The camera that has an iPhone in the back

It would be really really nice to be able to stick your phone where the LCD screen of your laptop is.

On the first approximation, it makes perfect sense. Arguably, it's silly for one of the camera manufacturers to not make a really good phone-backpack P&S camera to try and rescue their declining marketshare.

On the other hand, for real pro SLR cameras, it really won't work, in the proposed form.

Now, I've made this point before.. but there's a giant army of recreational photographers, wanabee photographers, and bad spray-and-pray wedding photographers out there who buy cameras based on the opinions of what real pro photographers use. They have to buy the L-grade glass in case they decide that they don't want to be a Proctologist anymore and want to be a famous fashion photographer. And a real pro photographer is probably going to think about the difficulty of using an iPhone with gloves on, what happens if their iPhone crashes, what happens if they can't get a cell, what happens if the new iPhone won't fit, etc. So they'll avoid them, which then means that the photographers who could be perfectly happy with an SLR camera that treats the phone as a backpack won't buy it either.

It's not a bad idea, however. There's a gap of opportunity to be had to make a camera that is clearly better than the built-in camera on an iPhone that integrates with the iPhone. The P&S market works differently. But the camera in an iPhone is pretty darn good enough, so I'm not even sure if that will actually go anywhere.

If you remember the days long ago, they used to make camera accessories that connected your PDA. And that didn't work out especially well, so I suppose that's why folks aren't trying to roll out a modern version of this.

The real questionable idea is Bluetooth and Wifi. The chip necessary to make Wifi and/or Bluetooth work is tiny, doesn't consume much power, and is cheap. And the modern version of this chip is able to work wherever. The cameramakers would really like to sell you an accessory module for high-end cameras for a lot of money. Canon finally made a wireless version of their remote flash system. And, if you look at the Eye-fi chip that has Wifi, you can see that all of that circuitry fits in a little itty bitty chip and that I'm not just making this up.

A camera-controller app for your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone/tablet would be really handy. Especially for the macro-shooting crowd, for the fashion-shooting crowd, etc. Especially with your iPad 3.. err... The New iPad that has a high resolution screen. And it's not just about tethering, it's about control. It's about being able to focus remotely and control flash setups and add metainformation much more easily and probably things that won't become totally evident until you make it possible.

But, really, I think the camera-makers are quite content to charge you absurd amounts of money for the Wifi and GPS accessories and avoid becoming beholden to Apple.

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I love my E-P3 and the touchscreen, by the way. And it's probably good that they kept it single-touch and able to used with gloves instead of multi-touch... and also kept much of the button UI.

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