Sony released their latest quartal financial report (PDF file here). And there is very good news for Sony. They managed to increase their operating income by 72,7%! This despite a small 1,7% sales decrease (mainly due the shrinking video camera and entry-level compact camera business).

Sony writes:

Canon 80D Video Test vs a6300, GH4, & 70D

Sony Alpha 7 Aktion: Bis zu 80 EUR Rabatt auf ausgewählte Objektive at Amazon.de
Don’t worry, new A-mount cameras will come this year ;) (SonyAlphaForum)
AF Tracking Test A77II vs A7II by Andreas Peters.
Sony a6300 and long exposure photography (SonyAlphaForum).
Tips for Tethered Shooting (Vanguardworld)
Sony A7r II vs. A7 II vs. A7S: Comparison: https://youtu.be/m2HWLnaN4s0
Sony A6300 review by SonyAlphaLab.

Sony recently patented a new kind of “contact lens camera” that gives us a glimpse into an intriguing (and for privacy reasons also scary) future! Yes this is a full working camera worn on an eyeball that has a lens unit, image sensor, microchip processor and storage unit on the contact lens! It also has a built-in wireless antenna to transmit pictures to any device (smartphone or laptop for example).

Now you would imagine the contact lens having a sort of fixed focal and aperture but it has not. Sony writes:

The image pickup unit includes, for example, a lens system including the image pickup lens, an aperture stop, a zoom lens, a focus lens, and the like, a drive system that causes the lens system to perform focusing operation and zooming operation.

And there is some more sensational thing that small contact lens camera can do:

The image pickup signal processing unit may perform image stabilization for correcting blur of a captured image, the blur being caused by motion of the eyeball.

A display unit will display your captured images directly on the contact lens. See the original Sony patent drawing below:

And how do you control this “thing”?

• You control the release shutter via a conscious eyelid closure and aperture (there is a sensor that can measure the pressure of the eyelid)
• When you accelerate shutter speed increases (to avoid blur)
• All settings like aperture and zoom can be adjusted via eyelid movement

I really want to see this thing for real as I think this could really have a success. Having a wearable camera people cannot see make it unproblematic to wear (unlike the [shoplink 47352 ebay]Google Glass device[/shoplink]). But of course, wearing an “invisible” camera will raise a lot of question regarding privacy…

The full patent literature is available at Freepatentsonline.

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Thanks Raul Frias for finding this!