Hasta La Gadget!

Just before the January news-thaw turns the trickle of CES 2011 news into a flood, Samsung has announced a followup to its mirrorless, large-sensor camera, the NX10. Going by the updated spec-sheet, the NX10 was a success, as hardly anything has been changed.

The NX11 (you’d guessed the name already, right?) has one big new feature: It can use Samsung’s i-Function lenses. These lenses put the most used controls around the lens barrel, a rather excellent spot for oft-used buttons as your hand is likely right there on the lens already. Compatible lenses let you change between shutter-speed, aperture, exposure-compensation, white-balance and ISO by using a button or a ring on the lens. Olympus used to do this years on its film SLRs, putting a shutter-speed ring on the lens-mount.

Otherwise, almost nothing has changed. The finger-grip has been tweaked slightly, but the sensor (14.6MP), the video (720p) and the rear LCD (3-inches) remain the same.

It’s a pedestrian upgrade, but then, if you’ve got it right, why change things? (I’m looking at you, Panasonic GF2). It’s a shame Samsung opted for those controls on the actual lens, though, rather than on the camera. I guess it’s just a way to get people to upgrade lenses as well as bodies. And on that note, there are a pair of new lenses for the NX-cams: a ƒ2.8 20mm pancake and an ƒ3.5-5.6 20-50mm zoom.

The NX11 will be in stores in February 2011, bundled with the kit 18-55mm zoom for $650.

See Also:

• CES 2010: Samsung Joins Rangefinder Fray With Large-Sensor NX10 …
• Samsung NX100, Slimline Mirrorless Camera with Smart Lenses …
• Do Mirrorless Cameras Spell the Death of DSLRs?

Been questioning the value of having omnipresent surveillance cameras tracking your every move? Well, if you’re an outlaw, you still won’t like them, but for the rest of us law-abiding types, London’s Metropolitan Police has a comforting stat to share: almost six crimes a day are being resolved with the help of CCTV footage. It’s being used primarily to aid the identification of perps on the run, and the number of suspects identified as a result has gone up to 2,512 this year. There is a bright light for criminals, however, as the Met admits digital recordings aren’t kept around as long as VHS ones used to be, meaning that if you slip the dragnet once, you’ll probably be alright. So good news for everyone!

CCTV cameras help solve ‘six crimes a day’ in London, says Metropolitan Police originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 05:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IPhone photographers get all the retro-licious fun. Apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram let you mess with your pristine digital pics and make them look as if they came from a low-quality plastic camera from communist-era Eastern Europe. Now videographers can join in the image-degrading hijinks, with 8mm Vintage Camera.

The app does exactly what you’d expect. It adds dusty, speckly artifacts to your footage, and you can shoot through a variety of virtual lenses (flickering frame, light leak and color fringing, for example) and capture the video onto one of several “films”. You can also add random jitter and movement to the movie, as if the projector was having trouble keeping the film fed neatly through its gate.

All the effects happen in real time, so you see on-screen exactly what you are recording. There are modern touches, too: you can light up the iPhone’s flash whilst recording, and the familiar touch-to-focus feature is in there. Exporting options are good, too. ITunes sharing is supported, as is email and saving to the camera roll, but you can also send movies straight up to YouTube.

Best of all, the app is just $2. Sure, my $800 Micro Four Thirds camera might shoot great-looking, hi0def video, but this looks like way more fun.

8mm Vintage Camera [iTunes via iPhoneography]

See Also:

• Hipstamatic Gentrifies iPhone Camera
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos
• Hands-On with Swankolab, a Chemical Darkroom for the iPhone …

Iain Sinclair’s Poco Pro is a tiny, credit card-sized (although not credit-card thickness) camera. Despite its pocket friendly design, it manages to pack in a rather ridiculous number of features, especially given its projected £200 ($307) price-tag.

The sensor is a way-too-large 14 megapixels, which will also capture 1080p video. The blurb on the site says that the camera has “excellent low light performance and can outperform much larger and bulky rivals.” I remain skeptical.

Round the back you’ll find a 2.4-inch AMOLED screen, with touch buttons arrayed around its edges, much like the four buttons on many Android phones. The buttons also give haptic feedback when pressed. See what I mean about feature overload?

Amazingly, this little slip of a camera also manages to squeeze in a mechanical shutter, the kind found in SLRs. This gives it the potential to have almost no shutter lag – the delay between pressing the button and taking the picture.

The Poco Pro doubles as an MP3 player, too, with a jack socket and built-in speaker, and media is stored on a microSD card, which might slow things down a little.

Want more? Sure. How about direct uploads to YouTube or Flickr (when connected to a computer, I assume, as there is no other connectivity). Or two LED flashes, not one, on either side of the lens. One thing you don’t get, though, is a zoom.

It seems hard to believe that a camera could have all this and also be well made for just $300. And to be honest, we’ll probably all forget about it before it finally ships in June next year, or possibly never ships, confined to the insides of a CAD application for the rest of its days.

Pico Pro product page [Iain Sinclair via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• CardSharp, A Folding Knife for Grammar-Nazis
• Samsung Reveals Tiny, Credit Card-Sized Hard Drive
• Credit Card Cutlery: Ordinary Cutlery, Without the Cut
• Credit Card Sized Voice Recorder Sports 1990s Style Specs

Magic Shutter is an iPhone camera app that mimics the effects of shooting at slow shutter speeds, and of using flash to freeze a subject. Here it is in action:

The app actually does use some programming magic to achieve its effects. For instance, if you choose the “flash” modes, you can choose front and rear curtain-sync effects. Front curtain sync takes a sharp image and then records subsequent frames in a kind of still video, allowing those frames to build into a blur. The original, sharp image is laid over the top. Rear-sync does the same, but snaps the sharp photo at the end, making the light streaks appear behind a moving car, say, and giving a more expected effect.

Light-painting mode lets you snap a light-source and then wiggle the camera to draw shapes, as if the light were burning an image into a film while the shutter was left open.

Magic shutter looks like a lot of fun, and certainly makes the iPhone do some impressive new tricks. Output resolution is limited, though, to under a megapixel due to limitations that Apple sets on accessing the camera at full resolution for video.

An update early in the new year will boost the output resolution, but as the source video is no bigger, this won’t add much.

The app is ready for your blurry experimentation now in the app store, at a price of $3.

Magic Shutter app [iTunes via iPhoneography]

See Also:

• Hipstamatic Gentrifies iPhone Camera
• Best Camera: 'Like Photoshop for The iPhone'
• Pro-Camera Adds Image Stabilization to iPhone