All your cameras are out-of-date. Including the one you want to buy.

Whether you have a £100 a point-and-shoot or a £40,000 super-duper digital medium format camera, it's already old-fashioned and out-of-date.

Fundamentally so.

Not because it uses a mirror, or the optics aren't as perfect as you can find but because of the embedded software. Most of it looks like the BIOS in your home PC when you hit F2 on startup.

It's so primitive, you need even more software to do stuff.

Consider this. You buy your enthusiast's DSLR at say £1000. You then buy some nice software like Lightroom or Aperture that does RAW conversion and some editing, which sets you back a further £180. Then you buy a copy of CS5 which assuming you are buying the upgrade version is another £190.

So let's read that back, you have software on your camera which controls it. Software to suck files off your card and do some editing and even more software that takes those files and edits them more.

That's broken. It's not efficient.

Can't we learn from the iPhone which "has an app for that"? You can take a picture, do the editing, post it to a website, email it whatever from the iPhone. Heavens, there's even Photoshop for the iPhone and it's free.

So why can't you have apps on your camera?

Simple. You can. In fact at least two apps for camera have been around for some time. The Canon SDK which runs a brand new set of of software on many Canon cameras from a memory card. And my favourite, the Eye-Fi card. The Eye-Fi adds wi-fi capabilities to any camera. Yes the Eye-Fi has some hardware in there too but also some very clever software.

So lets have some apps. For my Canon and your Nikon, Hasselblad or whatever.

Your camera and my camera need apps. If it had apps you could do more. And you could do more better.

You could, for instance, take over the maximum ISO setting or do some editing or email a converted-to-jpg-on-camera RAW, or give all your images the same colour balance or vintage look or post them to facebook, flickr or a million other sites. In the camera.

The first camera or card manufacturer to figure this out wins the prize. Because we'll be there. Buying the card that adds the apps to the camera that takes 'em, then buying the apps again and again and again.