attended Adobe Max in person, where we got to demo several of the new features in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw. If you missed the announcement, you can read our coverage of it here, though we’ll be covering the hits here.
We documented the demos on our Instagram, but in case you missed it, we’re rounding them up here. We were also able to interview some folks at Adobe while at the show, so stay tuned for more on the future of Photoshop, Lightroom, and other Adobe projects like Content Credentials.
Adobe Camera Raw Adaptive profile
Adobe has added a new profile to Adobe Camera Raw, called Adaptive. It uses AI to analyze what’s in the scene, and adjust exposure, tones, saturation, and other parameters automatically, potentially giving you a better starting point for your own edits. It’s also designed to work with HDR images and produces both HDR and SDR profiles, making it even more useful for those who aren’t used to editing for HDR displays yet.
Since it’s substantially more opinionated than other profiles like Adobe Color or Adobe Landscape, there’s also an amount slider that lets you tone down or turn up the results.
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Photoshop automatic distraction removal
Perhaps one of the niftiest features Adobe added to Photoshop is the automatic distraction removal tool. It analyzes your photo for cables, wires, or people that may be in the way of your subject, then automatically fills in the areas they took up.
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Lightroom Quick Actions
Lightroom’s new Quick Actions, available on Mobile and Web, will automatically mask parts of your image like subjects, backgrounds, and skies, and let you make adjustments to them.
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Lightroom Frame.io integration
Frame.io is now built into Lightroom, letting you access images uploaded to the cloud service. Combine that with Frame.io’s Camera To Cloud feature, available on some Fujifilm, Panasonic, Nikon, Canon, and Leica cameras, and you can take pictures on your camera then watch them appear wirelessly in Lightroom.
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Content Credentials
Adobe’s Content Credentials system is part of a larger industry-wide initiative to help prove what content on the web is authentic, and to keep track of what edits have been made to it. While at Max, we got to take a look at the Chrome extension meant to surface the credentials attached to images on social media and other sites, as well as the closed beta site that lets you attach content credentials to your own images, and view what credentials are attached to existing images.
We got to sit down with one of the senior directors of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe while at the conference, so expect a more thorough check-in of the technology to come.
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Generative Extend in Premiere Pro
Photoshop has had several generative AI features in beta for a while now, but now Adobe has introduced one for its Premiere video editing software. It lets you extend a clip by up to two seconds, helping you fill in gaps, transitions, or slightly flubbed takes with imagery generated by Adobe’s Firefly model.
According to Meagan Keane, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Pro Video, the idea came from asking customers what some of their biggest editing pain points were. The Pro Video team was then able to take that to the research team, and the result is Generative Extend.
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| Photo: DPReview staff |
As part of DPReview’s 25th anniversary celebration, we’re looking back at some of the more significant cameras to come along over the past 25 years, and today, we’re highlighting the camera that led the 4K revolution in consumer cameras: the Panasonic GH4. Officially announced in early 2014, we published our GH4 review on October 16, 2014 – ten years ago today.
We’ve all become so used to 4K video that it no longer registers as unique. It’s found on virtually every mirrorless camera made today, smartphones, action cameras, miniature gimbal cameras, webcams, security cameras, and even those wacky $100 ‘pro’ video cameras you see on Amazon and wonder who buys them.
But, of course, it wasn’t always that way, and we have the GH4 – the first mirrorless camera to capture 4K video internally – to thank for opening the metaphorical floodgates and ushering in the 4K era.
I had a personal interest in the GH4: as someone who had adopted the GH line early on for video projects, I was as curious as anyone to know how it stacked up. Although I was on staff at DPReview, I wasn’t involved in writing the GH4 review and probably read it with as much anticipation as anyone else.
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| Photo: DPReview staff |
It’s worth remembering that the GH4 was a hybrid camera designed to appeal to both stills and video shooters, and it had features to appeal to those who wanted to do both. Like the GH3, the camera was built around a 16MP sensor, but it supported 12fps burst shooting (7.5fps with focus tracking), a 1/8000 shutter speed and 1/250th flash sync. It even had a rather lovely 2.36M-dot OLED viewfinder.
But realistically, nobody was buying a GH4 just to shoot stills. You bought it because you wanted a solid video camera that could shoot stills when needed.
“Realistically, nobody was buying a GH4 just to shoot stills.”
The GH4 could capture 4K video at up to UHD 4K/30p (3840×2160) or DCI 4K/24p (4096×2160) internally and supported both Long GOP and All-I codecs at bit rates up to 200Mbps. Although we take bit rates like this for granted today, this was very high at the time. The camera also produced pleasing 1080p video, though as we called out in our review, its HD video wasn’t as good as the perfectly oversampled 1080p video from the Sony a7s.
Despite the impressive specs and beautiful video to match, we had some nitpicks. To start, 4K video captured internally only had 8-bit 4:2:0 color, providing less flexibility for color grading in post. (10-bit 4:2:2 color was supported, but only when recording externally.) Additionally, the GH4’s sensor was 4608 pixels wide, requiring the camera to use a smaller, native crop of the sensor when shooting 4K. This resulted in a 1.1x crop for DCI 4K and a 1.2x crop for UHD 4K.
Equally as crucial as its video specs, the GH4 illustrated Panasonic’s commitment to supporting a professional video workflow.
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The camera included several now-common tools to improve the video shooting experience, including focus peaking, two zebra settings, control over Master Pedestal (black level) and luminance scale, and a ‘cinema-like’ gamma preset. It also allowed users to set the shutter speed and ISO as shutter angle and gain and could generate color bars for calibration. It was also possible to switch between capture frequencies, meaning the camera could support NTSC, PAL, and true 24fps cinema standards.
“Equally as crucial as its video specs, the GH4 illustrated Panasonic’s commitment to supporting a professional video workflow.”
Alongside the camera, Panasonic released the optional DMW-YAGH interface unit. This $1999 accessory unit added two XLR inputs for audio, an SDI input for timecode, four 3D-SDI connectors capable of outputting 4:2:2 10-bit video and a 12V DC power socket. The unit attached to the bottom of the GH4 and felt oversized relative to the camera. Beginning with the GH5, the interface unit was phased out in favor of the DMW-XLR1, a much more affordable option in the style of the hotshoe-mounted XLR adapter we’ve become accustomed to today.
The GH4 was also the camera Panasonic used to debut its newest autofocus technology: Depth-from-Defocus, or DFD. DFD attempted to build a depth map of a scene by making tiny focus adjustments and analyzing changes in the image. With an understanding of the out-of-focus characteristics of a particular lens, the camera could build a depth map of the scene.
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| The optional DMW-YAGH ‘Interface Unit’ provided a more extensive selection of video industry connectors for using the GH4 as part of a high-end video rig. | |
However promising the technology may have been, DFD never quite met expectations. Panasonic really wanted to make it work, and it’s possible that, given fast enough sampling and processing, it might have continued to improve. Unfortunately for Panasonic, cameras using phase-detect autofocus consistently provided a better AF experience, particularly when shooting video, and the company eventually made the jump to phase-detection with the Lumix S5II in 2023, finally arriving in the GH series on the GH7 in 2024.
In our review of the GH4, we found a lot to like and a few frustrations. For example, despite having an autoexposure compensation dial, the camera didn’t allow you to use it when using Auto ISO in manual exposure mode, and there was no Auto ISO option when shooting video in M mode. Overall, though, we were mighty impressed and saved our biggest praise for the camera’s video capabilities:
“The GH4 was also the camera Panasonic used to debut its newest autofocus technology: Depth-from-Defocus, or DFD.”
“It’s in terms of video that the GH4 really stands out. It produces some of the best video we’ve yet seen – losing out only to the Sony a7S’s moiré-free 1080 output. The ability to capture good quality 4K, whether for use at full resolution, downsampling to 1080 or cropping to 1080, adds real flexibility to the camera. Low light performance is solid if not exceptional,” we concluded.
The GH4 landed in the retail market at a price of $1699, or about $2260 today adjusted for inflation, which isn’t far off the $2199 price of the GH7. It’s amazing to think about how expectations for video have changed over the years. However, the GH7 has its work cut out for it: rather than being an obvious standout in the crowd, it has to compete in a marketplace of cameras brimming with video features. Maybe in another ten years, we’ll look back to see how it held up.
| Photo: DJI |
DJI has announced the Air 3S, an update to its existing dual-camera Air 3 model that upgrades the primary camera to a larger Type 1 sensor and adds features that promise to make the drone easier to operate at night. DJI is positioning the Air 3S as “perfect for travel photography.”
The main camera on the Air 3S gains a 50MP Type 1 (13.2 x 8.8mm) CMOS sensor and features a 24mm equiv. F1.8 lens. That’s an upgrade from its predecessor, which utilized a smaller Type 1/1.3 (4.8 x 3.6mm) CMOS sensor with a marginally faster F1.7 lens. The telephoto camera remains unchanged between the two models, using a 48MP Type 1/1.3 sensor and featuring a 70mm equiv. F2.8 lens.
In addition to stills, both cameras can capture up to 4K/120p or 4K/60p when shooting HDR. All video can be captured in 10-bit, even in regular color mode, and D-Log M and HLG modes are available. The maximum ISO has been raised to 12,800 (3200 when shooting D-Log M). However, DJI says the Air 3S includes a new, more advanced video encoding algorithm that reduces video file size by over 30% without compromising image quality.
DJI claims both cameras can capture up to 14 stops of dynamic range and says the new main camera should capture even more detail than the camera on its more expensive Mavic 3 Pro model.
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The DJI Air 3S is similar to its predecessor, the Air 3, but it gains a larger Type 1 (13.2 x 8.8mm) CMOS sensor on its main camera.
Image: DJI |
Beyond the cameras, DJI has added several appealing features to the Air 3S:
A new Free Panorama mode enables users to create panoramic shots by stitching together images across a manually selected subject area. This works with either camera, but DJI suggests the best results will come from using the telephoto camera, which reduces distortion.
The Air 3S also includes features designed to make it easier and safer to fly at night, including Nightscape Obstacle Sensing, with the Air 3S becoming the first DJI drone to feature forward-facing LiDAR. Additionally, the drone includes downward-facing infrared sensors and six vision sensors (two each at the front, rear and bottom). According to DJI, this combination of sensors provides the Air 3S with “nightscape omnidirectional obstacle sensing,” which should allow the drone to automatically identify and navigate around obstacles for safer nighttime photography.
This technology also enables DJI’s next-gen Smart RTH (return-to-home) feature, intended to allow the drone to return safely to its takeoff location, even at night.
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The Air 3S is available with either DJI’s RC-N3 controller, which requires a smartphone to monitor the camera feed and aircraft status, or the RC 2 controller (above), which includes a built-in 700-nit 5.5″ 1080 screen.
Image: DJI |
The Air 3S also includes real-time vision positioning and map construction technology, designed to allow the drone to memorize a flight path and to return safely when adequate light is available, even in areas without satellite coverage.
The new model also features DJI’s ActiveTrack 360 subject tracking but introduces a new subject focusing feature designed to keep a subject in sharp focus, even during manual flight or when a subject moves off-center. This should allow a pilot to focus on creative decisions like composition or camera movement while ActiveTrack keeps the subject in focus.
There are a few hardware specs worth noting as well. The Air 3S weighs 724g (1.6 lbs), just 4g more than its predecessor, and is rated for 45 minutes of flight time. It includes DJI’s O4 video transmission system that transmits 10-bit video at up to 1080/60p and 42GB of built-in storage. A new Off-state Quick Transfer feature allows files to be transferred from the drone to a smartphone or a computer even when powered off.
Finally, for the privacy-conscious, a new Local Data mode completely disconnects the drone from the internet, ensuring that all data stays only on the device. DJI likens this mode to airplane mode on a smartphone.
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The Air 3S is available in several packages. The Fly More combo shown above includes the RC 2 controller, ND filter set, two additional batteries (for a total of three), a charging hub, extra props and a shoulder bag, will retail for $1599.
Image: DJI |
The charging hub that ships with the Air 3S supports PD fast charging and features a power accumulation function. It allows users to transfer the remaining power from several depleted batteries into the battery with the most remaining power – something anyone who has had to use drones in remote locations without a charging station is likely to appreciate.
Price and availability
The DJI Air 3S is available for purchase in several configurations: the drone with the RC-N3 controller, which requires a smartphone to monitor the camera feed and flight status, will retail for $1099. A Fly More combo with the RC-N3 controller, ND filter set, two additional batteries, a battery charging hub and shoulder back will retail for $1399. Finally, a Fly More combo with DJI’s RC 2 controller, which includes a built-in 700-nit 5.5″ 1080p screen, ND filter set, two additional batteries, charging hub and shoulder pack, will retail for $1599.
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