Hasta La Gadget!

Canon’s EOS-1D Mark IV has been slinking around at retail availability for some time now, and while we brought you plenty of sample imagery from the camera over a month ago, it’s taken awhile for the thing to get the full review treatment. Digital Photography Review has finally done the deed, dedicating a whopping 33 pages to Canon’s low-light, 1080p wunderkind. It’s that last new feature, video, that the review finds fault in, with the same jellyvision we’ve seen on other HD-shootin’ DSLRs (seemingly no worse here than elsewhere), but the review feels that the movie mode here doesn’t feel sufficiently integrated with the camera. Meanwhile that low-light, high-ISO shooting performance is impressive, but not quite up to the performance of the Nikon D3S. Everything else, though, seems to be a nice evolution over the older Mark III — if you have a similarly advanced budget.

Canon EOS-1D Mark IV survives marathon 33 page review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, didja hear the news? PMA is just about upon us, giving all the camera makers a perfect opportunity to refresh their lineup. In no particular order, here’s what Samsung is providing, all set for a Spring 2010 release:

• New HMX-U15 ($230) and HMX-U20 ($250) 1080p HD pocket camcorders shoot H.264 and feature HDMI out, image stabilization, a 2-inch LCD, and some simple edit options. The U20 also throws in a 3x optical zoom and 10 megapixel stills, while the U15 instead takes 14 megapixel stills.
• The TL500 is a 10 megapixel camera with 24mm ultra-wide angle lens with an articulating three-inch AMOLED display, perfect for spying around the corner. It supports RAW format, shoots VGA video, and is due out for a hair less than $450.
• The 10 megapixel TL350 claims 1080p HD video recording with a maximum speed of up to 1,000 frames per second — which invariably drops the video resolution to 138 x 78, but hey, sacrifices must be made. The three-inch AMOLED display and look for it set you back about $350.
• A pair of 12 megapixel point-and-shoots for the lower end, the waterproof AQ100 ($200) and the “scratch resistant” SL605 ($130), both with 2.7-inch LCDs and 5x optical zoom. The former shoots video in 720p and the latter just VGA.

Plethora of pressers after the break, and we’ll be catching our flight to Anaheim shortly to give hands on impressions and take pictures of cameras that’ll put our DSLRs to absolute shame.

Continue reading Samsung’s PMA gifts: HD pocket camcorders, point-and-shoots with AMOLED screens

Samsung’s PMA gifts: HD pocket camcorders, point-and-shoots with AMOLED screens originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So, there’s good news and bad news, and we tend to prefer starting with the former. According to Akihabara News, Mitsubishi has whipped up an upscaling technology to end all upscaling technologies — one that takes vanilla 1080p material to 4K x 2K without breaking a sweat. Now, for the less-than-awesome tidbit. For whatever reason, the tech is not yet compatible with Blu-ray content, and moreover, you’re still nowhere close to being able to afford a 4K television or projector. Here’s hoping this breakthrough makes ’em a wee bit more feasible for the layman, though.

Mitsubishi’s upconverting technology takes 1080p to 4K x 2K, you to cloud nine originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Can’t get enough of hearing about implementations of ARM’s Cortex-A9 MPCore processors? Good. ST-Ericsson’s powerhouse U8500 system-on-chip has come a major step closer to appearing in mainstream devices with today’s newly announced support for the Android operating system. Having optimized the OS to take advantage of Symmetric Multi Processing — a method for extending battery life by sharing the load between the two processing cores and underclocking when necessary — the partner company is now ready to start dropping these 1.2GHz dual-core beasts inside the next generation of smartphones. The claim is that you’ll get all that additional power while sacrificing nothing, as devices based on the U8500 would maintain “the cost and power consumption characteristics of a traditional feature phone.” We’re promised built-in HDMI-out support, 1080p video recording, and 120 hours of audio playback or 12 hours of Full HD video off a 1,000mAh battery — pledges we’d very much like to see fulfilled.

ST-Ericsson’s U8500 brings dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 to the Android world originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t know much about this thing, Ikonoskop is only teasing the bare minimum of specs, but while we don’t expect to be able to afford it, the upcoming A-cam3D is certainly an object of lust. The company has cut its teeth on a $10k 1080p RAW camera, the A-cam dII, and now it’s taking that same tech into the realm of 3D. The new 6 pound unit (including battery and memory) will be able record to 25 or 30 fps in individual RAW sequences, has a TBD pricetag, and will be built on order.

[Thanks, Mark]

Ikonoskop teases A-cam3D to shoot 1080p RAW video in stereo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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