One way in which my quest for surreptitious photography (originally laid out in the second part of this post) can be described is to say that I want a cameraphone without the phone. The cameras in cameraphones are very small, operate silently, have very small openings for the lens, perform impressively in low light conditions, and lately have been getting into pretty reasonable resolutions such as 2MP. Some can even zoom, without anything sticking out in the process. I tried to find out if I could purchase the camera components that are used for these separately, and make a primitive interface for them by which, absent of an LCD or anything like that, take pictures, zoom, etc. I could achieve great wearability by spreading out the parts, with the camera where it needs to be, the batteries in another place, the memory in another, and the trigger buttons in my pocket, with wires running all around.

My efforts in this direction were frustrated. I found out that ST Micro Electronics is a company that makes cameraphone cameras, including pretty good modern high-res ones, and found old cached versions of Mouser catalog pages that showed that they had sold the standalone cameras and development kits to go with them! The dev kits were expensive, but still, it was more than I expected to find. Sadly, in the current catalog these pages have disappeared. I couldn't find anyone anywhere saying anything about it. I can only hope these products will soon be replaced.

Meanwhile, for Christmas I received what's probably the most readily concealable consumer digital camera on the market: L'Espion S, sold by Thinkgeek and made by Digital Dream of the UK. I'd thought of buying it a while ago, but it used to be even more unfortunately named the "James Bond Digital Camera." I guess they must have realized Bond is not a very hip association these days.

I've only used the camera a few times so far, but here are my first impressions. As I said it's very concealable, and the Zippo case it lives in is really pretty cool--it even makes the right sound when you open and close it. The resolution is not great at 640x480, but I can live with it for now. The low light performance is pretty impressive. The memory capacity is sufficient for me, though it could certainly improve. The image compression is quite detectable, and not suitable for photophiles, but fine for my purposes. My primary gripe is with the "quickshot" feature that allows you to flip it open, press one button, and take a picture without having to separately turn the camera on and off. To be honest, until tonight I hadn't gotten this to work at all. But it turned out I just wasn't holding the button down long enough. The feature is used by pressing the same button that normally turns the camera on, but holding it down for 2 seconds. I think it actually took about 3 or 4 seconds from when I first depressed the button to when the picture was taken. To me that's not a great way to take the picture surreptitiously, although if the camera were hidden I guess it would be alright. But after thinking about it, I realized this limitation is probably due to the fact that the camera still needs to turn on and initialize before it can snap the picture, rather than simply poor button programming.

I should also mention that the camera has a pretty impressive amount of configurability considering the fact that its interface consists of two buttons, an LED and a two-character display. It does make some noises that can't be disabled, but they're high-pitched tones, so I'm hoping to find that in any reasonably loud environment it won't be noticeable. Transferring to the computer is easy, it has a USB plug and appears as a removable drive the same way any camera does. Battery management seems sensible, unlike some of the other tiny digital cameras I've heard about (it takes one AAA).

A side note: the thinkgeek page says "The l'espion S uses ST Micro technology to capture highly-detailed images with incredibly small file sizes." So I think they've done pretty much exactly what I wanted to do, and much better than I could have done on my own. If they come out with a new version with higher resolution and an improved quickshot feature, it will be a really great gadget.