Hasta La Gadget!

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Last week’s Switched On discussed some of the challenges the Flip camcorder faced trying to grow in the marketplace, an effort abruptly scuttled by an indifferent Cisco. But while Kodak, Sony and others are now poised to fill the Flip void, no competitor exactly matched Flip’s combination of simplicity and sharing. With point and shoot cameras, camcorders, traditional MP3 players and standalone GPS units in decline, the jury remains out on how long portable electronics can fight the smartphone, but Flip’s success taught the industry some valuable lessons that may have relevance going forward.

Continue reading Switched On: A legacy from the Flip side

Switched On: A legacy from the Flip side originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Apr 2011 20:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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David McCourt’s Slow Camera looks like a prop from 2001

David McCourt has come up with the idea of Slow Photography. Essentially, it’s a bulky, analog version of all the photo grungifying apps for the iPhone. The big difference, though, is that you’ll look way cooler when you’re doing it.

David’s Slow Camera is a box which treats your cellphone like a piece of film. You pull the front open like a drawer, slot in your phone and close the box back up. Now, you frame and view the image by peering into the top of the box, and select from three lenses by twisting a turret at the front. The camera itself looks like a prop from Kubrick’s 2001.

But why bother with all this extra trouble? After all, a cellphone camera’s greatest strength is its convenience. Because by slowing things down you have to take a more considered approach. If any of you has ever used a reflex camera with a top-down, reversed-image viewfinder, you’ll know just how much more attention it forces you to pay to composition.

The lenses are fun, too, and only add to the Hipstamatic-ness of the rig. You can choose between regular fixed, fisheye and macro lenses, and all of them deteriorate the quality of your pictures (see the results below).

I’m interested to see where this will end up. The current obsession with making perfect digital photos look like they were snapped with a plastic Soviet-era camera makes for some nice images, but it will start to look a little cheesy soon enough. Take a look at the 1980s fad for using tobacco grad filters and you’ll see how a certain look can date pictures strongly.

Pushing a camera to force weird images is as old as photography itself, though. I wonder if photographers will start to exploit digital noise and other defects the same way that film photographers exploited grain?

Slow Photography [David McCourt. Thanks, David!]

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• The Cheap Russian Camera That Could: Lomo Turns 25
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos
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The results of the Slow Camera. Photos David McCourt

Eye-Fi Direct Mode setup can be tricky

Sometime in the middle of the night, Eye-Fi released both the “Direct Mode” software update for its Wi-Fi enabled SD cards, and a new iOS app that works with” this mode. An Android app is also available.

Together, these pieces of software lets you snap photos on any camera and have them show up on your iPhone, iPad or Android device, beamed through the air over Wi-Fi. The Direct Mode actually turns your SD card into a tiny Wi-Fi hotspot, allowing devices to connect. Once you get it working, it works great. But it is a little tricky to set up. Here’s how.

First, slot your Eye-Fi card into your computer or card reader and run the Eye-Fi Center software to update the card’s firmware. Then go grab the new universal iOS app from the App Store.

Done? Good. Now, follow Eye-Fi’s own instructions to set up the Direct Mode. This involves checking a box and hitting save.

Then you need to connect your iPad or iPhone to the wireless network that the card has created. This is where things can get a little sticky.

The card will only fire up its own Wi-Fi network if it doesn’t recognize any other networks in the area. The idea is that you would use your existing network to transfer photos if you are at home or at work, and the Direct Mode would only kick in when you’re out and about. So, in order to use the Direct Mode at home, you’ll need to remove your local network from the card. This is easy to do in the settings. Then hit the “Start Direct Mode Network” button to force it to start up.

Once that’s done, fire up the Eye-Fi app on your iOS device and sign in to your account. Choose Settings>Eye-Fi Card Settings and tap on the name of your card on screen. Press the “Copy” link to copy the password to the clipboard, then go to the Settings app and connect to the Eye-Fi card’s network just like you would any other. I couldn’t get my iPad to see this network until I stopped the card from looking for my home network, as detailed above.

If this works, remove the card from your computer and put it in the camera. Switch on and test. You may have to force a reconnect since your iDevice will probably have re-joined your home network in the meantime.

Once you’re up and running, the transfers work great. I have mine set to receive only JPEGs (in the setting on the iOS app) to keep things fast. The camera is set to shoot RAW + JPEG, which lets me upload the RAWs into Lightroom later. I haven’t yet tried the combo out and about, but in limited testing it works great, with transfers coming across in seconds and getting saved in the camera roll, ready to be Instagrammed.

The only real problem is using the setup in the range of a known Wi-Fi network. Even if you have disabled the network on the card itself, your iOS device won’t connect to the Eye-Fi hotspot automatically if it sees another network it recognizes. And there appears to be no way to force the card to transfer to your iOS device via the home network. This shouldn’t be a problem out in the street, though.

Finally, there is one other oddity. The geotagging function on the card seems to think that I’m in somewhere called Nan Nan in Thailand. This is really rather strange.

Setting up Eye-Fi Direct Mode with an Apple iPhone or iPad [Eye-Fi Support]

See Also:

• Eye-Fi 'Direct Mode' Send Photos Direct to iPad
• Eye-Fi Mobile X2 With 'Direct Mode' Beams Photos to Your iPad …
• Marry Your Camera to Your Mobile With This Wireless SD Card …

A slip at Nikon HQ has prematurely revealed a new 50mm ƒ1.8 lens

Nikon is all set to launch a new 50mm lens for its SLRs, according to a page which popped up and then promptly disappeared from its website. The new lens is the long-awaited 50mm AF-S Nikkor 50mm ƒ1.8G.

Nikon historically has a pair of fast 50mm lenses in its lineup. The always cheap ƒ1.8 (I own one. It is excellent) and the more expensive, faster ƒ1.4. The these decades-old designs have aperture rings and lack the internal AF motors of the more modern S lenses. Recently, Nikon added the AF-S 50mm ƒ1.4G lens, which ditched the aperture ring and added the fast, internal motor.

Why is this important? Because almost all new Nikon SLR bodies lack the motor and spindle to focus these older lenses. This means that the entry-level cameras can only use these older lenses with manual focus. That would be fine, but the viewfinders in these bodies just aren’t designed to make manual focusing easy.

The specs are similar to the older ƒ1.8 G lens, although the internal layout has changed, adding an aspherical lens element and grouping seven elements in six groups (the older lenses groups six elements in five groups). The lens can be used on both FX and DX bodies, and will turn into a nice 75mm portrait lens on the crop-sensor DX bodies.

It looks like a great entry-level lens, just like the 50mm has always been. The only thing we don’t know is price. That wasn’t revealed on Nikon’s short-lived product page. So here, to give you a guide, are the current prices from B&H Photo:

1.4D $370

1.4G $550

1.8D $135

1.8G $?

Nikon AF-S 50mm f/1.8G Lens . . . It’s About Time! [Photography Bay]

See Also:

• Nikon Launches 50mm Silent Wave Lens. At Last.
• $11000 Leica Lens Sees in the Dark
• Nikon Announces Hot, Fast 35mm “Standard” Lens

Here’s a clue how popular smartphones have become as cameras: Apple’s iPhone 4 is quickly approaching the No. 1 spot to become the most-used camera on Flickr.

Nikon’s D90 DSLR camera is still Flickr king, but the iPhone isn’t far behind, and the chart below suggests that the handset should surpass the D90 pretty soon. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler was first to make this observation.

That’s not to say general-purpose devices are killing the camera market. Worldwide still camera sales increased 10 percent to 141 million units last year, according to research from IDC. Canon remains the world’s largest camera maker, and Sony is in a close second.

One thing contributing to the growth of handheld cameras is the advent of mirror-less cameras with bigger sensors and better, sometimes interchangeable, lenses — aka EVIL cameras. These cameras are still a relatively small part of the camera market, though.

The explanation is probably even simpler: most dedicated cameras still have superior quality to most smartphone cameras, and people want their photos to look good. Plus, these cameras have things that a smartphone doesn’t, like a zoom lens and more complex controls to change the appearance of photos.

The Flickr data more directly suggests that people aren’t carrying around cameras as much as they do their iPhones — which shouldn’t be a surprise, because which device would you rather keep in your pocket everywhere you go?

The smartphone’s impact on the video world is a bit more interesting. The iPhone has driven massive growth in mobile uploads on YouTube. When the iPhone 3GS released in 2009, YouTube saw mobile uploads jump 400 percent each day.

Incidentally, Cisco just killed the Flip camcorder division last week. A few argue that Cisco made this decision solely because it no longer wanted to focus on consumer products. However, that’s a bit difficult to believe when you consider that smartphones shoot video that’s just as good, if not better, than a Flip; plus, they have an internet connection to send videos straight to the web.

In the case of the Flip, Cisco didn’t adapt to the changing, increasingly interconnected world where people want to share videos and photos as fast as they create them. That left an opening that smartphone vendors are happy to fill.

However, camera vendors are making the right moves by focusing on quality images and a wider range of features to keep still cameras alive and well.

See Also:

• iPhone 3GS Driving 400-Percent Growth in YouTube Uploads
• Creepy Bug Gives Some iPhones Unwanted FaceTime
• Just How Bad Is the iPad 2 Camera?