Samsung's abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick

Its crazy to me that there isn't a modern version of this kind of camera. Sony and Cannon could be doing a lot to take away from the smartphone share if they made cameras more usable and modern:

- Built in GPS for location tagging in photos(a few cameras have this but for many you need an external dongle attached to the camera)

- Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations

- built in flash storage for redundancy

- Wifi that isn't trash so you could transfer photos at a meaningful speed

- LTE for the same reason when on location

- Run apps for upload to a variety of services

- More computational photography features

The Fuji cameras I'm working on include similar functionality. Basically the camera can connect to any AP, then it will find a client. From there the client can do liveview/automatic photo importing/change settings.

Original blog post: https://op-co.de/blog/posts/samsung_nx_mastodon/

Partially off topic:

What happened to the "non-flat" CCD / CMOS sensors which were going to enable awesome smartphone cameras, by allowing lens assemblies with far fewer elements and virtually no chromatic aberration? Thanks to the fewer elements whey could be way thinner (or much wider in the same thickness, collecting way more light) and still fit in a smartphone body. This was supposed to especially benefit smartphones due to their fixed lenses (while for a variable zoom lens you would need different sensor curvature depending on the zoom level which is trickier....).

A couple relevant links (just a few search results):

https://optics.org/news/12/5/4

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/sonys-new-curved-ima...

https://www.dpreview.com/news/7542036825/french-startup-is-p...

Also, the quickly deformable (with an electric field) "liquid" lenses which would revolutionize the lens aspect, similarly appearing in a lot of news and then never seemingly materialize.

https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-31-26-43416&id...

https://www.nextpit.com/liquid-lens-technology-smartphones

It's a bit weird that there aren't any great ultraportable high quality cameras anymore. Some interesting ones I've found are the Yongnuo YN450M and the Switchlens.

So I've used the discussion here and the inspiration by @samcat116 to finally publish my review of the Samsung Galaxy NX - half smartphone, half "professional" camera: https://op-co.de/blog/posts/galaxy_nx/

Something I think should be said more often: the root cause of decades-long ongoing camera data exfil mess must have to do with 802.11 Wi-Fi standard.

Technically it could be just as painless and usable like Apple AirDrop; it might not be readily implemented in products, but technically it's shown possible. The reason why it remains massive pain has to be in the Wi-Fi standard that can't be kicked from client or established in split seconds.

I'm not a camera enthusiast - but are these cameras still "worth it" to go through all the effort for their qualities, or is this closer to a vintage computer enthusiast just cracking away at something because it's a challenge?

Very interesting route to go through to get the camera working again!

But its much more convenient for me to live stream what I'm eating for lunch using my phone. Please like & subscribe, so I can eat

I think I may be missing the point of a lot of the comments, but could someone explain what this does that a smartphone does not?