Ever wished for a better camera for the smartphone to take nicer photos? While camera capabilities are limited by the phone’s size, startup Photogram is developing an alternative that brings the benefits of the mirrorless camera to the smartphone.
Its Alice compact, mirrorless camera is sleek and sports just a shutter button, control wheel and cold-shoe adapter. After mounting the smartphone, it connects via 5Ghz wi-fi, letting users share images and stream videos easily.
Alice is built around a Sony IMX294 10.7 megapixel 4/3 sensor optimised for high-quality and full-width 4K video. The sensor is eight times bigger than that of a typical smartphone.
In front of that big sensor is a Micro Four Third lens mount. The compact interchangeable lens system gives users access to more than 100 lens options from Olympus, Panasonic, and specialty lens makers such as Sigma, Tamron and Tokina.
Users will be able to choose from 16mm-equivalent fish-eye lenses for a super-wide angle of view or 800mm-equivalent telephone zoom lenses able to get clear, undistorted pictures of objects far away, with plenty of options in between.
THE SECRET SAUCE
“I was thinking a lot about how data science and machine learning and AI could be applied to create video and imagery. I was using a camera all the time to create video content and becoming increasingly frustrated with operating them,” said Vishal Kumar of Photogram.
The secret sauce is an AI built using NVIDIA GPU-accelerated deep learning to help photographers wring the most out of Alice’s hardware. The AI controls and improves focusing, changes exposure, automatically adjusts white balance, and performs automatic image stabilisation.
Users will eventually make Alice better at whatever photography they do. “Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer, or you like to shoot cats or clothes. We want people to be able to optimise our models and retrain them so their Alice camera can be more optimised for the photography they do,” said Kumar.
Since its listing on Indigogo last September, Alice has raised US$200,000 from more than 250 backers by February. It is due for release in October for around US$760 to early backers.
Photo: Photogram
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