SSLR - The idea (part 2)

Shutter speed
One effect that usually requires a tripod is taking very long exposure images, e.g., night shots of traffic or waterfalls. Like tripod use in general, this could be handled by taking many short exposure images and creating the blurring by using super resolution techniques (aligning and averaging).

Landscape Photography and HDR
Landscape photography can be amazingly beautiful. Unfortunately, it is also a huge pain in the ass. You basically have two times of the day where you can take good landscape photographs: dawn and dusk. The reason is that during the day, the sun casts harsh shadows on everything making them look pretty ugly. At dawn and dusk, there isn’t any direct sunlight and everything looks evenly lit.
Now, using software we can get almost the same effect during the day. During day shots, there are areas of the scene that are directly illuminated by the sun and others that are indirectly illuminated (and much much dimmer). Using widely different exposure times, it’s possible to capture all of the detail in the indirectly illuminated regions as well as the directly illuminated areas. Better yet, if a surface or texture is directly and indirectly illuminated then it’s possible to match the colors and make the entire surface look like it’s indirectly illuminated. The result is that everything looks like light is indirectly hitting it like it would be during dawn or dusk.

There are some caveats here though. The biggest one is that light that hits a surface can reflect onto other ones, e.g., wearing a green shirt can make your face look a little green. This technique cannot account for that.

This HDR photography is already available on current smart phones. So, it’s really not really a stretch. The difference between what’s used right now and my idea is that I hope to fully compensate for lighting not just make it look a little better.

White Balance
Many DSLRs today comes with GPS sensors, which means the cameras know where they are. If you are outside, the camera could know that and set the white balance accordingly. If you are inside, then it could know that too. Also, if someone else has been inside the same building at roughly the same location and taken a photo, all of that information could be used to determine the white balance. Lastly, if you take a picture of the same thing many times, say a friend who you drag along on your photo adventures or a hat, you can use how those objects look in different photos to help figure out the white balance.
One thing that all of these features have in common is processing. The SSLR camera will need to come with a beefy processor or graphics chip set.