By Matthew Henry
SYDNEY: A senior Kodak executive revealed the company is developing technology for mobile phone cameras that it hopes will improve the image quality and user experience of camera phones.
In a recent interview in Sydney, Kodak director of innovation and advanced development – digital capture, Peter Labaziewicz, outlined the company’s future directions to current.com.au including the development of technologies for mobile camera phones.
“We’re not stopping at cameras. Right now camera phones don’t take very good pictures, but with Kodak technology we can change that. We would be looking at developing new technologies and imbedding them into the next generation of camera phones,” Labaziewicz told Current.com.au.
The company’s foray into the mobile phone market is unlikely to take the form of a Kodak-branded phone. Instead, Kodak is focussing on developing new camera hardware and software that will improve image quality and make it easier for users to transfer photos to other devices.
Earlier this year, Kodak signed a 10-year partnership with Motorola to develop mobile phone imaging technologies and supply Motorola with CMOS sensors for its camera phones.
“These camera phones leave a lot to be desired in terms of imaging, they’ve got a ways to go yet,” said Labaziewicz.
According to Labaziewicz, the new direction is consistent with Kodak’s history as a ‘total imaging company’ focussed on developing not only capture technology, but also image sharing technology such as the EasyShare system and the online EasyShare Gallery.
Labaziewicz also demonstrated photo enhancement technologies that could soon be implemented into digtital still cameras, such as Face Smoothing, which identifies blemishes such as pimples on the skin of a photographed subject and removes them from the image.
“Our goal is easy quality. People don’t want reality in their memories, they want perfection,” he said.
The brand is also developing automatic archiving software with face recognition, which will enable a user to automatically sort or search for photos with a particular person in them.