Today I listened to a great interview by Mike Seymour of fxguide.com. He was speaking with Dr. Kari Pulli a senior director of research for NVIDIA. They were talking about computational photography and the Frankencamera project. 

The Frankencamera or (FCam for short) is an experimental camera that works something like an iPhone does. Right now I can use my favorite Pro HDR app on my iPhone and generate two bracketed images that combine within the app to generate a HDR image. Your trusty DSLR can not do this. Yet. 

That is where the Frankencamera comes in. This is a project started at Standford University where they built a camera that runs on a linux OS and allows you to download programs to it, just like a iPhone. This is what is meant by computational photography. The ability of a camera to produce an image that is not something that a normal DSLR can capture. In this case the Frankencamera would shoot a rapid succession of bracketed images and produce a HDR image in camera. 

Recently there has been a lot of talk about the LYTRO camera. This made a big splash a couple months ago. It is the first camera that I know using this type computational photography. It fires a series of images and different focus settings. Then you choose later on what you want to be in focus.

Is this the future of cameras or a fad?

Future Jeff