Recently, there was a leak surrounding a Polaroid camera running Android and packing the ability to change lenses on the camera. A leak only gets you so far though however, and the President of Polaroid recently said the following in an e-mail to Imaging Resources: “There will be an Android powered, interchangeable lens camera introduced by Polaroid at CES 2013,”. This might not sound like much but the idea of having a camera with interchangeable lenses and Android onboard excites me a little bit.
The camera itself is said to be packing an 18.1 Megapixel sensor, a 3.5-inch display and running some flavor of Android 4.X. The camera could be called the Polaroid IM1836 but that could just be a codename while the device is in development. Throughout 2012 there have been a couple tries at the smart camera concept, with Nikon trying it out and Samsung going one further with the Galaxy Camera, which is essentially a Galaxy S III with some pretty good optics attached to it.
I’m pretty big on my photography and have numerous cameras, if anything, my favorite to shoot with is my dSLR but, it’s getting a little long in the tooth and is hell-a-awkward to lug around. That and the fact I believe my smartphone’s camera to be good enough for everyday sort of shooting. After all, the saying goes that “the best camera, is the camera you have with you”. Aside from the convenience of having a decent shooter in your smartphone, is the added bonus of having a full-fledged OS behind it all to edit, resize, share, send, tweak or do whatever you want with. This manner of manipulation is very natural and it’s something I’m sure a lot of people use as their primary method of adjusting photos.
No matter how good you are with Photoshop Touch however, your results are very limited as there’s only so far you can go without proper optics. The kind of lenses that provide great aperture and optical zoom. With these optics you could make some very good-looking photos with the help of photo-editing software on Android. Something like this could well be the way back for Polaroid. We remember the company for quick snaps on plastic film but soon, we could be thinking of them as the company that fuel the best photos on Instagram, Snapseed and Flickr.