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Comment by phonon | Hacker News Reader

Polaroid made a beautiful professional digital camera, with their own CCD design early on, which even had its own compressed RAW format...then they gave up :-(

http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/pdc-2000

https://www.digicammuseum.de/kameras/detailansicht/kamera/Ka...

http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/pdc-3000

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They probably spent too much on development and didn't sell enough of them. That's a quick way for management to shut down the professional digital camera division. They can just buy whitebox designs from China and slap their name on it for almost nothing. They probably figured that Canon and Nikon were going to corner them out before they could really gain a foothold so why blow all that money when they could still make film for the time being?

It'd be interesting if development on sonar autofocus systems continued - they could work in the dark where phase detection and contrast detection have difficulty.

A compound eye of phase detection points, laser, sonar as well as regular contrast detection would be interesting. Each has their own strengths and limitations.

(For context the camera listed above uses sonar autofocus - basically echolocation)

I'm guessing the issue is that there would be few (1?) focus points available; people are used to much finer grained auto-focus capabilities. That being said...maybe uBeam can find a use for their tech now :-)

https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/search/label/ubeam

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