Earlier quoted context omitted.
What worries me is that COTS photo equipment increasingly comes with these algorithmic retouches that "over-represent" the data - or, put another way, bake its own interpretation into image, in a way that cannot be distinguished from source data. It's nice for a casual Instagrammer, but then a lot of science and engineering also gets done using COTS equipment. I worry that at some point, a lot of money will be burned…
I did a web search for "cots" and learned that a cot is... > a small usually collapsible bed often of fabric stretched on a frame But in this case, COTS is apparently... > commercial, off-the-shelf In other words "photo equipment" or "consumer/retail photo equipment." Upon further reading[0] it seems odd to use the term here, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something. It's often used for software and has a key phrase.…
"Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf[1] (COTS) products are packaged solutions[buzzword] which are then adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of custom-made, or bespoke, solutions."
So for example, a research team may decide to not spend money on expensive scientific cameras for monitoring experiment, and instead opt to buy an expensive - but still much cheaper - DSLR sold to photographers, or strap a couple of iPhones 15 they found in the drawer (it's the future, they're all using iPhones 17, which is two generations behind the newest one). That's using COTS equipment. COTS is typically sold to less sophisticated users, but is often useful for less sophisticated needs of more sophisticated users too. But if COTS cameras start to accrue built-in algorithms that literally fake data, it may be a while before such researchers realize they're looking at photos where most of the pixels don't correspond to observable reality, in a complicated way they didn't expect.