danbricklin.com/log

Scott Kirsner's eyemodule pictures
Scott Kirsner, writer for the Boston Globe, Wired, and Fast Company, took pictures at the Nantucket Conference on the Internet Economy, May 2000. He used a Handspring Visor PDA, with an IDEO eyemodule plug-in digital camera.

The eyemodule was introduced at the Demo 2000 conference. Apparently, it's now shipping.

Here are some pictures Scott gave me to share:

Two smiling faces, with a bit of image noise, in color  
eyemodule photo: Conference organizers Alyssa Gilbert (Silverweave) and Bridget Quinn full size image (320x240) and resized 50%
eyemodule photo: Black and white of Scott Cohen (NewMediary) and Will Richmond (PoliticalWag.com)
eyemodule photo: Black and white of Tim Horgan, CIO.com, full size (320x240)
 
eyemodule photo: Jeanne Lewis of Staples.com at 60% and cropped full resolution
Scott reports that some pictures were speckled and fuzzy (from low light imaging device noise?). These were among his best.They look better reduced a bit it seems.

For comparison, here's a picture I took of the same scene as the last picture with an Olympus C-2000Z digital camera at 640x480 resolution (no flash), entire image resized and full-resolution cropped to show a small section, just like the eyemodule picture above:

 
Regular digital camera: Same scene reduced to 29% and cropped full resolution
The pictures from the eyemodule seems to be closer to the PC cameras (like those used in webcams) in quality than good digital cameras. This is not surprising considering its price ($149, vs. $70 for a PC camera and $300-$1000 for a consumer digital camera), size, and battery drain requirements. As the eyemodule web site says in the FAQ section on image quality, the shutter speed can go down to 1/30th second so you have to hold it very steady, and "pictures in very low light may have a lot of 'noise' in them, due to the sensitivity of the eyemodule." The eyemodule pictures are 320x240 pixels in size, maximum, while most digital cameras are 640x480 pixels minimum -- four times as much resolution.

Here are some pictures I took at Demo 2000 of the unit plugged into a Visor PDA. They claim it adds 15 mm to the length, no thickness, and "practically no weight":

 
Flush in a Visor, sliding into the Springboard slot in the back
Here is an image of it in use from Demo 2000:

 
Showing an image, showing list of images
Here's the companion program:

Shot of projected image of photo editing program at Demo 2000 in February
There is more information on the eyemodule web site. The list price is $149. For more about the conference, see my "Nantucket Conference" page. For more about Demo 2000, see my Demo 2000 writeup February 10, 2000, in my log.
© Copyright 1999-2018 by Daniel Bricklin
All Rights Reserved.