Hasta La Gadget!

Nokia? Samsung? LG? Those jokers are all ‘old world’ has-beens. The future — according to Peek’s latest email campaign — is Indian featurephones. Well, at least MicroMax’s latest, the Q80 EZPAD. Peek says its ‘Genius Cloud’ gifts the Q80 with smartphone-like features via cloud-based software. The firm’s site claims that the service will run on any hardware, from not-phone to smartphone, providing push mail, instant messaging, video chat, social networking, software GPS, web browsing, and other smartphone features. Writing on Business Insider, Peekster-in-Cheif Amol Sarva asserts that low-end devices have pushed Nokia out of the asian market, and suggests that with the help of the Genius Cloud, featurephones can do the same to RIM. If that doesn’t work out, at least the firm still has a corner on the dedicated tweeting handheld market.

Peek calls own internet-only devices ‘collector’s items,’ heads to India with the cloud originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Blurbs photo books now pull straight from your Instagram account

A new service from photo-printers Blurb will turn your Instagram pictures into a printed paper book. The service, which starts at $11 for a 20-page softcover book, is almost as easy to use as Instagram itself.

Blurb uses a Flash-based online editing app to layout the book, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. To start, you click the link and then grant the app access to your Instagram account. Then wait a few moments for Blurb to load you photos. It will automatically populate the pages for you, and you could just click the order button and be done. But there is more fun to be had editing it yourself.

The editor is surprisingly powerful. The default view shows you one two-page spread at a time, and at the bottom of the screen you’ll see a strip containing thumbnails of all your Instagram photos. If you’re working on a big screen, you can click a drop-down to show “All Photos,” expanding this strip to a four-row box. Then click the “Arrange Photos” button below the page preview and you’ll get a proper overview of all your double-page spreads.

Like the happy accidents in Instagram, Blurb’s auto-layout is sometime serendipitous. Photos Charlie Sorrel

Now you can add pages and drag existing ones into the order you like. You can also change background colors, put more than one photo on a page, zoom images and add text and captions.

It’s a lot of fun. So much fun, in fact, that I’m still tweaking mine until I get it just right. When I’m done, the 7 x 7-inch book will take 7-15 days to reach me.

I’m off to finish my layout. I’ll report back on quality when I’m done.

Make Instagram books with Blurb [Blurb. Thanks, Grace!]

See Also:

• Blurb Adds Collaboration To On-Demand Book Publishing
• Instagram Hacks: How to Get More Out of (and Into) the Electronic …
• Postagram Prints, Mails Instagram Photos
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos

If you insist on using film, this DIY reflector might help you get your photos into your computer. Photo Andrew Lewis

If you have a bunch of old negatives that you’d like to get into your iPhoto or Picasa so you can process them and actually look at them once in a while. then you might want to try Andrew Lewis’ cheap-o DIY project that will help your flatbed scanner get better scans of your negs. It’s pretty simple — a triangular box made from silver cardboard which will reflect light to illuminate the film from behind.

If you still shoot film — using a Lomo, perhaps — then easiest path to digitization is to have the lab give you a CD of TIFFs or JPEGs along with the processed prints. For everything else, this virtually free hack might help.

Download Andrew’s PDF template and print it on the reverse side of a sheet of silvered card. cut, score, fold and glue it into a prism-shaped reflective chamber. Andrew says that it lets you scanner light the slide or negative from the rear, giving a proper, contrasty scan.

You’ll want to place the box perpendicular to the travel of the scanning head. This will let its white light enter into the chamber from the side. Placing it longwise will only let light enter through the neg itself, which kind of defeats the object of the lightbox.

This DIY project looks easy, fun and effective. It also highlights one of the main reasons I’ll never bother with film again: its just a pain in the ass to deal with.

How-To: Turn Slides and Negatives Into Digital Photos [Craft via Photojojo]

See Also:

• Canon Film Scanner Accentuates Positive, Eliminates Negative …
• Short Shot on Flatbed Scanner Screens at Disposable Film Fest …
• Scan Old Negatives with a DSLR and Toilet-Paper Tubes

North America’s largest comic book and entertainment media convention, the San Diego Comic-Con, returns for its 41st year of comics, video games, TV shows, movies, and rampant fan costuming.

If these awkward super zooms were children and they had hair, they’d be red-headed step-chidren

Panasonic has made an update to its FZ superzoom family. The FZ-47 has a 25-600mm (35mm equivalent) range, a 12.1 megapixel sensor, 1080p video and no RAW capability.

Whenever I see somebody with one of these mongrel cameras I wonder why they bought it. Barely smaller than a budget SLR, bigger than an Micro Four Thirds camera and yet featuring the sensor (usually) of a tiny compact (in this case 0.43 inches on the diagonal, or 1/2.33). The only reason to make a camera this big, with such low-level specs seems to be to accomodate that huge zoom lens.

The FZ-47’s lens is a whopper. The Leica-branded glass offers a 24x zoom, running from a maximum aperture of ƒ2.8 (reasonable) to ƒ5.2 (thank the gods that the camera has image stabilization). ISO runs to an old-school 1600, and the rear 3-inch LCD panel offers an equally-outdated 460,000 dots.

You also get the usual complement of face-detection, color-changing effects and exposure modes. In short, you’d be hard put to find a duller camera.

The FZ-47 will be available in August for around $400. Or you could walk into a Walmart and buy a Nikon D3000 for $50 more.

Panasonic FZ-47 press release [DP Review]

See Also:

• Olympus Super-Zoom Shoots Movies and Stills Simultaneously …
• Sony Quietly Intros Super-Zoom Camera
• Nikon Anounces New Coolpix Camera With D-Lighting and Super Zoom …