I heard this on NPR the other day and looked it up. A Stanford project to develop an open source camera.

http://www.jbphotographics.com/blog/?p=136

Indicates to me that the digital camera hardware has reached or is reaching maturity and the next big thing in photography will be in software and in-camera capabilities. In-camera HDR, etc.

Case in point the new Nikon D3s and its impressive 102,400 ISO. I would suspect this is mainly a software feature with little hardware advances supporting it.

going to be fun.

Openess hasn't made much progress in the photographic world, there is actually less openess now than 4 years ago looking at the way MF has been evolving.

I just don't see how this interesting initiative would become any close to mainstream because the integration between hardware and software has a major impact on the performance of a camera system and most photographers still rank performance as being an order of magnitude more important than openess.

Cheers,
Bernard

Yeah, I would not old my breath for an open source camera. But the features being developed in this type of project will certainly be features in future cameras.

I've often thought it would be good if you could use third-party software (firmware) in digital cameras. The major manufacturers seem to be seriously lacking in imagination - so many useful features could be added simply by upgrading the software, with no extra hardware required. My favourite example would be allowing arbitrarily long bracketing sequences, for HDR photography. Histograms and highlight warnings based on the raw data would also be extremely useful, as many people have already suggested.

Folks, it's a research project. It's to encourage folks to pitch in on the camera development side, whereas previously it was difficult to do so because of a lack of platform. Even if the camera platform, or the notion of an open-source, programmable camera platform never takes off in the mainstream, it is entirely possible (and even plausible) that some of the new image processing methods that come out of the research would do so.