Hasta La Gadget!

Nikon today announced eight (count ’em) new Coolpix cameras, from a
cheap-as-chips $110 (L19) up to the $400 Coolpix P90. The range is, of
course, confusing. Nikon gave me a sneak peek of all the new models at
CES this year and even my head is spinning sifting the press releases.
We’ll concentrate on a few key models, and point out the truly useful new features hidden amongst all the usual marketing bunk.

The first surprise is the price of each camera. They’re cheap, but they
certainly don’t feel it. The biggest bargain of the range is the S220, above. It costs $150, but feels like it costs twice that thanks to the small size and sold metal shell.

The camera doesn’t have all the fancy new gizmos found on its brethren, but you do get some truly useful features — 10 megapixels, image stabilization, a decent 3x zoom (35-105 equivalent) and a big-for-the-price 2.5mm LCD screen. Not essential but nice to have features include a "blink-proof" mode. This would be great for me — any shot I take of the Lady seems to catch her with her eyes firmly shut.

Next up is the $270 S630, notable for its 3" touch screen and lens that is 28mm at the wide end. The screen is used to control the usual functions but Nikon, in a fit of retro-fever, decided to include a stylus which "brings an element of personalization and expression". With it you can scrawl on your pictures. This is actually pretty neat, meaning you can annotate snaps and use your camera as a digital notebook. Combine with the online notebook Evernote and an Eye-Fi card and you’re golden.

Further up the range is the top-end of Coolpix compacts, the S630. Despite being hobbled by too many pixels – 12 million of them – the camera has pretty much everything you need. In addition to the "four-way image stabilization" (which is just normal stabilization with some software tweaks to select higher shutter speeds, along with a burst mode that captures ten shots and picks the sharpest), you get a 2.7" display, a 7x optical zoom, all the auto electronic crap you’d expect (red-eye reduction, motion detection) and one truly amazing feature. The ISO goes up to 6400.

This last is proving to be a trend at Nikon. The D3 and D700 SLRs are famed for their low light capabilities and its now trickling down into the consumer range. I tried a few shots at ISO 6400 and while it isn’t exactly clean and sparkling, its easily "good enough" — way better than what I get at just ISO 1600 on my Canon G9 for example.

Finally, we’ll visit the top end P90, at a reasonable $400. You get everything mentioned above (except the gimmicky touch screen) along with enough extras to keep you playing for weeks. First, the lens. This uses Nikon’s ED (Extra-low Dispersion) glass, found in the company’s pro-level SLR lenses and crams in a massive 24x zoom – an optical zoom – which starts at 26mm and ends up at a ridiculous 624mm at the far end. Make sure you have the image stabilization switched on.

Nikon sensibly decided to keep the pixel count at "just" 12MP, allowing the above mentioned 6400 ISO mode. The LCD screen is a 3" monster and can be flipped out and twisted, and when you hit the shutter release you can let the camera scream away at 15 frames per second for up to 45 frames.

Playing with it, I remember that the screen is tough feeling and also very very sharp, similar to the high-res LCD found on the D700 and D3. This is a good thing, because Nikon left out a proper viewfinder and instead put in an electronic one. I hate these, but honestly, with an LCD like this you won’t ever need to use the viewfinder anyway.

The Nikon folks told me that they’re sick of chasing megapixels, and have started to do something about it. Sure, the public still swoons with ever higher dot-densities, but enthusiasts are starting to appreciate other things like low light sensitivity (not to mention the hard drive space saved by not shooting at 24MP).

This, along with Casio’s excellent 1000fps Exilim FC100 and Canon’s high-def video shooting 5D MKII, is marking a real change in the digicam market. We’ve caught up with film already. Now it’s time to start doing things that film cameras never could.

Product range [Nikon]

See Also:

• Review: Nikon D3 is Light-Years Ahead of Other Prosumer-Grade …
• Hands-On With the Nikon D700
• Video: Casio’s Crazy-Fast 1000-FPS Digicam
• Review: Casio EX-F1 Is a Speed-Demon Snapper

When we recently posted a Vietnam-era Bolex camera with a rifle stock attached, we thought the concept was a little nuts. Then Army Reserve Staff Sgt. and wartime photographer Jeffrey Duran set us straight.

In our original post, we speculated that using a gun stock for shooting a camera seemed like a good way for a photographer to get shot. And we wondered how common these stocks could be. Duran wrote back with a short, informed response, but I was able to twist his arm into telling us a bit more.

Pointing a long lens mounted on a stock is indeed a recipe for getting shot if you’re not careful. In fact in training at Fort McCoy, Wi., I was “shot” by Soldiers on practice missions.

I was not where they expected me to be… i.e. mixed in with the opposition who happened to be shooting at them at the time. Thus, I was “shot” at with blanks during the training even though I was in uniform. They *saw* what they assumed was a rifle in an area where bad guys were shooting at them..

This, of course, is why we train. Even as military media, we need to train in realistic conditions. It was a learning event for both myself and the Soldiers in training.

At Kajaki Dam in Afghanistan, I was there to get some on the ground coverage for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan National Army. The Afghan National Army troops there are “spot on” as the Brits say and the dam has great strategic importance. There are lots of bad guys.
I took my Bushhawk stock along for the ride out to Kajaki. The stock is of limited use as in remote regions such as this, the local population has never seen a DSLR so they limited trust when you’re pointing a long lens at them. In operations where we were going patrols or at night with night vision I’d use it a lot. However, when going where the bad guys are, there is little worry as I was with some of the best Soldiers in the world.

Okay, so why risk losing your life. Good question. Lemme see if I can figure it out.

Ok. It is an extremely stable platform to shoot pictures with (i.e. that’s why rifles are designed that way). It is very natural and comfortable which results in good images. When using long lenses, holding the camera steady is damn important.

Plus, you can sling the camera stock while walking. This is very important when trying to keep up with Soldiers that are in *much* better shape than you (lost 20 pounds during the tour). Although I’m a Reservist, there’s only one standard… so I have the keep up with Olympic-grade athletes when on Active duty.

Monopods work very well but are a pain in the ass when on the move. You have to open them, then close them when you’re going to roll out. Which happens unexpectedly at times 🙂

Handholding with two hands is about the only way and how most of the world gets it done. I would not advise *any* media in a war zone to use a stock. In my case, I’m a member of the armed forces and I’m with the guys with the guns. We used to joke about it in that the Taliban would wonder if we bought some some secret weapon since we were the only Americans at Kajaki. Either way, the bad guys would shoot at me anyway on any patrols with little regard if I had a camera or a rifle.

My main thing was not to make the local population feel threatened…
I have to say that there is something inherently fun about shooting a camera like a rifle. It is really more fun than I should admit. I found myself grinning every time I used the darn thing.

I guess there’s just something obsessive with me and rifle stocks for cameras. I actually designed one in drafting class in high-school but it wasn’t until this last tour that I ponied up the cheese to buy one. It’s just a lot of fun.

– Jeff Duran

or Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Duran one weekend a month, two weeks a year (unless called to go to far away places and meet new people… and take their picture).

A special thanks to Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Duran for writing in and sharing his experiences. You can see more of his photos here and here.

Of the hundreds of photographs from President Barack Obama’s inauguration, David Bergman’s 1,474 megapixel panoramic shot was breathtaking for its scope and level of detail.

The photo was made up of 220 Canon G10 images stitched together for six and a half hours on the GigaPan software, a new project that looks to construct high-resolution panoramas.

Now the project has released the GigaPan Epic, a robotic camera mount that automates the process of taking different images to compose the ultimate shot. That means photographers can capture detailed panoramas with almost any point-and-shoot digital
camera and without worrying about missing details while clicking the different photos that will be ultimately stitched together. 

"The potential applications for
the Epic are limitless," said Henry Hillman Jr., founder and CEO of GigaPan Systems in a statement. "Our beta users have taken fantastic panoramas not
only of President Obama’s Inauguration, but of Yankee Stadium, Chicago
skylines, Hawaiian landscapes and thousands of extraordinary images."

The GigaPan Epic mount comes with the GigaPan software. It costs $380. A second model, GigaPan Pan Epic 100, designed for larger digital camera models is expected to be available soon for $450.

Photo: (cogdogblog/Flickr)

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson, from the Carnegie Mellon University, have come up with a way to fake some pretty convincing 3D using nothing but a standard, single webcam, so videoconferencers can actually look behind the people they are talking to.

This head-slappingly simple idea uses something that will be familiar to old-school video gamers — parallax. The video explains this very well, but for those of you who like to read, here’s how it works.

First, the software separates the subject (let’s say me, on a Skype call to my mother) from the background. It does this by either remembering the bits of the picture that don’t move and building the background up over time, or by simply taking a snap when I’m not there. Then the subject is reimposed on the background.

At the other end, the program tracks my mother’s head using face recognition software. When she moves her head, the layers in the image slide over each other to give the illusion of parallax and therefore 3D.

It’s ingenious, and we wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple bought this up, patented it and stuck it in iChat. After all, the software already runs on a Mac — look at the video.

Pseudo-3D Video Conferencing with a Generic Webcam [Chris Harrison. Thanks, Hesham!]

This clunky little workaround will let you shoot video with the Nikon D700. In fact, it will work for any camera which can pump a live video stream into a computer. It has nothing to do with the rather nice, and rather higher definition hack we covered earlier today, but it will let you at least play with the great lenses and shallow depth of field afforded by DSLR videography.

This hack uses three ingredients. First, a camera with a live view function, which lets you see a real-time stream on the camera’s screen. Every single compact camera does this, and more and more DSLRs provide the feature. Second, a way to get the feed from the camera to the computer. I used a trial version of Nikon’s Camera Control 2, a truly awful piece of non-intuitive software that just manages to get the job done. Third is a way to capture the video displayed on the screen. For this I used iShowU HD Pro, a screencasting application for the Mac.

First, connect the camera via USB cable and fire up Nikon Capture (or software of choice). At bottom right you see the button marked "Lv", or Live View. Click this and the camera will start sending a low quality video feed to the computer (you can click to make the picture bigger):

Next, fire up your video capture application, in this case iShowU. If you can, set it to capture only the part of the screen you actually want, otherwise you’ll have to take the video file into an editor to crop it later:

Once done, hit return and start the recording. Anything you now do with the camera is being recorded. Here’s the result. It’s pretty poor, and because I’m using the trial version there’s an overlay watermark from iShowU. But you get the idea.

The quality is severely limited by the refresh rate of the incoming video feed, although the D700 has an HDMI out port, so this could be used to get a much better stream. What is interesting is that you can see just how useless live view is even for still capture — the focusing takes forever in any mode.

As an exercise, this is fun, but ultimately the quality is too poor for anything — on a Mac it would be better to just use the iSight camera to shoot. Still, if you have the camera, the trial software is free so go and try it out.

Product page [iShowU]

Product page [Nikon Capture]