Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog

TV business is not booming anymore as it used to be. Last year TV makers lost more money than ever before. And things do not seem to be getting better in sales. U.S. Flat Panel TV Shipments to Decline for First Time Ever in 2012 article tells that demand for flat-screen televisions in the U.S. is expected to decline for the first time ever this year, and continue falling for at least the next three years, according to a new report from IHS iSuppi. The market research firm projected that shipments of flat-panel TVs to the American market will decrease 5 percent, or two million units, to 37.1 million units in 2012. Shipments are expected to continue decreasing until at least 2015. Sales in the U.S. of flat-panel TVs are now driven by consumers who are replacing their older flat-panel sets with new models.

HDTV predictions for CES — and 2012 article predicts that small and medium screen HDTV prices will stabilize. The days of price erosion in the under-40-inch category will end as market demand picks up and the world economy stabilizes. TV makers can no longer afford to lose a billion or more dollars a year. The larger screens will continue to get cheaper. HDTV predictions for CES — and 2012 article points to a recent survey (by NPD DisplaySearch): U.S. consumers prefer bigger screens to smaller Internet streaming or 3-D capable TVs. The article predicts that the industry will respond with many 70-inch and larger sets for 2012.

HDTV predictions for CES — and 2012 article expects that at least one major TV brand will pull the plug on the U.S. market in 2012, either with a complete exit, or by selling its name to a Chinese TV manufacturer. Hi-Tech Retailers with their large stores are struggling because of notoriously narrow profit margin and the fact that retail shops are becoming showrooms where people check the product they then buy on-line.

Electronics expected to drive China’s 2012 exports article tells that uppliers are looking to home and personal electronics, and other high-value products to spur orders in 2012. Companies will introduce more add-ons, intelligent models to attract orders. Makers of electrical home appliances will emphasize aesthetics, performance and value add-ons to attract business and prop up margins, which narrowed in 2011 due to climbing material and labor costs. As for TVs, LCD-based models will be at the center of exports in 2012. Outbound shipments of LED, large-screen and smart TVs will increase in the second half of the year. The under-performance is due partly to economic uncertainties in the US and the EU. The two continue to be the primary destinations of most China-made products, although alternative markets such as Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region are growing in terms of export share.

Also new companies are pushing to TV and consumer electronics business. IKEA moves into consumer electronics with China venture. Sweden’s IKEA, the world’s largest furniture maker, is set to enter the consumer electronics market with a line of furniture with integrated connected television and sound systems. The furniture aims to solve the challenge of living room clutter of cords and remote controls. Uppleva range of home entertainment systems integrate a flat-screen full HD TV, 2.1 sound, and a Blu-ray player. The products are developed in co-operation with China-based TCL Multimedia. Uppleva will only be available in a few European markets to start with, but the UK and North America should see it in 2013. Generally speaking things like this are miserable failures, but let’s see what this turns out. So now my furniture won’t just go out of style. It will literally become obsolete and have interoperability issues.

OLED displays are becoming more common. HDTV predictions for CES — and 2012 article points out that in 2012, LG and Samsung will introduce the revolutionary OLED HDTV technology in the 55-inch screen size. OLED can produce high-definition images that outperform the best LED LCDs and plasmas. The most significant improvement is in contrast and large viewing angle (especially when compared to every LCD and LED LCD). All three remaining plasma makers (LG, Panasonic and Samsung) will continue to support the format with more emphasis on the larger screen models and product improvements as OLED sets will be very expensive for the next couple of years.

HDBaseT connectivity technology will try to push to market It represents a digital home networking alternative to standards such as HDMI, radio frequency(RF), coaxial cable, composite video, S-Video, SCART, component video, D-Terminal, or VGA, presenting a feature set previously unavailable in the CE industry. HDBaseT’s ability to deliver up to 100W of power (over 100m, via a single LAN cable, without any additional power source) is actually very nicely aligned with trends in energy usage and demand. The power level is more than adequate for supporting today’s typical 40-inch LED TV, which requires 70W of power.

There is now a maximum permissible power limit calculated in relation to screen size, with an absolute maximum of 80W for any TV with screen size 50 inches or larger. It is expected that both LCD and LED TV monitors will soon be averaging approximately one watt of power consumption per inch of screen size. Regardless of screen size EnergyStar™ 6.0 is targeting a cap of 85 W for all screen sizes.

Innovations being employed to help meet current and future power consumption standards include LED backlighting. It which improves efficiency compared to CCFL backlights while also allowing thinner dimensions. There is currently a dramatic market shift toward LED backlighting that will see 10 times as many LED TVs built, compared to units with traditional CCFL backlights, by 2015. In addition, more efficient and simplified power supply designs are emerging.

3D TV is still hot. HDTV predictions for CES — and 2012 article expects that number of 3-D disc titles will grow, first-generation glassless 3-D will arrive and TVs with Full HD resolution with the passive 3-D.

Consumers are just gaining access to the 3D TVs when the next disaster is already on the way. Maybe the next revolution is Super Resolution HD-TV. Television technology is developing rapidly. We are entering post-full-HDTV resolution (1920×1080) era. Just few years ago full HD was considered the ultimate resolution that everybody were aiming to and was considered “enough”. No the trend seems to be that resolutions beyond full HD are becoming widely used. A number of the major TV makers will begin to offer large-screen TVs with resolutions four times that of HDTV: 3840 x 2160, otherwise known as 4K. Standard and high definition will be internally up-converted to 4K resolution. It is expected that there will be 4K HDTVs that include passive 3-D technology capable of displaying Full HD resolution with the passive 3-D.

New kind remote controls are coming. Look for remotes from a number of TV makers that will use voice, gestures, motion or other ways to better control the display device. LG has already announced its Magic Motion remote will incorporate voice control in select 2012 models. And of course, because of Siri on the iPhone 4S, expect the Apple iTV to take TV control functions where no set has gone before.

The connected TV will evolve. Top-selling brands are currently offering Internet-connected TVs with streaming and apps. Online video is overtaking physical sales article says that Americans are spending money on video streaming and downloaded film services, so much so that online sales there have overtaken physical ones. 2012 will be the first year that online films and streaming services will take in more money than sales of DVD and Blu-ray discs combined. There will be 3.4 billion legal and paid for movies watched in the US this year, around one million higher than hard copy sales. The year 2012 will be the final nail to the coffin on the old idea that consumers won’t accept premium content distribution over the Internet. Horror stories about so-called ‘piracy’ but they do not seem to be ringing true.

I earlier write about new camera technologies concentrating on light field photography. There are many other new camera technologies that deserve to be mentioned.

Is ‘vision’ the next-gen must-have user interface? article tells that IMS Research issued recently a press release questioning if Apple and the iPad are falling behind competitors in user interface technologies. The industry still wants to know: Where will the battle lines be drawn for the next-generation user interface – beyond touch. Will it be gesture, motion, or voice? A growing number of FPGA, DSP and processor companies are now betting the future on embedded vision. Jeff Bier, president of Berkeley Design Technology, Inc., said, “Thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect (used in Xbox 360), we now have ‘existence proof’ for embedded vision. We now know it works.” Embedded vision is in fact a “classic long-tail story”: There are thousands of applications; and its market is extremely diverse. IMS Research said the market for intelligent automotive camera modules alone was estimated at around $300 million in 2011 and is forecast to grow at an average annual rate of over 30% to 2015. The article also mentions some interesting application examples which are worth to go through.

The next killer app: Machines that see article asks: Do embedded processors shape applications, or is it the other way around?
In reality, it works both ways. This is particularly evident in digital-signal-processing-intensive applications, such as wireless communications and video compression. These applications became feasible on a large scale only after the emergence of processors with adequate performance and sufficiently low prices and power consumption. And once those processors emerged, these applications started to take off. Then, the growing market attracted competition and investment.

Image processing has evolved to state that many things earlier though to be science fiction or available to intelligence agencies are nowadays widely available. Facebook Facial Recognition: Its Quiet Rise and Dangerous Future article tells that new facial recognition technology used to identify your friends in photos could have some interesting applications–and some scary possibilities. Facebook would be using facial recognition to suggest the names of friends who appeared in newly uploaded photos. Fake ID holders beware: facial recognition service Face.com can now detect your age article tells that fake IDs might not fool anyone for much longer, because Face.com claims its new application programming interface (API) can be used to detect a person’s age by scanning a photo. With its facial recognition system, Face.com has built two Facebook apps that can scan photos and tag them for you. The company also offers an API for developers to use its facial recognition technology in the apps they build. Its latest update to the API can scan a photo and supposedly determine a person’s minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age.

Image editing is nowadays easy and images everywhere. Digg pointed to article Verifeyed uses a camera’s ‘mathematical fingerprint’ to find manipulated images that tells that nalysis startup Verifeyed wants to bring a new a sense of legitimacy to the world of digital images. Image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop easily allow the creation of fake images with just a few clicks, so as a result, digital images have lost their trustworthiness. Verifeyed plans solve the problem using its patent pending technology that is able to certify the originality (or absence of modification) for digital images taken from any device. It uses math (a lot of it) — a product of the founders specialty as PhD researchers in the area of applied mathematics. This could be valuable for example insurance companies authenticating claims.

Are gestures suitable to be used as camera user interface? What if framing a scene with your fingers actually caused photos to be created? Air Camera Concept Shoots When You Pretend to Take a Picture article tells about a clever camera concept “Air Camera” by designer Yeon Su Kim that would make that idea a reality. It consists of two components: a ring-like camera worn on the thumb, and a tension-sensing device worn on the forefinger. If the tension unit senses that you’re making a camera gesture, it triggers the camera to snap a photo. Make a video camera gesture, and it begins recording video!

Actually this idea isn’t very new. It was mentioned a few years back in Ted talk discussing SixthSense technology (time 6:28). Prototype Camera Lets You Shoot Photos by Framing Scenes with Your Fingers article tells that Air camera concept may soon become a reality. Researchers at IAMAS in Japan have developed a tiny camera called Ubi-Camera that captures photos as you position your fingers in the shape of a frame. The shutter button is triggered with your opposite hand’s thumb, and the “zoom” level is determined by how far the camera is from the photographer’s face.

When was the last time you carried around a 2nd device for taking pictures? No need! Phones now come equipped with megapixel cameras. It’s all these advances in camera phone technology, point and shoot cameras just aren’t as important as they used to be. Nokia has been the world’s largest digital camera manufacturer for many years, as the sales of its camera-equipped mobile phones have exceeded those of any conventional camera manufacturer. I am not sure if this is true anymore because Nokia is not the biggest mobile phone manufacturer anymore.

There needs to be a good reason for carrying around a 2nd device for taking pictures. So digital cameras need to become continuously better than their mobile phone counterparts. There are a few easy ways to make a digital camera better: make the sensor bigger, improve the quality of the lens, speed up the processor. DSLRs have gone this route for a long time. DSLRs are able to produce considerably better pictures than mobile phones so cell phone cameras will not completely replace DSLRs any time soon.

Those improvements I listed are incremental improvements on a basic technology that hasn’t changed much in a long time. There are some new more radical technology changes coming. Here is one that is the looks most intersting.

Lytro has build an amazing new kind of camera. Lytro review: You’ve never seen a camera like this before article tells that Lytro built the self-titled Lytro camera, a digital camera that neither looks nor operates like any camera you’ve ever seen: it measures megarays instead of megapixels, captures light fields instead of light, and lets you focus your pictures after you’ve taken them. Lytro team has worked hard to bring this technology to life and manufacture the world’s first light field camera for consumers. There’s absolutely no doubt that the camera represents a huge technological achievement.

Lytro offers something never before seen in the world of photography: adjustable focus that you can adjust afterwards. Check Lytro gallery for some demos on how you can focus to different part of the picture when you view them. I would say pretty amazing. Lytro Light Field Camera: Snap Happy Or Photo Gimmick? and First week review and first 1,000 images with Lytro — the camera that lets you refocus after you shoot articles gives you some reviews of Lytro camera.

You might be interested in how this Lytro lightfield camera works. Lytro: Science Inside and The Science Inside Living Pictures articles describe he basics. If you are interested in hard science and equations used, read Lytro CEO’s dissertation DIGITAL LIGHTFIELD PHOTOGRAPHY. View also Inside the Lytro camera, and the start-up’s 3D future video.

The Size of Lytro’s Sensor Compared with Other Common Formats tells that the sensor inside Lytro camera is roughly 6.5×4.5mm (slightly larger than the iPhone sensor and slightly smaller than the one in most point-and-shoot cameras) so I am pretty sure it has it’s limitations. And I am pretty sure there are also other limitations on the technology also. First week review and first 1,000 images with Lytro article tells that is not a camera for many people because low light sensitivity sucks on the Lytro, sharpness and printability sucks, color saturation and quality isn’t up to par with even cell phone cameras and processing images takes time and means picking focus point. So Lytro just doesn’t make images that are hyper sharp, even when compared with cameras on cell phones. Still with limitations writer Robert Scoble says he really loves his Lytro: “t’s just a well designed product that will bring me great joy, even with its limitations.” So most propably you will not be be ditching your DSLR for a Lytro, but there could be some place for light field camera as well (remember for some time you get “no way” when showing the refocusability of the images).

Lytro’s product seems to have activated some interesting DIY camera projects that you might want to check out. First start with this Light field photography and microscopy lecture video. It gives you good basics on the topic.

DIY: Build a Light-Field Device at home video claims that now you can build a little bit different light field camera at home! This video describes how to convert your camera into a light field camera using a printed cosine mask (transparency). Total cost is claimed less than $10. The captured photo with the mask on top of CCD will be a “light field” photo which can be used for refocusing after the photo has been taken. Looks easy but I don’t yet buy the idea because this video lacks the description of the post-processing needed for focusing the picture.

Fortunately the video description text has two links to more information: Dappled Photography: Mask Enhanced Cameras for Heterodyned Light Fields and Coded Aperture Refocusing and Lytro vs Mask Based Light Field Camera.

Lytro vs Mask Based Light Field Camera article tells that you can convert your medium format digital/film camera into a 4D light field camera. A Light Field camera captures the variations in the rays falling on the sensor. A traditional 2D camera (your favorite point & shoot or SLR camera) outputs a 2D image, a grid of integer values specifying the intensity at each pixel. The intensity value of the pixel is equal to the sum of all the rays falling onto the pixel. However, we would like to capture the variation among the rays falling onto a sensor pixel. By capturing the ray-space, we can obtain all the light information in geometric ray optics inside the camera.

There are several ways to capture the light field. One way is to put a lenslet array in front of the sensor such that the main lens is focused on the lenslet array and the lenslet array is focused on the sensor. This is the approach used by Lytro, which is offereing the first commerical light field camera. Now the cone of rays from a focused scene point falls on the lenslet which diverts the rays to different pixels on the sensor. One can thus capture the angular variation among rays. However, spatial resolution is lost since the sensor pixels are now used to sample the angular variations.

Lytro vs Mask Based Light Field Camera article describes another design that is based on non-refractive elements such as masks. In this design, a pinhole array mask (transparency) is place in front of the sensor. Each pinhole samples the angular variation by forming the image of the aperture on the sensor. The article writers printed a pinhole array mask of the same size as 36mm by 48mm Dalsa CCD imaging sensor (5344 by 4008 pixels) the and simply dropped it on top of the sensor protective glass. The design used was square pinhole opening of 25 microns width printed at 5080 DPI at local printing company (A4 sized transparency holding 20 masks can be printed for less than $100).

Sound easy. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using masks for light field capture? This loss of resolution is inherent whether we use masks or lenslets if we want to capture a light field. But by using masks, we could avoid the loss of spatial resolution in certain cases (when agular dimension is not needed). Low cost and ease of use are also benefits for mask approach. The biggest disadvantage of using masks is the loss of light since masks are attenuators. If we use a pinhole array mask, then only 5 percent of light goes through, rest is blocked.

Dappled Photography: Mask Enhanced Cameras for Heterodyned Light Fields and Coded Aperture Refocusing article gives some views to the post-processing needed for refocusing the picture. The writers used a patterned attenuating mask to encode the light field entering the camera. Depending on where you put the mask, you can effect desired frequency domain modulation of the light field. If we put the mask near the lens aperture, we can achieve full resolution digital refocussing. If you put the mask near the sensor, we can recover a 4D light field without any additional lenslet array. In the end of the article there is an animation showing views obtained from light field.

The results seems to be far from the ready solution from Lytro, but interesting reading I must say. Some of the reading material reminds me of some material I saw many years ago in optics course I took years ago…