Fujifilm’s first surveillance camera can read a license plate from 1km away
theverge.com
theverge.com
The P900 has been succeeded by the P1000, which is the same focal length as this one.
This new camera has a 1000mm-equivalent lens.
The moon will completely fill the frame.
You can look at airliners and read the tail numbers. At high zoom levels tracking the airliners is the hard part. You have to have a steady hand, although the image stabilization really helps. It also has a quick-zoom feature allowing you to zoom-out, locate and center something and snap back quickly.
The article seems to indiate the p1000 doesn't have optical image stabilization, but it does.
But the p1000 does NOT have ISO 819200 or heat haze correction. That sounds pretty cool. With the p1000 you will see atmospheric shimmering pretty often.
Of course, they automatically substitute this when you zoom, they don't make you click "enhance", that'd be terrible UX.
(skip around)
"What's the breakthrough here? It seems they just mated peanut butter with jelly between two slices of bread, all of which we've already had for decades"
This is the novelty. Basically improving on other camera systems by making the optics better. There are plenty of surveillance cameras that offer a similar set of features but perhaps with lower specs (slower AF, less effective processing algorithms, etc.). But I don't think they claimed to be a breakthrough invention, just an excellent first step into the field and a possible improvement over some of the competing offerings. This is more or less standard for border security applications, as an example [0].
There are many extreme long range surveillance systems that probably do a lot better... at potentially multiple hundreds of thousands of $ per unit.
[0] https://www.kowa-lenses.com/en/applications/cctv-security/42...
I strongly believe that this was always the case. There was never a 'breakthrough' invention.
Although maybe the folks buying them mount them on light poles or other non-steady bases.
You could say the same for tons of successful products, from instant noodles to ride hailing apps.
We are all very smart. But the universe is also very vast. We do not have all — not nearly all — of even the basic, bronze-age technologies that an alternate human civilization could have developed.
Of course there are simple tricks left involving photosensitive semiconductors and modern optical engineering, is my point.
The city I used to live in did a trial. They recovered more stolen cars in the first month they tried it than the whole year before. Here’s a press release about the program in general[1].
[1]https://www.brookhavenga.gov/police/page/brookhaven-police-c...
The benefits are real, but without safeguards it will be abused: police officers and, in this case, also power utility workers likely have full, unaudited access to this data. That means they'll use it to stalk and harass people, e.g. ex-girlfriends, in addition to legit uses.
This is such a common trope, and it should be fairly well-known by now how so many American cops are basically bullies with guns, that I really have to wonder why any sane woman would ever date one. Horror stories about the things the ex-girlfriends and ex-wives of cops have gone through have been around for many decades, it's not something new. I have seen a non-negligible number of women on online dating sites who have specifically said they would not date anyone in law enforcement.
Everything is a balance between privacy and security. In a perfect world the cameras wouldn't be abused, but in a perfect world there wouldn't be any crime.
Personally I think we don't need any more tracking in our lives, and I'd gladly swap some stolen cars in order to avoid a surveillance dystopia.
technically the car is stolen from the place that holds the note.. but I don't think the malls and other places that have installed these and sold the data are really wanting to put our press releases about how many broke people late on their payments they turned over to repo men/women..
They used that excuse to put some in at the airport near here, but I have second hand knowledge that they have been used to Id other people and investigate other things, so that data is not in a read - only - plates put into the db that are stolen and get info back, it's db data that is there and searchable shareable for other reasons, most the general public may never know.
That's a very optimistic reading of GDPR. In practice, LEO agencies legal counsel has to write them a compliance rationale doc supporting their need to use private data and that's it. I bet activists are gearing up to challenge some of those rationales in courts but those will be speed bumps at most. It's hard to see the judiciary constraining the powers that law enforcement traditionally had.
I know of some Romanian park rangers who temporarily lost their fining powers until their GDPR compliance gets sorted out - they're low priority compared to other LEO agencies. It's funny to think that people degrading natural parks is a consequence of GDPR, yet here we are.
Unless you have some specific LEO capability you wish GDPR eliminated, it's hard to see GDPR as anything else than an compliance burden on government agencies.
There is also a sense of immunity, since a state fining itself doesnt cost them anything.
> With a focal length equivalent to 1000mm