Artimi's WUSB camera tech might be in your hands in 2008

Artimi, a fabless semiconductor company, has been working on wireless USB for cameras for the past while, and finally got to show off some of its prototypes at this year's CES. The deets were slim, however, and they've finally come clean with some more specs for our prying eyes. Of course, WUSB is no mystery. 480MB/s up to 10-feet, 110MB/s up to 30-ish-feet, along with the prestige of being the new "it" wireless standard for peripherals. Artimi is taking all that good bandwidth loving to the camera, and is teaming up with "several brand name camera vendors" to do it, the names of which it will announce in Q2. It'll cost manufacturers about $25 to add WUSB at the outset, but within 3 years that figure should be down to $10, and Artimi figures all but the cheapest cameras will have it by then. We might see a WUSB cam get launched in '07, but most likely we'll have to wait for '08 to roll around before this becomes a reality. Artimi also expects WUSB dongles to be fairly common by then, but the first-to-market products will most likely include a dongle just in case. As to battery life, these kids aren't too concerned, 'cause WUSB can toss 1GB of pics in about 30 seconds, so the chip doesn't need to be on for too long.

[distantbody @ Jan 31st 2007 11:45PM]

How is WUSB 'Artimi's tech'. Isn't WUSB an interconnect standard and therefore I should be able to plug in ANY conbination of WUSB senders & recievers from any manufacturer and plug them into ANY USB device?

P.S. Isn't 480 MB/s faster than even the fastest HDD, SCSI or otherwise? Could I then have a wireless RAID configuration with ten or so HDDs/SDDs? I think that's very unlikely, but interesting nontheless...

[Nick @ Feb 1st 2007 3:52AM]

Read the artical propperly... it says 'Artimi, a fabless semiconductor company, has been working on wireless USB for cameras for the past while, and finally got to show off some of its prototypes at this year's CES.'

Working on wireless USB, not that they own it.

As for pixel blenders question about bluetooth. its not worth a response.

[pixelbender @ Feb 1st 2007 1:38AM]

Can someone tell me what was wrong with bluetooth????

[Rubin110 @ Feb 1st 2007 1:44AM]

http://eye.fi/

Uhh, wireless USB? That means you need to have your computer close by to make a connection. Wireless USB on cameras, a bit to lame, a bit to late.

[blargman @ Feb 1st 2007 3:26PM]

mbit not MB i HIGHLY doubt its 480MBytes per second. use a small b engadget ;)

[Josh @ Feb 1st 2007 4:31AM]

Only problem I see is, with a dongle attached with a long lead like that, what's the point - just hook the camera up. Until we have WUSB integrated into laptops/desktops I don't see the point myself.

[Derek @ Feb 1st 2007 12:42PM]

Yes it is 480Mbps (bits). There's no way 1GB can be transferred in 30 seconds. You might sit down and do the math, ok 480Mbps is 60MBps and figure that 1GB is easy within 30 seconds, the problem here isn't the connection - it's the memory cards being able to read quickly enough and the computer being able to write fast enough. It's rare now that USB2 is the slow part of a connection chain between data that wants to go from one place to another.

[mkrell @ Feb 1st 2007 1:41PM]

Alereon first showed a camera half that size in a demo with Kodak last June. there are a number of camera manufacturers that are working on integrating wireless USB directly into the camera (no dongle attached). The distance that wireless USB is spec'd out to is 30', it runs at a max rate of 480Mbps at 1m and 110Mbps at 10m. Your mileage may vary, but you should get at least 200Mbps out of it at a reasonable distance. Derek is correct, there are much bigger bottlenecks than the actual pipe.