I was really pleased to get my hands on Alice Camera this week, a project one of our CASA alumni has been working on for the past 4 years. This is a 4/3 sensor camera with interchangeable lenses (just like a DSLR) but uses the brain power of your phone to do the smarts. Their goal is to create a device targetted at content creators which improves the experience of shooting with high quality lenses and speeds up the process of publishing content directly through your phone.

It has been really interesting to watch Vish’s journey from co-founder and Entrepreneur First participant to shipping product to paying customers. He has also kindly shared some of those experiences with our students in the MSc Connected Environments programme. Out the box the device felt solid and had a quality to feel to it, the aluminium enclosure feels lovely to hold.

I have only had a quick go with the Lumix G 25 F1.7 lens that I bought to stay with the camera (since it will reside in our lab) but will be trying a few different lenses soon. So why the comment about old mans eyes in the title? The Alice team are working on the autofocus which means the camera is currently manual only. It turns out I massively rely on autofocus on cameras since even with my glasses (varifocals) I don’t seem to be able to see things in crisp focus so am having to “guess” between the two extremes of “not in focus anymore”! A few pictures will follow in the next week.