'Frankencamera': A Giant Leap For Digital Photos?

It's big. It's ugly. And it's made from recycled parts, at least for now. It's called the "Frankencamera" — and it might someday change the way you take pictures.

Computer scientists at Stanford University say the new camera works something like an iPhone: It can be altered in nearly infinite ways, depending on the applications downloaded to it.

Say you want to take a photo of your child playing with a new toy in a dark room, near a bright window. It's tough to do now because of the variations in lighting within that single frame. If Junior's face is visible and bright, the tree and the sky through the window will be bleached out. If the scene outside comes out just right, Junior will be so underexposed you won't be able to see the glee on his face.

Not so with the Frankencamera, says Levoy. For the prototype, he and his colleagues developed a program that instructs the camera to take two rapid shots if a frame has both dark and light parts. One shot exposes correctly for the dark; one shot exposes correctly for the light. The program then merges the two images into one, taking the best parts from each.

Read the whole story at NPR.