
Thanks to smartphones you can now point, click, and share your way to superstardom.
Smartphones have made creating-and consuming-digital photos and video on social media a pastime for billions. But the content those phones can create can't compare to the quality of those made with a good camera.
British entrepreneur Vishal Kumar's startup Photogram wants to combine the benefits of mirrorless cameras replete with interchangeable lenses, big sensors, and often complex, fiddly controls with the smarts and connectivity of your smartphone.
The Alice Camera, due for release in October for around $760 to early backers on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, is, first of all, a compact, mirrorless camera.
The Alice camera focuses on what cameras do well But its machined aluminum body is sleeker than other mirrorless cameras. There's no onboard screen or viewfinder of any kind just a shutter button, a control wheel, and a cold-shoe adapter.
Instead, photographers mount their smartphone to the Alice camera. Alice focuses on what smartphones can't do: it houses a big, light-soaking sensor, and it can be screwed to a wide array of lenses.
Alice links to your smartphone via a 5Ghz Wi-Fi connection - so your smartphone can do what traditional cameras can't do. An app on your phone provides not just an easily updatable software interface on the smartphone's big, bright screen, but the connectivity to easily share images and stream video.
The secret ingredient: an AI built using NVIDIA GPU accelerated deep learning to help photographers wring the most out of Alice's hardware.
A Star Is Born Kumar, whose startup is part of NVIDIA Inception, an acceleration program that offers go-to-market support, expertise and technology for AI, data science and HPC startups, sees the opportunity for this device literally staring everyone in the face.
There are more than 1 billion active Instagram users, more than 1 billion active TikTok users, and more than 2.3 billion YouTube users. Social media influencers who can deliver great content to all these users become instantaneous global superstars, Kumar explains.
Consider Charli D'Amelio, who has more than 115 million followers, or Addison Rae, with more than 86 million, or YouTube star Mr. Beast, with more than 71 million followers.
Content creators like these may rely, in large part, on smartphone users to provide an audience. Most, however, left their smartphones behind long ago, adopting more sophisticated gear to create their content.
Firsthand Frustration and relies on a user's smartphone, mounted on the back, to do what smartphones do well. Kumar, a self-described cultural data scientist, learned this firsthand working as a data scientist at Sotheby's. Great photography was vital to sparking worldwide interest in the auction house's offerings on social media.
I was thinking a lot about how data science and machine learning and artificial intelligence could be applied to create video and imagery, Kumar says. I was using a camera all the time to create video content and becoming increasingly frustrated with operating them.
A Camera for Creators And, for serious content creators, a better camera than the smartphone they already carry around with them is definitely needed.
In part, that's because you can only capture so much light in the relatively compact sensors crammed into today's smartphones, Kumar explains. Bigger sensors soak up more light, so they can capture a high-quality image even in very dim lighting conditions, among other benefits.
So Alice is built around a Sony IMX294 10.7 megapixel 4/3 sensor optimized for high-quality and full-width 4K video. The sensor is eight times bigger than that of a typical smartphone.
In front of that big sensor is a Micro Four Third lens mount. The compact interchangeable lens system gives users access to more than 100 lens options from Olympus, Panasonic, and specialty lens makers such as Sigma, Tamron, and Tokina.
Users will be able to choose from 16mm-equivalent fish-eye lenses for a super-wide angle of view or 800mm-equivalent telephone zoom lenses able to get clear, undistorted pictures of objects far away, with plenty of options in between.
Like more traditional cameras, Alice can use a wide variety of lenses. A Classic Deep Learning Problem All of this is why professional photographers continue to keep big big, expensive cameras in their toolkit. But the masses of content creators may never get the most out of dedicated cameras, Kumar explains.
Making more expertise more accessible to more people is a classic deep learning problem. And the technology's roots in computer vision and image recognition make training an AI to operate a camera a natural fit.
To build Alice's AI, Photogram CTO Liam Donovan trained an NVIDIA GPU accelerated convolutional neural network using millions of out-of-focus and in-focus images, teaching an AI to distinguish between good and bad photos.
Optimized for What You Do The AI is a crucial element in the end-to-end deep learning image processing pipeline Photogram's team has built.
The result is an AI that can control and improve focusing, change exposure and automatically adjust white balance, and even perform automatic image stabilization.
Revealed last September and positioned by Kumar as the AI camera for creators, in February the project has raised $200,000 from more than 250 backers - 7x Kumar's original goal. Users will eventually make Alice better at whatever photography they do, Kumar explains.
Let's say you're a wedding photographer, or you like to shoot cats or clothes, Kumar says. We want people to be able to optimize our models and retrain them so their Alice camera can be more optimized for the photography they do.
Smartphone Synergy Revealed last September and pos
Most recent headlines
09/11/2025
Dalet today announced a transformative leap forward for media operations: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under one natura...
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
12/09/2025
College Football Kickoff 2025: Fox Sports Ups Look as Canon, Sony Power Shallow ...
12/09/2025
ABC/ESPN Excited For WNBA Postseason Coverage In Revamped FormatThe Finals moves to a best-of-seven series in 2025By Mark J Burns, SVG Contributor
Friday, Sep...
12/09/2025
(L-R) Jade Croot, Rosy McEwen, and Bryn Chainey attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Rabbit Trap at Eccles Theatre on January 24, 2025, in Park ...
12/09/2025
For fans, we know how important it is to stay plugged into music culture and dis...
12/09/2025
Link ping, Sweden and Shipley, United Kingdom, September 12, 2025 - Agama, the expert in video observability and analytics for service quality and customer expe...
12/09/2025
IBC2025 began on Sept. 12, with exhibits and conferences running through Sept. 15 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center. Explore the full TV Tech coverage of t...
12/09/2025
The Best Fictional Bands (and the Artists Who Make Them Great) With Spinal Tap II: The End Continues hitting theaters and songs from KPop Demon Hunters ruling...
12/09/2025
Industry veteran Tom Baldassare has joined Advanced Systems Group, LLC (ASG), a technology and services provider for media creatives and content owners, as a Se...
12/09/2025
Maxon, maker of powerful, approachable software solutions for creators working in 2D and 3D design, motion graphics, visual effects, and more, today announced a...
12/09/2025
PlayBox Neo, a leading provider of media playout solutions, has partnered with AI-Media, pioneering developers of AI-powered captioning technology, to integrate...
12/09/2025
Dalet today announced a transformative leap forward for media operations: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under one natura...
12/09/2025
New alliance strengthens the IT channel in Germany and Switzerland in protecting business-critical SaaS data.
Keepit, the world s only independent, cloud-nativ...
12/09/2025
Fincons Group, an international IT business consultancy and systems integrator company with more than 40 years of experience in the market, is proud to announce...
12/09/2025
Following its acquisition of Telemetrics, EVS continues its push into robotics with an announcement at IBC2025 that it is acquiring XD motion....
12/09/2025
TORONTO The North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) has announced the appointment of Eduardo Ruiz Sanchez, deputy director, broadcast operations at Telev...
12/09/2025
Ed Miller, a longtime broadcast engineer in Ohio and a former national president of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, has died....
12/09/2025
AMSTERDAM At this year's IBC2025, the Advanced HDR by Technicolor initiative will be pushing broadcasters to adopt a more dynamic, frame-by-frame conversion...
12/09/2025
Feature-length retrospective from Studio Crook to air in 2026
Sir David Jason returns to the nation's favourite comedy channel, U&GOLD, for Open All Hours:...
12/09/2025
September 12th, 2025
Tribeca X and The Female Quotient to Host Powerhouse Em...
12/09/2025
Friday 12 September 2025
The Boomtown Rats, Nyah Grace, Soweto Kinch, Royal Ballet and Madness also announced to perform at the ceremony on Tuesday
Sky today ...
12/09/2025
Wuppertal September 12, 2025
Riedel Unveils Ultra-Light Bolero Mini Wireless Intercom BeltpackAt IBC2025 in Amsterdam, Riedel Communications unveiled Bolero M...
12/09/2025
Wuppertal September 12, 2025
Riedel Communications Acquires hi human interfaceRiedel Communications today announced the acquisition of hi human interface fro...
12/09/2025
Back to All News
New International Crime Series Road (WT)' Explores Twiste...
12/09/2025
Back to All News
First Look: Thai Crime Drama Everybody Loves Me When I'm ...
12/09/2025
Back to All News
Netflix Marks 10 Years in Japan, Announces Three New Series Th...
12/09/2025
CORE+ virtually removes distortion, setting a new standard for church sound and giving worship teams the clarity and confidence they need.
Read the full artic...
12/09/2025
The Late Late Show is back with a bang after the summer break, and Patrick Kielt...
12/09/2025
The World Athletics Championships, Ireland v France in the Women's Rugby World Cup quarter-final, the Irish Champions Festival, and two Sports Direct Men...
12/09/2025
The Records Show starts Sunday at 6.30pm on RT One and RT Player.
Katie Hanno...
11/09/2025
Report: Busy Live Sports Streaming Execs Have Low-hanging Fruit' in Front o...
11/09/2025
Inside Game Creek Video's Big Week as Ovation, Flagship Make NFL DebutsBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Thursday, September 11, 2025 - 7:00 am
Pr...
11/09/2025
NFL Kickoff 2025: Prime Sports Starts New Season at Lambeau Field; Sets Sights o...
11/09/2025
College Football Kickoff 2025: NBC Sports Pushes HDR Image Quality, Aerial Drone...
11/09/2025
RADAR, Spotify's program for emerging talent, recently hit a major milestone...
11/09/2025
SBS shares Australian National Anthem in over 60 languages to foster belonging a...
11/09/2025
L3Harris showcases advanced Distributed Spectrum Collaboration and Operations (DiSCO) technology on Defence Science and Technology Laboratory's MAST-13 uncr...
11/09/2025
L3Harris recently signed an agreement with Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace to supp...
11/09/2025
Warsaw, Poland, 20.08.25: Nielsen, the global leader in audience measurement, data and analytics, has released its latest July All Screens Video Landscape repor...
11/09/2025
Warner Bros. Discovery to add key Big Data and Advanced Audience capabilities fr...
11/09/2025
Link ping, Sweden, September 11, 2025 - Agama, the expert in video observability & analytics for service quality and customer experience, announced today the la...
11/09/2025
Maxon today unveiled the latest Maxon One release, delivering new innovations across its unified creative ecosystem and introducing a fresh visual identity that...
11/09/2025
Lightware is pleased to announce the launch of the Lightware Enterprise Program, empowering corporations and organisations with its portfolio of scalable, relia...
11/09/2025
CueScript, the leading international developer of professional teleprompting solutions with over a decade of innovation and hands-on industry expertise, is intr...
11/09/2025
MASV (massive.io), the fastest and most reliable secure large file transfer platform for media professionals and an IDC Innovator 2025 for Media & Entertainment...
11/09/2025
CROSSPOINT/CROSSMEDIA (part of ES MEDIA Group), in partnership with AMPLIFY, has been selected to deliver the automatic metadata service for RTVE's historic...
11/09/2025
TSL is launching Hummingbird, a unified, interoperable ecosystem of control and monitoring applications and interfaces, designed to drive efficiency and reduce ...
11/09/2025
LucidLink, the cloud-native storage collaboration platform, today announced new innovations at IBC 2025 (Stand 6.A12) designed to deliver faster, more secure wo...
11/09/2025
Under the USD 89.6 Million award, SES Space & Defense will provide global commer...