According to Canon’s new patent application, we could be seeing cameras that automatically watermark images soon.

The filing details a “Registration” mode on cameras that would take a snapshot of your iris and use that unique information as a watermark. The photographer would select this mode, look into the viewfinder for a moment so that the camera can scan his eye, and then take photos as usual. Up to five users would be supported.

The system would embed the metadata in batches to avoid slowing down the camera. It could also be modified to set up a verification code instead of a watermark, keeping the image quality intact.

It sounds like professional photographers could benefit from a system like this, but for the average Joe it probably wouldn’t do much good.

[Via Engadget, Photography Bay]

Canon and Casio have been looking into Microsoft’s JPEG XR format recently, and have decided that it makes a good middle ground between regular JPEG and camera RAW. The format has a much higher quality than JPEG, in addition to better compression. It allows a camera to fire off a lot of high quality shots quickly, without needing the horsepower to handle large RAW images.

This will undoubtedly create a generaton of cheaper, better cameras, and we love to see cheaper and better in the same sentence.