Feb 22

Five New Lenses Show Samsung Is Serious About Mirrorless

Posted in: lenses, samsung, Today's Chili

As the first-party Micro Four Thirds makers dilly-dally with their lens lineup, Samsung is pumping out glass for its NX series like a rabbit pumps out, well, more rabbits. Here’s the lineup, containing five new lenses.

16mm ƒ2.4 (July)
60mm ƒ2.8 Macro (August)
85mm ƒ1.4 (October)
16-80mm ƒ3.5-4.5 OIS (December)
18-200mm ƒ3.5-6.3 OIS (May)

All of those focal lengths should be multiplied by 1.5 thanks to the crop factor of the NEx’s APS-C sensor. The zooms use silent motors and internals to keep them quiet for movie-shooting, and all of the lenses work with Samsung’s i-Function feature, which allows you to use a lens-surrounding ring on the body to control things like aperture.

Those zooms look fine, but I would have my eye on the primes. That 16mm “pancake” looks particularly fun, with a fairly good maximum aperture and a 35mm-equivalent focal length of 53mm — a “normal” focal length.

The 60mm is a little pedestrian: A a 35mm equivalent of 90mm, it is the perfect portrait length lens, but a slightly wider maximum aperture would be nice. I assume this will be one of the cheeper lenses in the lineup (Samsung hasn’t yet announced prices). The 85mm ƒ1.4, though, is very interesting. That equates to almost 130mm, with the ridiculous light-gathering abilities of ƒ1.4 wide open. God knows what you’d use it for, but I imagine you’d get some stunning pictures.

The small-body, non-SLR market is getting hot. Samsung and Sony seems committed to bringing their own lenses, and while Panasonic and Olympus are being somewhat tardy with their own glass, the recent announcement that Carl Zeiss and Schneider-Kreuznach are going to make lenses for Micro Four Thirds shows a future there, too. It seems that more and more arguments for big-body SLRs are slipping away.

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Feb 18

500mm iPhone Lens for Grungy Close-Ups

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, iPhone, lenses, Today's Chili

Given that a cellphone case can easily run to $35, the iPhone Telephoto Lens is something of a bargain, combining as it does both a long, long lens, a case to hang it on, a mini-tripod to keep things steady, and a micro-fiber cloth to polish everything up.

It works like this: You slip the iPhone into the case (where it can be left, should you be a case kind of person) and then clip the lens on, over the iPhone’s existing lens-hole. Photojojo, which sell the kit, says that it gives the equivalent view of a 500mm lens on a 35mm camera.

Focus is manual — yes, there’s actually a focus ring. And while the quality isn’t great (you can check the sample shots on the product page), it’s a lot better than you’d get from a digital zoom. In fact, considering that almost every iPhone photo these days is destined for a thorough grungifying in either Instagram or Hipstamatic, the soft, not-so-sharp images should be perfect.

Also: Amazing for peeping-toms.

The iPhone Telephoto Lens kit is, as I said, $35, and comes in two models, one for iPhone 3 and one for iPhone 4.

The iPhone Telephoto Lens product page [Photojojo]

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Feb 18

Low-Tech Geekery Makes Beautiful High-Speed Photography

Posted in: arduino, flash, Hacks, Mods and DIY, photography, Today's Chili

Vincent Riemersma’s beautiful time-freezing photographs are a mixture of skill and old fashioned geekery. The pictures show splashes of colored water frozen in time as they jump simultaneously from a row of wine glasses. The results are clearly impressive. But how were the photos taken?

First, the splashes. To ensure repeatability, time after time, Vincent built a simple rig. Two inline skate-frames and a piece of wood made a rolling trolley which was mounted on a slope. A marker at the top meant the start-point was consistent, and a plank of wood at the bottom stopped the trolley suddenly. Momentum takes care of the rest, flinging the colored water into the air. Capturing these repeatable spills was the tricky part.

Timing is everything. To capture the splashes, you need to have perfect timing. Vincent decided to let a computer take care of this, and used an Arduino to fire a flash gun. The trigger was a piezo-element which would detect the noise of the crash and fire the strobe. Into the Arduino Vincent programmed several delays. The first was to give the water enough time to jump from the glass (around 100ms). The flash would then fire, and be cut immediately. A final delay, of 4,000ms, is there to make sure nothing tricks the circuit into firing again.

What about the camera? Well, that’s the easiest part. The tripod-mounted Nikon D300s was manually focussed and had its shutter speed set to three seconds. Turn out the room lights and trip the shutter, and the sensor waits patiently for some light. Roll the skateboard and wait. The water spills, the flash flashes, the sensor records the image, and the shutter clicks safely shut. Easy!

The results show just how well Vincent set things up. More photos can be seen over at his Flickr page, and you can read his write-up, complete with all the nerdy details, at the DIY Photography blog.

Creating “The Splash” [DIY Photography]

Photo: Vincent Riemersma / Flickr

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Feb 14

Hands-On With LG’s Eye-Crossing 3D Optimus Pad

Posted in: Android, honeycomb, LG, Mwc2011, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

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BARCELONA — Tablets are what we wanted to see at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and tablets are what we’ve got. They all have their gimmicks, and LG’s Optimus Pad has 3-D. It also has a new screen size of 8.9 inches.

First, the 3-D. The Optimus has a pair of cameras in the back for shooting stereoscopic 1080p video. This footage can be played back later on a big TV (the Optimus has an HDMI-out port) or piped direct to a big screen as you shoot (as you see in the picture above). I jammed a pair of 3D glasses over my regular glasses, held the camera in my other hand and tried to snap a picture whilst balancing on my crutches. Despite these various handicaps, the picture is a pretty good representation of the headache-inducing footage you’ll see without the 3-D specs.

Put the glasses on and things don’t get much better. The 3-D effect is there, but it has none of the slick smoothness you’ll see from a properly-shot clip. There’s no way you’ll ever mistake the footage for anything but cellphone video, even though both cameras are 5MP.

And if you want to view your 3-D video on the screen, good luck. LG touts the Optimus Pad as able to display 3-D, but see it you’ll need to travel back to 1955. The “3-D” image is displayed as red and blue anaglyph, the kind which you need colored glasses to look at. Given that any color screen, ever, can do this, LG is pushing the truth a little here.

The rest of the Optimus Pad is sweet enough, with dual-core Tegra 2 chip, 32GB storage, 3G radio, 2MP front-facing camera (even worse than the other two) and Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The 8.9-inch size is actually pretty good, although all the cameras seemingly bring the weight up to an iPad-like 630-grams. Take a closer look and you’ll see LG has opted to make the screen long and thin. That’s great for wide-screen movies, terrible for everything else (except, surprisingly, two-pane horizontal e-book reading). Finally, the 1280 x 768 pixel screen sounds good, but in practice it isn’t so great. Samsung’s Tab displays are way nicer.

My prediction for the Optimus Pad? Lots of (digital) ink spilled by hacks like me during the MWC this week, followed by terrible sales and a quiet death. You heard it here first, folks!

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Feb 10

Hipstamatic and the Death of Photojournalism [Photography]

Posted in: iPhone, photography, Photos, Today's Chili, top

Pictures of the Year International is a photojournalism contest that’s a pretty big deal. This photo of the 2nd Platoon under fire in Afghanistan by New York Times photographer Damon Winter took third place this year. It was taken with the iPhone app Hipstamatic, which slathers photos with moody effects. More »

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Feb 10

NYU professor unsurprisingly removes camera from the back of his head, citing pain and the malaise of lifecasting

Posted in: Today's Chili, video

Well, this one is not really a surprise. NYU Professor / artist Wafaa Bilal had a removable camera installed into the back of his head via a surgically implanted titanium plate to assist him with his lifecasting. Turns out that the camera caused a decent amount of pain as his body rejected the foreign object — again, no big surprise there. Bilal, however, seems pretty unfazed, and vows to continue on with the project which he says is a “comment on the inaccessibility of time, and the inability to capture memory.” Whatever, we suspect he just wanted to be known as the guy who had a camera implanted in the back of his head, and that’s alright by us.

[Photo by Brad Farwell]

NYU professor unsurprisingly removes camera from the back of his head, citing pain and the malaise of lifecasting originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feb 10

Array Camera Tech Turns Cellphones into Futuristic Image Processors

Posted in: Today's Chili

California startup Pelican Imaging wants to put slimmer, higher-quality cameras into cellphones with its new camera-array technology. Instead of using a single lens and sensor, the camera uses an array of smaller modules and uses computation to combine them into a single image. The resulting hardware is thin, but that is probably the least interesting thing about it.

The Pelican array uses “light-field photography”, and aside from just stitching small pictures into a big one, it does some things a regular camera can’t. For instance, you can diddle with the picture after it is taken, blurring a background, say. And in principle at least, you could use a kind of 3D “healing brush” to paint out distractions behind and in front of your subject.

Pelican’s camera also promises to give high resolution images with low-noise results in low-light situations, and could enable gesture-controls on tablets.

The tech is being sold into the industry, not to consumers, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that Apple will buy this and use it to replace the crappy camera in its skinny iPod Touch.

Pelican Imaging Unveils Revolutionary Approach to Smartphone Cameras [Pelican via GigaOM]

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Feb 09

Nikon’s Low-Light, Wide-Lens P300 Forgets the RAW

Posted in: nikon, Today's Chili

Like a pint of delicious spring-water submerged in Nikon’s salty, eight-camera press tsunami today, the little gem that is the P300 was almost diluted entirely out of recognition. Thanks to some quick work, the pocket-friendly compact has made it, sodden but still alive, to these pages.

The P300 is best thought of as Nikon’s answer to the Canon S95, a pro-friendly pocket-camera full of manual controls and topped off with a large sensor, great low-light sensitivity and a fast lans.

ISO runs up to 3200, which is pretty good for a smallish sensor compact. And speaking of sensors, it’s a little smaller than that in the S95 – 1/2.3-inch vs. 1/1.7-inch – and fits 12.3MP onto a backlit CMS plate. The lens offers a 24-100mm (35mm equivalent) zoom, and a super-wide ƒ1.8 maximum aperture (the S95 lens only opens to ƒ2).

Manual control is available for all exposure functions, controlled by a thumb-wheel on the top-plate, and you get image stabilization and a big three-inch, 921,000-dot LCD panel thrown in, along with 1080p video and a stereo mic.

It looks pretty compelling, and even has a weird night-mode which combines separate ambient-light exposures of the background with a flash-exposure of the subject. One warning, though. Nikon may have excluded itself from the race by leaving out RAW capture.

With compacts, you’re not tied to a brand as you are with SLRs that rely on lens compatibility, so you can shop around. If Nikon had added in remote flash control for its iTTL system, then this would be killer. As it is you’ll need to visit a store and try this out against the Canon S95 and the Lumix LX5. They all look very capable, so it will really come down to feel (and also that lack of RAW shooting). Available March for $400.

Coolpix P300 press release [Nikon]

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Feb 09

USB Knob Adds Remote Focus-Pulling to Canon SLRs

Posted in: Today's Chili, usb

This $400 knob proves that the SLR really is the movie camera for today’s indie filmmakers. It’s called the Okii Systems USB Follow Focus, and it does what it says, allowing you to control the focus of a Canon SLR via USB. Think of it as focus-by-wire for your SLR.

Canon’s cameras can be controlled by hooking them up to computers,
too, but the Okii knob is arguably more practical on-set, especially as one big point of using an SLR to shoot video is its small size.

What’s that? You at the back there. Speak up. You’re wondering why you shouldn’t just use the auto or manual focus built-in to the camera? Well, pay attention, boy. Autofocus is never used in movies, as it tends to swim around, and if the subject walks away from his focus-point, the camera will refocus on the background. And manual focus, especially the fast accurate kind you need to pull focus between, say, two actors at different distances, is almost impossible with a modern AF lens.

Not only can the Okii knob save and flip between four pre-set focus points, you can also turn its hefty aluminum collar to focus using the lens’s built-in motor. Buttons around the edgers can also control digital zoom (to aid focussing), start/stop shooting, adjust ISO, aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation, as well as focussing=zone positioning. In short, if you put this on a long (tested up to ten meters) USB cable you have a full remote setup. Plug an HDMI-cable into the camera and hook-up a monitor and you’re done.

The knob costs $400, and is available for pre-order now.

Okii Systems USB Follow Focus knob [Okii via Oh Gizmo]
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Feb 09

Fujitsu’s next-gen Milbeaut image processor does single-chip Hi-Vision video, 20MP stills

Posted in: arm, digital camera, DigitalCamera, photography, Today's Chili, video

Fujitsu’s latest image processor, the Milbeaut MB91696AM, has a new bag of tricks on tap, and it’s fixing to unload them in April. The new Milbeaut sports ARM processors and a “newly-developed” Full HD H.264 codec engine, making for 14-megapixel shooting at 8fps (or about 20 megapixels at 5.5fps) and low-noise Hi-Vision video recording at 1920 x 1080. So the processor, in its sixth iteration, sports high resolution photos and HD video all on the same chip, and features continuous photography speeds up to five times faster than its predecessors. Fujitsu’s got plans to show off Milbeaut’s mobile solutions at MWC next week, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the MB91696AM make its debut in Barcelona as well. Either way, the new processor is scheduled to ship starting in April for ¥3,000 (right around $36), which means new Milbeaut-equipped cameras won’t shouldn’t be far behind. Full PR after the jump.

Continue reading Fujitsu’s next-gen Milbeaut image processor does single-chip Hi-Vision video, 20MP stills

Fujitsu’s next-gen Milbeaut image processor does single-chip Hi-Vision video, 20MP stills originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Feb 2011 02:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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