It’s “a sure thing that the iPad will get a camera in its second generation,” according to the “Cult of Mac” site (http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-is-hiring-ipad-camera-engineer/38256). There’s already an empty, iSight-shaped slot in the iPad’s frame and Apple is looking for a performance QA engineer to work on still and video capture in the iPad Media department.

At the “Jobs at Apple site” (http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.showJob&RID=47818&CurrentPage=1), it says: “The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines. You will work together with the development team to ensure quality. Your focus will mainly be on performance testing and developing performance measurement test tools. You will be responsible for the development and maintenance of methodical testing strategies and accompanying test documentation. Day to day activities will include developing and conducting functional/system/regression testing.ad-hoc testing; creating and tracking high quality bug reports; and reporting on project progress.

“The successful candidate for this role is a team-oriented professional with excellent communication skills, comfortable in a fast-paced environment, and possessing good testing and programming skills. Familiarity with and interest in photography, video as well as media file formats is highly desirable. Experience with tuning of and image pipeline, including, but not limited to AWB, Color Correction, AutoExposure, FrameRate adjustments is a plus. You are proficient with shell scripting perl/phyton and familiar with basic Unix command shell. You ideally have a programming background, C/C++.”