Hold on to your stylus — Kodak has just taken the Palm family of handheld organizer to another level. The company announced today that it will produce the Kodak PalmPix camera for the Palm III and Palm VII lines.
The device, which weighs only 1.5 ounces, plugs into a Palm’s serial port and functions as a 640-by-480 pixel digital camera. After a photo is taken, the PalmPix software will allow the user to see a low-resolution preview of the image. Users can also beam photos to one another. When the user performs a hot sync operation, the images are automatically loaded to the desktop computer and erased from the Palm’s memory.
The camera captures images in 24-bit color with its CMOS sensor. Although CMOS sensors are relatively cheap to produce, they often introduce more noise into an image than the CCD sensors found in higher-end cameras.
Kodak says it does not intend for the device to replace a full-function digital camera. Instead, they expect people to use the PalmPix camera to document information. For example, the camera might be used to capture a quick image of a whiteboard, or to take a snapshot of someone for use in a contact database.
The camera is expected to ship during the late spring or early summer of 2000. It will include software and sell for $179.