Hasta La Gadget!

Is it spring already? Nikon has just assaulted us with no less than nine new Coolpix models, freshening up its consumer offering with a litany of hot new shades, touchscreens and hardware updates. We’ll let you dig into the press releases after the break for the full details, but the two new Performance range cameras, the P500 and P300, are worth discussing in more detail. The P500 improves on Nikon’s P100 by a few orders of magnification, touting a voyeur-friendly 36x optical zoom, while also offering a 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor, 1080 / 30p video plus stereo sound recording, max ISO of 3200, and an 1100mAh battery. The back is also adorned with a tiltable display, sized at 3 inches diagonally and fitting 920k dots. Yours on March 3rd for $400, €464 or £400, depending on your local currency.

The P300 is cheaper at $330 / €348 / £300, however it might well be the more appealing option for image quality obsessives as it boasts a lens with an aggressive F1.8 aperture and 4.2x optical zoom. It shares the same backside-illuminated sensor as you’ll find in the P500, but benevolently permits its user full manual control to let him or her capture that perfect shot. Rapid-fire shooting at 8fps for up to seven frames is available, but we’re loving the fact it can also do 1080 / 30p with continuous autofocus and the ability to both capture images and use its optical zoom while recording. If Nikon is to be believed, the P300 is basically the P7000 that came out last year, but shrunken down to the size of a compact. It really is a very diminutive and attractive — it has that intentionally understated matte black finish that huskily whispers the word “prosumer” in your ear — compact camera. It lands on March 17th.

Continue reading Nikon crams 36x zoom in P500, full manual controls in P300, refreshes Coolpix range with tons of color

Nikon crams 36x zoom in P500, full manual controls in P300, refreshes Coolpix range with tons of color originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Brace yourself, Samsung has new point-and-shoots to fill in what little pockets of consumerism weren’t intrigued by any of the company’s five CES shooters… or even the five more announced just weeks later. First up is the PL20 (pictured left). A 14 megapixel CCD sensor, 27mm wide angle lens, 5x zoom, digital image stabilization, 720p 24fps HD video with Smart Filters. That one comes out in March for a penny under $120, with a choice of silver, pink, black, and tomato red (Sammy’s description). For the ES80, subtract two megapixels from the sensor, nix the HD recording, keep the color options, bump the release date one month, and subtract $20. You get the idea. Full details and press release after the break.

Continue reading Samsung announces PL20 and ES80, brings 2011 pocket camera lineup to 12 total

Samsung announces PL20 and ES80, brings 2011 pocket camera lineup to 12 total originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amidst a slew of new announcements from Canon comes the new entry-level T3 (EOS 1100D) SLR, a replacement for the Rebel XS or EOS 1000D. Like the two-and-a-half year old camera it replaces, the T3 is built down to a price, but competition is so fierce in the low-end of the SLR market that you still get a full-featured camera.

The sensor is a 12MP CMOS model, and comes with old-school sensitivity running from just ISO 100-6400. That might sound good, but the upper limit of these things is always poking into the realms of noise. The LCD screen is a mere 230,000 dots, compared to the now-standard 900,000+ and video is 720p-only.

But you do get a nine focus-points, color-sensitive light-metering and Canon’s latest DIGIC 4 image processor. And beginners will be pleased with the Basic+ interface which lets you adjust settings based on intent rather than by tweaking the numbers. Think of it as Instagram, only with real camera settings instead of filters.

Along with Eye-Fi compatibility and a tweaked layout for the buttons and dials, that’s about it: a solid camera for anyone stepping up from a compact. You will be able to pick one up in March for $600, with an updated 18-55mm kit lens.

Canon EOS 1100D press release [DP Review]

See Also:

• Specs and Full Price of Entry Level EOS Canon Rebel XS Announced …

Ricoh GXR pictured with the 24-72mm ƒ2.5-4.4 10MP "lens"

Ricoh’s GXR system is about to get a Leica M lens-mount. This will let you take pretty much any of the legendary lenses and put them in font of a tailor-made sensor.

The GXR system, you may remember, is Ricoh’s rather weird take on cameras. The “body” is just a shell with a screen and some buttons. The “lenses” are where the action is, and each lens unit features its own sensor. These sensors vary in size and sensitivity depending on the lens they are paired with.

The new lens unit is actually lensless, with an M-mount for your legacy lenses. The sensor will be an APS-C sized 12.9MP CMOS model, and have its own focal-plane shutter.

While being able to use Leica lenses on any camera is desirable, the non full-frame sensor is less than ideal. Except for a handful of lenses made in the early days of Leica digital, all M-mount glass is made for 35mm film. Thus the 35mm focal length, the most popular on a rangefinder, becomes around 50mm. Fine, unless you like wide-angles, in which case you’ll be paying more and suffering from (typically) slower maximum apertures.

Ricoh has yet to announce a price, and the specs you see above are the totality of the sparse press release. We do, though, have a vague launch date: Fall 2011.

See Also:

• Ricoh's Inside-Out GXR Puts Its Sensors Inside the Lens
• Ricoh Speeds Up AF With Old-School Tech
• Ricoh P10: A 10-Megapixel Zoom Lens

SynthCam is probably the coolest cellphone photography app we’ve seen in quite a while. In short, it allows you to snap iPhone pictures with a very shallow depth of field, blurring the background of your pictures and making the subject pop out. This is usually the domain of SLRs and other large-sensor cameras.

How does SynthCam work this magic? By crunching numbers. To use the app, by Marc Levoy (professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University), you frame the image, hit the “shutter” button and then move the phone in small circles, keeping it perpendicular to your subject. The camera records video and then process the frames to keep the subject sharp and blur the background. Because it shoots video, the resolution is lowered, but the effect is startlingly like the real thing.

In his demo video, Levoy says that the effect works by simulating the larger apertures found in SLRs. Move the tiny iPhone lens in circles, the thinking goes, and you create a bigger aperture, much like scribbling a Sharpie will make a bigger mark than just tapping it on the paper.

This seems simplified, although it’s a good enough layman’s explanation. What the app is doing is tracking the subject and watching how the background moves behind it. This does simulate a larger aperture, kinda, but the behind-the-scenes processing is doing more than just stitch images together side-by-side.

These 15-second exposures have some nice side effects, too. Low-light noise can be reduced by keeping the camera still throughout the exposure and then combining the results to make a brighter, less noisy image. But better is the “tourist-removal”, as it could be called. A long exposure will only record things in the frame for the whole time. Any passersby will just disappear.

The app can be had right now for the iPhones 4 and 3GS or iPod Touch running iOS 4.2 or better, and costs $1. Combine this thing with Instagram and you just found a way to spend the rest of your day.

Synthcam product page [Marc Levoy]

Synthcam [iTunes]

See Also:

• Review: Bokeh Masters Kit Adds In-Camera Effects To Your Arsenal …
• Sigma's ƒ1.4 Portrait Lens, Tailor-Made for Today
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos