The Associated Press says it has reached a deal with Sony Electronics to exclusively equip its visual journalists with new video and still cameras over the next two years.

The AP sends some 3,000 photos and 200 videos a day to customers worldwide. Visual journalism is a point of pride for the news cooperative, which won its 54th Pulitzer Prize this year, the 32nd it has won for photography.

The new Alpha cameras will be smaller and lighter, and employ mirrorless technology, enabling photographers to work silently.

“This is a game-changer for the AP and will give us way more flexibility into the future,” said Derl McCrudden, deputy managing editor for visual and digital journalism.

The company would not discuss the size of the investment.

It will be the first time the AP uses video and still cameras from the same manufacturer, which it hopes will allow for greater consistency in the product and more speed. Photographers will be able to easily share lenses and memory cards.

“We think we can get images from the back of cameras to customers in minutes,” said J. David Ake, director of photography.

Ake said he hoped the transition would be complete in between 18 months and two years, although training on the new equipment will be initially complicated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Neal Manowitz, deputy president for Imaging Products and Solutions Americas at Sony Electronics, said the company is “honored to equip AP’s journalists with our technology and support, giving them the opportunity to capture, transmit and deliver imagery in ways they never could before.”

Just the name Walkman hits the nostalgia nerve of the people from the era of 1980s and 1990s. Audio cassettes started replacing the Vinyl records three decades ago making Walkman popular among the youths two decades ago here in Nepal. Audio Cassettes and Walkman were cheaper and affordable than the record players.

You might be wondering why the talk of Walkman in the era of digital medias and streaming services. 2019 marks the 40^th Anniversary of the legendary Sony Walkman and for the same occasion Sony has unveiled the latest Walkman model the NW-A100TPS Walkman but its a walkman that doesnot and cannot play the audio cassettes. Wait! What? How can a Walkman be a Walkman that cannot play audio cassettes?

For those who don’t know, Sony also shifted to the digital media along side the whole world and has been producing Digital Walkmans for a while now. For the 40^th Anniversary of Walkman, they have designed the digital Walkman that looks like the original Walkman back from the 1979.

 

 

Front of the device features a flap which looks like the plastic window of the original Walkman, beneath that you can see a cassette running but when you open the flap you know its not a cassette rather a display playing the video of cassette running. The device is a 16GB storage device with a 3.6-inch display on the front which will last 26 hours on a single charge and will be available from November for £400 which is equivalent to Nrs. 56,765.

 

Sony Corp touted on Thursday the world’s first image sensors with built-in artificial intelligence, promising to make data-gathering tasks much faster and more secure. Calling it the first of its kind, Sony said the technology would give “intelligent vision” to cameras for retail and industrial applications.

The new sensors are akin to tiny self-contained computers, incorporating a logic processor and memory. They’re capable of image recognition without generating any images, allowing them to do AI tasks like identifying, analyzing or counting objects without offloading any information to a separate chip. Sony said the method provides increased privacy while also making it possible to do near-instant analysis and object tracking.

Sony joins tech giants like Huawei Technologies Co and Alphabet Inc’s Google that have been building dedicated AI silicon to help accelerate everything from image processing to machine learning. Its latest semiconductors could offer a big boost to augmented reality applications, should the technology be adapted for the smartphone or consumer markets, where the Japanese company is a leader.

The new AI-augmented sensors are capable of capturing a regular 12-megapixel image, 4K video at up to 60 frames per second or neither, providing only metadata about what the sensor has seen. Among the applications suggested by Sony are the counting and tracking of visitors to public spaces, heat and congestion mapping and measuring shopper behaviour in retail locations.

Though intended for commercial customers in its present iteration, the technology has promise for consumer applications as well. Without generating any actual images, it can help a personal device such as a smartphone identify objects and users securely. The accelerated object detection would also be an advantage for maintaining sharp focus when filming fast-moving subjects such as sports players or pets.

Sony is the world leader in providing image sensors for smartphones such as Apple Inc’s iPhone and dedicated photo and video cameras from the likes of Nikon Corp Its sensor division has been its most reliable growth driver over the past few years, boosted by the proliferation of multi-camera phones. The new products are in line with the company’s long-term goal, as articulated by Chief Executive Officer Kenichiro Yoshida, of expanding the variety of sensing solutions it offers and pursuing more forms of recurring revenue.

Another big application is industrial automation, where image sensors are needed to help so-called co-bots — robots designed to work in close proximity to humans — from bashing their flesh-and-blood colleagues. Here the main advantage of an integrated AI image sensor is speed. If a co-bot detects a human where they shouldn’t be and needs to come to a quick stop, then processing that information as quickly as possible is paramount.

But this is only the first generation, and the technology will undoubtedly improve in future. Right now, cameras are smarter because they send their data to computers. In the future, the camera itself will be the computer and all the smarter for it.

Source: Bloomberg 

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