Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips
I want to stop using CDs and DVDs but the lack of a standardized digital media platform is keeping disc-based content delivery around. While the 40-and-under crowd could probably live without discs, we have two generations of people ahead of us that just won’t get there. Of course, that means we’ll probably be burning discs for the next 15-20 years and keeping a should-be-legacy format alive. [Read more…]
The SDXC card specification has been announced for more than a year now. However, it’s only now that we are starting to see products supporting this new specification. There are a few important things to note about SDXC cards and how they fit into photographers’ gear bags.
The SDXC specification comes from the SD Association, which is an industry standards organization founded by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba in 2000. If a manufacturer is going to use SD technology in product, they have to license the right to use that technology from the SD Association. Most, if not all, of the major camera manufacturers are members of the SD Association and license the patents and other intellectual property necessary for developing SD-compatible cameras and memory cards.
There are a number of different specifications that the SD Association has developed over the past decade, including SD, miniSD, microSD, SDHC, miniSDHC, microSDHC and SDXC, among others. Each specification has its own limitations or capabilities. For instance, the original SD specification offered storage only up to 2GB. When SDHC came along, it took the capacity up to 32GB. The latest specification, SDXC, offers storage capacities up to 2TB. [Read more…]
Camera manufacturers design point-and-shoot cameras for the specific needs and wants of consumers the same way that they target their DSLRs to different professional markets. While we as photographers will always sing the praises of how awesome our DSLRs are, the general population will opt for a “nice” point-and-shoot. We know many of these people and they make come to us asking camera questions. Here’s a round up of cameras for the different personalities in your life. If they’re a student, link them over to my post on Back-To-School digital cameras.
Author’s Note: The camera’s above are a special series of Canon Powershots that Maria Sharapova designed with Canon. They were available in a contest.
We’ve blogged before about laptops for photographers, but the announcement of the Nokia Booklet 3G has me excited as a photographer. You can read more about the netbook at Gizmodo and check out the intro video below. There are lots of reasons and features that this laptop has that could be useful to us photographers, although we are being promised more specs soon at Nokia World next week. Here are a couple of reasons why this laptop has me excited.
Despite us photographers always wanting cleaner images like in the example of the recently announced Canon G11, there are times when image noise can be useful to us. A while back, I wrote about how it can be used in your advantage to satisfy your clients. With the closer merger of video and stills these days and in honor of Grindhouse-style movies like the upcoming Inglourious Basterds here is when image noise and grain can be useful to you.
With camera manufacturers in stiff competition with one another, if you pay attention to what features they work hardest on you’ll begin to realize that they also tailor their products to certain segments of the buyers and that many of them pride some features well over others in order to get sales. Recently, I was in search of a new camera system and if you are too, check out this brief list of the pros and cons of each system. This list includes the most popular systems: Nikon, Canon and Sony. The next list will include the rest (which in some ways give the top three a run for their money.) [Read more…]
Camera companies usually take all of their developed technologies and spread them across any products that they put out. That being said, one can only wonder how far off we are from a Touchscreen DSLR of some sort with built-in WiFi and social-networking/sharing features. [Read more…]
Advanced Imaging Pro has an interesting article on Kodak’s latest developments in sensor manufacturing. This was found via Flickr, which alludes to the possibility of a PMOS sensor.
The new PMOS apparently a new take on CMOS pixels and how they work on a camera sensor. In the Kodak PMOS the underlying polarity of the silicon is reversed, so the absence of electrons is used to detect a signal. This works the opposite way that normal pixels work: which instead detects electrons that are generated when light interacts with the sensor surface.
In addition to this, a new CCD sensor is being developed that, according to Samsung (as noted in the article), only uses 1/10th of the power that a regular CCD sensor uses: which means an insanely long battery life.
For current Olympus (and Panasonic) users, you can be glad to hear that the new sensors are focused on low-light photography, speed and HD video capabilities. However, we can still only just wait to see the results. When the Live MOS sensor was released it promised better low-light capabilities. In truth, it couldn’t match the capabilities of Canon or Nikon. Further, that isn’t a totally fair statement because of the fact that the sensor is smaller in size.
The new PMOS sensor could be what we see in the higher end pro camera models.
No matter how excited we get, there are certain things we need to remember when photographing wildlife. This is especially true when you are looking for animals that are notoriously hard to capture on camera. Whatever you do though, you need to keep in mind that practice makes perfect and that perseverance will eventually get you that shot. Here are a couple of reminders for your reference. [Read more…]
Recently, I’ve been shooting all my shots without autofocusing and only relying on the manual focus wheel on my Olympus E-510. What I’ve discovered is that it’s making me think more about my shots, framing, and forcing me to concentrate more on achieving the perfect photo that I have set in my mind already.
In contrast, the world of commercial and event shooting has called for the “spray and pray” method of shooting. On top of this, your camera’s autofocusing may not always be up to par with your expectations and standards; especially in low light as is the case with the above photo. It was achieved with manual focus. [Read more…]