For spontaneous photography, the best camera for the job is the one you happen to be holding. For the overwhelming majority of casual photographers, that camera is the one in your smartphone. The very first cameras appeared on commercial mobile phones around the turn of the century (although as ever with tech milestones, there are multiple claims to the title of pioneer). The early work of companies like Kyocera, Motorola, Samsung, and even Apple, opened the floodgates to what is now best called'computational photography'; relatively small sensors and lenses, paired with massively sophisticated algorithms and processing to deliver the kind of images that even the best DSLR cameras would struggle to match. One company believes that mobile photography could be better.

The British startup Photogram AI has announced a new camera called the Alice Camera. It's an "AI-accelerated computational camera" that aims to deliver better connectivity than a DSLR and better quality than a smartphone. Smartphones have been making huge advances in the area of computational photography in recent years while traditional camera companies have largely been left in the dust. Alice is trying to bring the worlds of standalone cameras and computational photography together. Alice is an interchangeable lens camera that features a dedicated AI chip "that elevates machine learning and pushes the boundaries of what a camera can do."