2024 is the year of adding Artificial Intelligence to everything. Now, even a pleasant walk in the woods is getting a dose of AI: optics manufacturer Swarovski has announced the AX Visio, a binocular set with an AI bird identification feature. Not sure if that is a lesser or greater scaup on your pond? These binoculars will tell you, for the low, low price of $4799.
While digital cameras built into binoculars have been around for a while, adding AI is new. That’s a cool thing, but a bit of digging into the specs reveals that there is a much cheaper way to do it.
- Buy a cheap digital camera, like the Kodak Pixpro AZ255, which has a higher resolution and longer zoom than these binoculars.
- Transfer the image to your cell phone with an $11 memory card reader.
- Run the free Cornell Merlin ID app to identify the bird.
- Send the $4500 you just saved to us, or your favorite charity.
These ludicrously overpriced binoculars use the same Cornell Merlin ID system that you can use for free from their app, which also has the advantage of being able to ID birds from their songs. This is helpful because birds are tricky creatures who will try and hide from the hideously overpriced gadget you just bought.
[Via DigitalCameraWorld]
Roasted.
HaD is trying out anger marketing. It’s great for creating viral content that people pass around.
Too bad! Other articles from the same authors look a lot more decently titled too
https://hackaday.com/author/richardbaguley/
In hope it is just a one-time experiment and that Hackaday is not struggling with getting finances for their journalists to shoot straight in the anger knee-jerk reaction this much.
Thank you, Richard Baguley, for finding and reporting this, still. An interesting implementation of something very similar I’ll need to do soon for hobby project for identifying birds on a live video stream. :)
Any more hint on the said “cameras built into binoculars”? I am not sure these have integrated displays though. Maybe these guys have some of the parts involved: https://www.enmesi.com/ – https://www.displaymodule.com/
Humm… I am likely just misinterpreting the author’s ironical humor. :)
It is hard to perceive the friendly irony when so many news are plain serious about these wild claims, or bitterly satirical in an aggressive way.
Oh wait, no looking at reviews, there is no display projected in transparency with the birds around. I see the author point better now! :)
Nice to see the ridiculousness of an overpriced product called out.
That camera can’t do shit compared to what those basic binos can even do. If HaD is gonna roast you’d hope they’d spend more that a minute making up some excuse of an article.
>Buy a cheap digital camera
But that’s not binoculars. You don’t have direct stereoscopic view with minimal distortion and light loss through it. Just staring at the zoom factor for example is pointless, because regular binoculars are 8-10x for a reason: to have a wider field of view. Beyond a certain range, hand shake becomes an issue and you lose your target too easily. Talking about the camera resolution is also pointless, because the main purpose of the device is that YOU see the bird. Seeing it through the crappy LCD viewfinder of a low end consumer camera is not the same thing. It’s a false comparison.
High end binoculars cost money. Swarowski binoculars are especially expensive. Whether it’s worth $4799 is debatable, but it’s not wildly out of the ballpark.
No great hack to piggyback a camera onto binoculars …
Even without the camera, you’re only seeing an image thru binoculars.
Don’t dismiss cameras. With image stabilization they could easily outperform binoculars. Maybe you need a better camera.
I use a Sony A1 for wildlife photography, literally one of the best EVFs in the world
It absolutely cannot beat my binoculars, stabilization or not. Your eyes have several stops more dynamic range than even the best sensor that humans have ever created, meaning your eyes can see more details in the differences between very close shades. Also I have binoculars with a wider apparent FOV than the Swarvo in this article, it does not feel claustrophobic at all. The A1’s EVF have two different FOV depending on the frame rate but even the widest one isn’t comparable to good binoculars.
My camera is for freezing moments, my binoculars are for actual observation.
Almost like there was a reason for DSLR’s to exist… but what do I know. At that point it’s a tossup of stabilization, autofocus, and aperture control with the ability to capture high quality images vs fov with binocular vision (and the ability to afocally provide your eyes with great light gathering at minimal loss when you pay for it).
OK but my cheap old DSLR has a pretty damn good zoom lens on it and I can look straight down the barrel of the lens all the time the shutter’s not open. Whole setup even with a good zoom lens is worth maybe $500 absolute tops on ebay.
While Binoculars are essentially tubes with lenses in them, there is a lot that goes on in-between the objective and the ocular that distinguishes the higher and lower end. However, I would never buy Swarovski, they’re no better than Leica or Vortex and you are paying for the brand so you can show off at the bird stand.
The product in question seems like a product with no market case. This sort of thing is good for beginners who don’t even know the kind of bird they are looking at. However, no beginner is paying 5 grand on binoculars. Seasoned birders generally 1. know what bird they are looking at or 2. know enough about what they are looking at to figure it out or 3. enjoy that process.
Merlin is pretty good though, particularly for sound. Even seasoned birders struggle with identifying birds by calls.
lol: “Transfer the image to your cell phone with a memory card”
I think they understand their target audience pretty well: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/famous-xkcd-comic-comes-full-circle-with-ai-bird-identifying-binoculars.1498251/page-2#post-42506749
Is there a version that also works on identifying humans?
Probably, but you’ll have to join a three letter agency to be able to use it.
But the article doesn’t include the cost of the Iphone, or Ipad. So that has to come off the 4400 dollar savings. Just a comment about the presumption that everyone has uses Apple products,
Apple product? Good luck putting the SD card in an iPhone. You specifically need a cheap Android phone that still accepts SD cards
Bit late, and that’s stupid expensive, but shout out to the Merlin app. It’s one of those apps that has really given me a sense of living in ‘the future’. While it not only can do a visual ID (via zoomed in phone cam photos), it can do audio (/bird call) ID in real time (like Shazam for birds!). It’s legit like magic. HIGHLY suggest if you have ANY interest in birds at all. So cool.