Sep 22

Lensbaby Tilt Transformer Marries Nikon Lenses to Micro Four Thirds Bodies

Posted in: Today's Chili

Lensbaby has crammed an embarrassment of new features into its tiny Tilt Transformer. The little sliver of metal and plastic lets you mount any Nikon lens onto a Micro Four Thirds camera and use it for tilt-shift* effects. And with the (optional) Composer Focus Front, you can use any of Lensbaby’s own optics with the new toy.

The existing Lensbabies let you twirl the front section of the lens to put the point of sharp focus anywhere in frame, not just the boring old center. The Tilt Transformer gives a strip of sharpness instead of a dot, and lets you get those crazy tilt-shift pictures that make your subjects look like models (scale-models, not fashion-models, unfortunately).

This would be exciting enough, but this new adapter also lets you use the full range of Nikon’s great lenses on your Micro Four Thirds camera (Sony NEX mount coming soon). That not only gives you much sharper images (the Lensbabies aren’t designed for top-notch image-quality), but it also lets you change apertures without swapping little magnetic disks, and it offers a whole range of focal lengths. God knows what psychedelia would ensue if you combined a fisheye with this thing. You can even use g-lenses, those without an aperture ring, as the Lensbaby has a” mechanism [that] allows the aperture to open and close by manually rotating the lens.”

The market for this may at first seem rather niche: you’ll need both a Micro Four Thirds body and at least one Nikon lens. But that, if you look around Flickr’s forums, turns out to be rather a large niche. I’m luckily in that niche, and one of these Tilt Transformer’s is winging its way to Gadget Lab’s Spanish HQ for testing. I shall be attempting to immanentize the eschaton by putting my Nikon-mount Composer on the front of the Tilt Transformer and fitting that onto a Lumix GF1. Lock up your daughters!

The Tilt Transformer and Composer with Tilt Transformer are available now, for $20 and $350 respectively.

Lensbaby Tilt Transformer [Lensbaby. Thanks, Jessica!]

*Technically it is just tilt, not tilt-shift, but you get the point.

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Sep 21

So Hot: Fujifilm X100 Mixes Optical and Electronic Viewfinder in Gorgeous Retro Body

Posted in: Retro, Today's Chili

Fujifilm’s retro-fantastic X100 is probably the hottest-looking camera you’ll see this year. Announced at this year’s Photokina tradeshow, the magnesium-clad compact makes it look like Fujifilm took the wish list of many photographers and made it real.

The first thing you’ll notice is the styling, which looks almost exactly like the rangefinder cameras of the past, right down to the flash being placed where the little bright-line illuminator window would go on, say, a Leica. Likewise, the giant viewfinder is placed over to the left (from the user’s point of view).

In fact, the whole camera is laid out like an old-style rangefinder. The shutter-speed is set by turning a dial on the top plate (as is the exposure compensation). The aperture is set by twisting a dial around the lens itself and the on-off switch is a collar a round the shutter-release. In fact, from the product shots, it appears that the shutter release is drilled and threaded for a manual cable release.

Then we get to the lens. The ƒ/2 lens is a fixed 23mm, which equates to 35mm on a full-frame camera. This is the classic focal length for a rangefinder, and coupled with the 12.3-MP SLR-sized APS-C sensor, means that you’ll be able to throw backgrounds out of focus, as well as shoot in very low light (the maximum ISO of 6400 will help there, too).

But the real “holy shit” moment comes with the viewfinder. It works just like a normal optical viewfinder, but has a prism stuck in the middle. Light from the scene in front passes straight through to your eye, but off to the side is a tiny 1.44 million–dot LCD screen. When on, the panel can either superimpose camera info onto the image or — get this — function as a super–high-res optical finder. You can switch between modes with a hardware button (it’s the lever on the front) Here’s the picture:

To be clear, this means that you can use this like an old-style camera, with distraction-free framing but also with the parallax errors of a non–through-the-lens finder, or you can swap to see what you’d see in an SLR. I’m guessing that you’d also get the focus points shown, and maybe even an in-finder histogram? [Update: The histogram is in there].

The X100 will also shoot 720p video, and has a regular 460,000-dot screen on the back, along with the usual host of digicam buttons, and there is even a built-in 3-stop neutral density filter so you can cut out some light and still use the lens wide-open in bright sunlight.

I’m ridiculously excited by this camera. It’s coming out in March 2011, and, at $1,000, I predict that Fujifilm won’t be able to make them fast enough. This, you probably already know, is the camera Leica should be making.

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Finepix X100 [Fujifilm]

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Sep 21

Sigma SD1 Crams 46 Million Pixels onto Crop-Frame Chip

Posted in: Today's Chili

Sigma’s new flagship SD1 SLR stands out from the flood of camera announcements at the Photokina show. Why? It is a monster, a crop-sensor camera with 46 megapixels crammed onto its imaging chip.

The trick here is that the sensor uses Sigma’s Foveon tech. This stacks red, green and blue-sensitive pixels on top of each other, allowing accurate color-capture at each pixel-site. Compare this with conventional sensors which pull color information from adjoining pixels and averaging it to work out the actual colors. Sigma’s method should give better color accuracy and sharper images.

Because of this stacking, though, Sigma’s pixel-counts are effectively one third of the claimed figure if you count actual dots on the photos. In the past, this has made Sigma’s specs look rather pathetic, with the claimed 15MP of its SD15 coming closer to 5MP. With this new 46MP behemoth Sigma is saying a big “screw you” to everyone else. Even 15MP sensor is great these days.

Elsewhere, the specs are fairly pedestrian. There are just 11 autofocus points and the 3-inch LCD has only 460,000 dots compared the the 900,000 found in any other flagship camera (including compacts). This is a pre-release, so many of the numbers are not yet available. Just what will the maximum ISO be, for example, or the price?

I’m pretty excited about getting my hands on one, though. If this thing has the ISO part licked, then those could be some sweet, sweet images it pumps out.

SD1 product page [Sigma. Warning: Flash]

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Sep 21

$29,000 Titanium Leica M9 Will Sadly Never Take a Picture

Posted in: Today's Chili

Apart from the price – €22,000, or $29,000 – all you need to know about the photographic ambitions for Leica’s new M9 Titanium special edition is in this paragraph:

[T]he Leica logo has been restyled and is elaborately hand-engraved in pure resin, inlaid with white enamel, sealed with clear varnish and then polished and positioned centrally – directly above the lens.

Yup, a whole paragraph about the hand-made logo – just the thing to get a collector’s acquisitive juices a-flowin’. There are actually some interesting innovations in the Walter de’Silva-designed camera, but these will go unnoticed by actual photographers as this M9 is not designed for them.

As you will guess from the name, the camera (along with its accompanying Summilux-M 35mm ƒ1.4 aspherical lens) is made from titanium. If you look at the comparison image above, you’ll see that the body is also a lot cleaner and more streamlined (appropriate, as de’Silva works for Audi). Gone is the little window that lets light illuminate the famous bright-line viewfinder, replaced by an LED-lit frame in the viewfinder. Also missing are the two strap-lugs, replaced by a hand-strap, which eliminates the need for the leather grip on the camera’s right-side.

Finally, and perhaps best, is a new holster which slings over a shoulder and around the waist (pictured below). This holds the M9 vertically at your side, ready to be yanked out by that strap. Fortunately, this holster is included with the kit. One small note, considering the designer’s day-job. You could actually buy a brand-new Audi A3 for less than this camera.

It’s hard to know what Leica’s engineers think about this. On the one hand, the M9 special edition brings some very clever additions to the camera. On the other hand, it is clearly a product of the marketing department, and will go straight from store to storage case or bank vault. If I had designed this, I’d be pissed that nobody could use it. It would be like someone paying me a fortune to write a post here on Gadget Lab and then filing it away for nobody to read. Wait. That sounds pretty good…

Leica M9 Titanium [Leica]

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Sep 20

Frio Coldshoe Is a Hot, Handy Holder for Strobists

Posted in: flash, Today's Chili

If you spent $500 on a Nikon SB900 Speedlight, you’ll remember how happy you were with this great flash. You’ll then remember the rage, followed by disbelief, when you discovered that it wouldn’t fit any of your existing lighting gear thanks to the stupid fat foot that Nikon put on it, a hot-shoe that would make a midget tall enough to reach the top-shelf magazines. This forced you to use the included tripod adapter, which Nikon decided to make with a fast-stripping plastic tripod thread. Plastic. On a $500 flash.

Luckily, someone out there is thinking straight and, starting next month, you’ll be able to buy the Frio Coldshoe, a miraculous widget that will fit any flash, including the club-footed SB900, and mount it safely on any light-stand or tripod.

We like it for a few reasons. First, it is secure. A springy tab automatically clicks shut when you slide in a flash (or mic, or LED-panel) and needs to be pressed to release. There is also a hole in just the right place for Canon and Nikon locking pins to slide in. Second, the tripod-mount is metal, which means it’ll last. And third, it’s tiny, way smaller than Nikon’s dumb adapter.

The Frio comes from Orbis, the ring-flash adapter people, and exists currently only on the teaser site, not yet on sale. My guess is that it will be cheap enough to buy a handful and just leave them on every one of your strobes.

Frio product page [Frio/Orbis via the Strobist]

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Sep 17

Elinchrom Plans Flash-Triggering iPhone App

Posted in: apps, flash, iPhone, Today's Chili

With their infinitely configurable touch-screens, iDevices make pretty much perfect universal remotes. The iPhone and iPad can already be used to remote-control a DSLR, your iTunes-equipped PC or even your Sonos multi-room sound-system. Soon, you’ll be able to add Elinchrom’s RX flash lights to that list.

Elinchrom make those big, powerful flashes that you see in photographers’ studios, the ones that pull their juice from the mains or large external batteries and put out enough light to beat the Sun into submission. The company has just announced, through a coy, teasing blog post, that it is working on an iApp to let you control the power levels of your various flash-heads, pilot-lights and “many other features of the Elinchrom RX flash units”.

The actual workings of the apps are still top-secret:

We like to give our respected competition the chance to find out themselves. The EL-Skyport system idea lasted at least approximately 4 years, before other companies picked up this great idea.

We can make a guess, though. Elinchrom’s existing solution is a transmitter on the camera, and also a USB-dongle for control from a Mac or a PC. The picture above doesn’t show any extra hardware plugged into the iPhone or iPad, so I assume that the internal Wi-Fi radio of the iDevice is somehow being used. Either that or there is a dongle and it just isn’t in the picture.

We’ll find out soon enough, though, as Elinchrom will be showing off a demo at the Photokina show beginning next Thursday. The app will be available to buy for the “most modest price” in the early part of next year.

Remote Quadra RX with iPhone, iPad [Elinchrom]


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Sep 15

Looxcie, A Futuristic Wearable Bluetooth Camcorder

Posted in: bluetooth, Today's Chili

Looxcie looks more like a prop from Valve’s game Portal than what it actually is: a non-nerdy wearable camera, or a distinctly nerdy Bluetooth headset.

It works like this. You jam the Looxcie in your ear and switch it on. A reversible earplug means it’ll fit in either ear-hole. The camera then runs continuously and buffers up to five hours of video. If something cool happens, you hit a button and it sends the last 30 seconds via Bluetooth to a companion app on your Android phone, from where you can edit and upload it. This app also acts as a live viewfinder for the camera.

If you only use it as a Bluetooth headset, it will last for 10 hours, and if a call comes in while you are filming, the video recording is muted.

Then we get to the rub: The Looxcie costs $200, and the camera quality is crappy: your phone’s camera is undoubtedly better than the measly 480×320 pixel resolution and 15fps. On the other hand, it does look like a gun from Portal, so that might make it worth the price as a novelty Bluetooth headset for a really rabid fan of the game.

Available “soon”.

Looxcie product page [Looxcie]

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Sep 15

Nikon’s Flashy New SB700 Speedlight

Posted in: flash, nikon, Today's Chili

Nikon’s second big announcement today (the other is the hot new D7000) is the SB700 speedlight, a smaller version of the great SB900 and an overpriced replacement for the SB600 (although the SB600 is still available).

Nikon makes some of the best flashes around: even some Canon shooters prefer them to Canon’s own if they plan to use them manually, but they probably won’t be buying this one, as it has one big feature missing: a sync-jack. Over at the Strobist blog, flash-nerd David Hobby has been crawling through the specs and finds that there is no way to trigger the flash off-camera with a standard PC-cord. You’ll either need to use a compatible Nikon camera to trigger it remotely, buy an expensive proprietary cable or use the “SU-4″ mode, which turns the flash into a dumb slave unit.

Apart from this odd move, the SB700 looks good. If you’re familiar with the SB900’s screen-and-control-dial interface, you’ll be at home here. In fact, in some ways the new flash looks better than its big brother, with dedicated switches for changing modes and for illumination patterns (like the SB900, you can choose between standard, center-weighted and “even”).

There’s also a motorized zoom, AF-illuminator and the ability to act as a commander for other, off-camera flashes (useful if you ponied up the cash for the top-end D3 which doesn’t have a built-in flash to do this). And lastly (well, lastly for this post: Nikon flashes have a veritable confusion of options if you dig in) there speedlight comes with a few hard color filters, replacing the flimsy ones that come with the SB900. The price for this new flash is $330, compared to around $220 for the SB600 and around $460 for the SB900.

SB-700 product page [Nikon]

Nikon SB-700 Speedlight Misses it By This Much [Strobist]

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Sep 15

Nikon’s D7000 is a Pro-Level 1080p SLR

Posted in: Today's Chili

Nikon’s hot new video-shooting D7000 is – on paper – a replacement for the D90. In reality, it puts pretty much every other Nikon crop-frame SLR to shame, and will sit bang in-between the still strong D90 and the top-end D300s.

To show you just how good this $1,200 camera is, let’s compare it to Nikon’s flagship APS-sensor model, the $1,500 D300s. I’ll put the more expensive camera’s specs in brackets. The D700 has 16.2 megapixels (12.3), shoots at up to ISO 6400 (3200) in regular mode, captures 1080p video (720p) at 24fps. More surprisingly, both have magnesium alloy bodies and 100% coverage in the viewfinder (both pentaprisms, not dimmer mirrors). The D7000 even beats the D300s with its exposure-meter, using a 2016-pixel sensor (1005 pixels).

In fact, the only places the D300s clearly wins are in autofocus, with 51 focus points against “just” 39, and memory card format. The D7000 has a pair of SD slots, and the D300s uses the faster and harder-to-lose Compact Flash.

So how does it perform? Handsome, bestubbled photographer and friend of Gadget Lab Chase Jarvis has had a bagful of D7000s for a few months now, and Nikon gave him a another bag full of cash to shoot a movie. The results are pretty great, as you can see for yourself:

Chase actually strapped one of the cameras to a toy, remote-control helicopter to get some of the shots (without telling Nikon, of course), which shows another advantage of the D7000: at just 1.7-pounds (780g) it is smaller and lighter than the 2.2-pound (918g) D300, and almost identical to the D90.

This camera shows us one other thing: that competition is good. Nikon and Canon are locked into a battle that keeps producing more and more amazing kit. Nikon’s D3 took high-ISO shooting to a whole new level, while Canon was concentrating on cameras that shoot great video. Now, both manufacturers are catching up to each other, and we have this new D7000 and Canon’s fantastic EOS 550D (Rebel T2i) to show for it.

And wait, there’s more. Nikon has also launched a new speedlight, the SB700, and a couple of lenses: a 35mm AFS ƒ1.4G (the S means it has its own motor inside, the G means no aperture ring) for $1,800 and a 200mm ƒ2G for $6,000. If you’re a Nikon shooter with some cash to spend, today is probably a very good day for you. And all this before the Photokina show kicks off next week.

D7000 product page [Nikon. Thanks, Geoffrey!]

Nikon D7000: Camera Road Test With Chase Jarvis [Chase Jarvis]

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Sep 14

Nikon D7000 Packs a Whole Lot of Pro Into a $1200 DSLR [Digital Cameras]

Posted in: dslr, nikon, Today's Chili, top

It’s hard for Nikon to fight Canon on video, so they’re fighting with what they know: photography. Nikon’s new D7000 packs a 16.3-megapixel sensor, 39-point autofocus, dual card slots and ISO up to 25,600 in a $1200 camera. Hot. More »

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