A future of high-speed wireless communications for digital cameras could be just around the corner if Artimi's aspirations are realised

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Think of USB High Speed operating at a theoretical 480Mbits, linking your camera to your PC - without the need for a USB cable and this is the dream being developed by companies like Artimi.

Artimi is a Cambridge, England, based company that is developing solutions to the spec. for the wireless equivalent of USB 2.0 High Speed, operating at 480MBits/sec, or 60MBytes/sec. At today's Sneak Peek pre-show event, Artimi showed a prototype camera and wireless USB adapter that allowed them to take pictures generating near 1MB image files and print them out, wirelessly, direct to an ink-jet photo printer without the delay associated with, for example, Bluetooth wireless connectivity, which is much slower.

Although Kodak and Nikon, for example, have produced WiFi connected digital cameras for the consumer market, relatively high cost and battery drain mean that WiFi is not likely to become a widely adopted wireless solution for consumer still digital cameras.

This prototype set of a wireless USB-equipped digital still camera and USB receiver demonstrated by Artimi could represent a viable future of digital camera to PC connectivity without wires. Be assured that the cameras will be prettier and the USB adapters much smaller!

Bluetooth is cheap and light on battery resources, but its data transfer speed capability is too slow for the large image sizes being produced by most digital cameras today. Both the USB and Bluetooth standards are being endowed with high-speed wireless variants for the future. Artimi says its ace is that its hardware implementation embraces both the wireless USB and high speed Bluetooth radio specification requirements while retaining the key benefits of both.

Dennis Laudick, Artimi product marketing manager, told DPNow that prototype hardware like that being demonstrated to us today performs extremely well when compared with wired USB 2.0 High Speed. He also said that we can expect the first commercially shipping cameras to feature high speed wireless USB some time next year.

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Artimi hints at the future for routine wireless connectivity in digital cameras

DPNow Artimi hints at the future for routine wireless connectivity in digital cameras
Consumer digital cameras could routinely feature high-speed wireless USB connectivity, with the firs... (more)