The DP-SLR is a secondary monitor for your camera. It is designed for movie-makers who use the latest video-shooting DSLRs but need a screen that’s bigger than the one on the back of the camera.
The biggest draw is the screen itself, which has a phenomenal 270 pixels-per-square-inch resolution. This makes it pretty much as sharp and detailed as the best DSLR screens currently available. The DP-SLR plugs into your camera’s HDMI-out port (video can also be fed in through component and RCA sockets) and mounts on the hot-shoe adapter. Given that it weighs 10-ounces, you might want to do this on a tripod.
The screen also has a wide, 179-degree viewing angle and measures 5.6-inches on the diagonal. The drawbacks? first, you’ll need to run a power cable to it — there is no battery pack yet (although one is planned). The base model costs $900, and if you want additional 3G/HD/SDI inputs you’ll need to spring for the $1200 version. Finally, if you order one you’ll be waiting 75 days. Not 75 days from now, but 75 days from when your pre-order is turned into an actual order, which could really be any time, ever.
One of many things the Micro Four Thirds manufacturers are getting right is the lenses. Panasonic’s optics clearly show the benefits of its long association with Leica, and Olympus’ Zuiko lenses have been great since pretty much forever.
These lenses aren’t cheap — this latest wide-angle zoom from Olympus will cost around $700 when it ships next month, but according to the testers at DP Review, you get your money’s worth.
The M Zuiko Digital 9-18mm (18-36mm equivalent) F4-5.6 is small. That’s it above, in the middle squeezed between a pair of already tiny wide zooms from Panasonic, one a Four Thirds lens on an adapter (left) and one a native M4/3 optic. Olympus manages this by making the lens collapsible like the 14-42mm kit zoom which comes with the Pen EP-1. When in use, it extends to around double the length.
The takeaways from the DP Review test: the bokeh, or out-of-focus highlights are ugly, but the lens is sharp and not prone to flare (essential in such a wide lens). Autofocus is good and fast (the lens “reveals a significant advance in Olympus’s autofocus system”) and also silent for movie-shooting. As we’ve said, it is also tiny, which is kind of the point with M4/3 cameras.
I’ll still skip it, though. The problem with all but the most expensive zooms is that they have variable and relatively slow maximum apertures. One of the great things about using a fast prime is both that shallow depth of field and the ability to shoot at night without worrying too much about getting the shakes.
If you want a capable 12 megapixel camera with a Leica lens and built-in GPS, we’d recommend the $400 Lumix DMC-ZS7 from Panasonic. If you want exactly the same camera, but are willing to spend an extra $300 or so for a red dot on the front, we instead suggest you take a look at the Leica V-Lux 20, leaked by Leica Rumors and expected in stores on May 9th.
The Leica has very average, if capable, specs: A 3-inch LCD screen, HD movie recording (720p), shoots JPEG only and will reach a disappointing ISO 1600 in regular, non-boosted mode. These features sit well in Panasonic’s product line, but when you add the Leica tax the price puts you in range of Panasonic’s amazing GF1, the mirrorless Micro Four Thirds compact (which I own and totally dig).
Our advice? Stick with the Panasonic and spend a couple of bucks on a pack of red dot stickers, or go for the GF1.
Love trashy, low-contrast photographs taken through a plastic lens, but find them a little flat? What you need is the Holga 120 3D Stereo Camera, Lomo’s medium format stereo-shooter that grabs two shots side-by-side for some photographic 3D action.
The plastic-bodied Holga makes you think you’re looking at it cross-eyed, or that somebody has mashed together two regular Holgas. The camera takes standard 120 roll-film, and captures two slides simultaneously when you trip the shutter. And you’ll want to use slides, as they’re the easiest to view, just by slotting them both into the viewer that comes with the kit.
And those flash-like rectangles up top? Yup, they’re flashes, and the camera comes with colored gels so you can splash differently-tinted light around from each of them. This is definitely a novelty camera, but then, it’s not too expensive, either, at $100 for the camera alone, or $150 for the camera, viewer, a film and a set of slide mounts. Available now.
Drift Innovation’s X170 sports-camera, or “Action Camera”, is a great looking, lightweight camcorder with a lot of very clever features. It is let down by just one thing: a mere hour of battery life.
The X170 is a solid-state camcorder that records straight to SD (a half-hour will eat 1GB) and has a tiny 1.5-inch screen for playback (or more usefully, a quick check to see you got the shot). Video is shot through a wide-angle lens with a 170-degree field-of-view, and is recorded in 720 x 480 pixels at 30fps. Stills can be grabbed at 5 megapixels.
The camera comes boxed with a huge array of mounts: A helmet-grip, head-strap, goggle and handlebar mounts and a plain ol’ Velcro fastener for anything else. It also comes with an RF remote control with a five meter (16-foot) range. If you’re into any kind of sport and want to film it, you’re covered.
Which makes that battery life all the more annoying. We guess, though, that putting in a longer-life li-ion in there would mean that once the battery died, you’d be stranded. The X170 instead uses regular AAs, so you can just keep swapping them out until you land/crash/collapse of exhaustion. $200.
The MicroRemote from Redrock Micro is a dumb remote-control focus device. Twiddle the knob on the side and a companion box over on your camera will move the lens itself, linked by radio (or a cable if you prefer). The knob has movable stops, so you can mark start and stop points, and your focus-puller can do his work from a comfortable chair rather than squatting under the cameraman’s overhanging belly. The unit also works with a separate sonar unit, which measures the precise distance between camera and subject.
As such, it is an adequate controller. Drop in an iPhone or iPod Touch, though, and it becomes the kind of omnipotent weapon a James Bond villain might use. The included app fires up and you now have a whole range of extra info, from the focal length of the lens, to the depth of field available, along with pretty much anything else you need to know about your lens.
Hit the auto-focus button and you don’t even need the knob. The iPhone takes the distance info from the sonar and adjusts the focus for you. How much is this device? Not cheap. The MicroRemote will cost around $1,000 when it goes on sale, and you’ll need to bring your own video-capable DSLR and buy one of Redrock’s compatible lens adapters to use it. Oh, and you’ll need an iPhone, too.
Flip’s new pocket-camcorder is the Slide HD. It takes the familiar simple-to-use video-camera and combines it with a big screen for playing back your masterpieces to a (small) audience. Where does the “slide” part come from? The body splits in the middle and slides open to prop the screen at a laptop-like angle for viewing. It’s pretty neat.
First, the camera. As you may have guessed from the name, it is a hi-def model, shooting 720p at 30fps in the the H.264 codec which is fast becoming the MP3 of video. 16GB of internal memory gives you four hours of shooting time, and you transfer to a Mac or PC for editing via the trademark flip-out USB plug. A lithium-ion rechargeable battery provides the juice, but only for two hours, so you needn’t worry about filling the camera in one go.
The screen measures three-inches, has 400 x 240 pixels and takes up most of the back of the unit when shooting. When flipped (or slid, we guess) up into playback position the “slide-strip” is revealed, a touch-sensitive bar for scrubbing through your clips. Sound comes through a pair of stereo speakers.
If you have shot some footage so amazing you must share it with more people than can crowd around the small screen, an HDMI-out will hook up to a TV. Should you choose to carry video specifically for watching, you can crunch the files down with included software and squeeze 12-hours worth onto the camera. If it wasn’t for the battery, this would be a great travel media-player.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 on the Mac desktop: Faster, cleaner and filled with kooky new tools.
Photographers have their own version of sleight of hand, manipulating images to make us believe the final product is a representation of reality.
The latest version of Photoshop, the flagship image-editing application in Adobe’s Creative Suite, adds a new stack of cards to the photographer’s trick deck. Wired.com was shown demos of new tools — such as the new Content Aware Fill and HDR — in Photoshop CS5 that we expect will amaze and please photographers with the tools’ ability to bend pixels with absolute precision.
Photoshop CS5 will arrive as part of Adobe Creative Suite 5, the company’s package of 14 productivity apps for visual designers, photographers and publishers. Creative Suite 5 will ship mid-May, according to Adobe.
Prices for the suite range between $1,300 and $2,600, depending on which package you buy, with upgrades priced from $500 to $1,500. Photoshop CS5 alone will cost $700, or $200 for an upgrade. Photoshop CS5 Extended, which has some additional tools, will cost $1,000, or $350 for an upgrade.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop’s arrival, and there are certainly several “wow” features in Photoshop CS5 that achieve a level of technological advancement most of us couldn’t have even dreamed of 20 years ago.
Most impressive is the new Content Aware Fill brush, a mind-bending tool that can remove large objects from photos, altering the background to make it realistically appear as though the object were never there. It can zap tourists, delete power lines and otherwise alter photos with click-and-drag ease.
This video shows it most plainly. Fast forward to about the halfway point if you want to see the really crazy stuff. (When this video first started making the rounds in March, some thought it was a hoax. It’s not: This is a real feature of Photoshop CS5.)
As with any new tool in Photoshop, expect Content Aware Fill to be overused: A surfeit of tourist-free images of Machu Picchu will soon be littering Flickr. But beyond the novelty, it’s a truly useful touch-up tool that turns what used to be hours of work into a simple drag of the brush.
Speaking of brushes, all of the painting features in Photoshop — neglected since the release of Photoshop 7 — have been rewritten. The app now features much more realistic interactions. If you use a digitizer tablet, you’ll find that your brushes are considerably more responsive. The angle of the stylus now controls the edge of the brush and the new paint-mixing tools control color blending, wetness and bristle length, making for a very lifelike painting experience.
Another bit of Photoshop trickery that’s become popular lately is high-dynamic-range imaging, or HDR. The Flickr crowd is crazy for it, and Adobe has responded by improving Photoshop’s Merge to HDR tool, which helps you create HDR images.
The new HDR tool now has fourteen HDR presets which can save considerable effort when hand-toning an image. The HDR presets shipping with Photoshop range from the cartoonish to the fairly realistic, and should satisfy all but the pickiest of HDR enthusiasts.
Composing a real HDR image requires multiple photos taken with multiple exposures, but now you can fake it. Photoshop CS5 has a new set of tools to create what Adobe calls “single-image HDRs.” The results will never quite match a true HDR with multiple images, but the new single-image HDR-toning dialogue lets you get pretty close using just one file.
Also incredibly helpful for HDR fans is the new Remove Ghosts tool in the HDR dialog, which makes it simple to eliminate ghosting and artifacts caused by differences between your layered HDR images. With Photoshop CS5, you can simply outline a ghosted area (say, for example, a flower that moved in the breeze between shots) and select a single layer for that portion of the image.
Mini Bridge: You can now embed the Bridge file browser into a Photoshop palette.
Photoshop CS5 isn’t just new brushes. There’s been plenty of attention to performance — the Mac OS X version is now fully 64-bit native, the same enhancement the Windows version got in in CS4. That means that you could, in theory, throw as much as 128 GB RAM at Photoshop.
This update further deepens Photoshop’s integration with Bridge, Adobe’s file-browsing tool. Bridge can now be embedded in a palette within Photoshop (known as Mini Bridge). You can quickly navigate through your images using the familiar Bridge interface without needing to leave Photoshop. Interestingly, the UI metaphor for Mini Bridge seems influenced by the iPhone — when you navigate through folders, the interface slides left and right.
Photoshop CS5 also gets the same massive overhaul to the Camera Raw engine that we’ve seen in the forthcoming Lightroom 3. Camera RAW in both apps offers much better sharpening and noise reduction, which is impressive not so much for its ability to remove noise, but to retain detail while doing so.
Photoshop CS5 also has a few tricks designed to make designers’ lives easier, particularly the new Puppet Warp tools, which allow you to make path-like selections and bend, warp, shorten, lengthen and twist an object.
Wired.com was shown a demo by Photoshop product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. He took an image of an elephant with a straight trunk and, with just three selection points, he bent and curled the trunk back so the elephant appeared to be eating.
Photoshop's new Puppet Warp tool in action: before and after
Puppet Warp introduced almost no distortion into the finished image. Puppet Warp also provides a much easier and faster way to straighten tilted horizons.
We were also impressed with the new Lens Correction tool, which fixes distortion and other lens artifacts, using profiles tailored to correct specific camera lenses (the lens type is determined by embedded EXIF data, so Photoshop can determine that automatically).
Most of the other smaller features that make this release of Photoshop a must-have are user-suggested features and workflow improvements. Adobe solicited user suggestions, filtered through the ideas, picking some three dozen ideas and making them a part of Photoshop CS5.
Photoshop has several outstanding new features — it’s probably worth the price of the upgrade just for the new Content Aware Fill tool, the 64-bit boost and the improvements to Camera RAW — but what really sells this release is amount of time it promises to save you.
Among our favorite workflow improvements: You can now adjust the opacity and fill percentages on multiple layers simultaneously, the Save for Web dialog is available in 16-bit mode (and handles downsizing to 8-bit automatically), and Photoshop has the ability to save layer styles as a default behavior that even persists across sessions.
Adobe has done an impressive job of focusing not just on the whiz-bang features, but on how photographers, designers and digital artists spend their time using Photoshop, and how making small changes can speed up their workflows.
These cute, brightly colored plastic cameras are modern-day versions of the Kodak Box Brownie, the camera that brought photography to the masses. The concept design is set to commemorate the upcoming 2012 Olympics.
George Eastman’s design has been shrunken slightly, and jazzed up with some candy-colors, but otherwise the design remains mostly intact. The biggest change is the inclusion of an electronic pop-out flash, easy to do thanks to all the spare space left in the box after removing the film-shooting parts.
The new Brownie, designed by James Coleman, will give you an idea of how primitive and mysterious cameras once were. First, there is no screen, either for shooting or for playback, so you have the same delayed gratification that comes with film. To see what you’re trying to shoot, you peer through one of two holes on adjoining sides of the box. These can be used in portrait or landscape modes, and show a reflected image from the two smaller lenses at the front.
These flank the main lens, a fixed aperture design which is focus-free. In fact, the only user-operated control is the big ol’ shutter release, which sits low, down by your thumb as you hold it and stare into the hole on top. You can also flip up a pair of square frames to form a straight-on sports finder, although with the optical finders it is not particularly useful.
The only thing I don’t like is the face on the front, which makes this look more like a Happy Meal gift than a toy for adults. Still, it does look like a lot of fun, and I’d certainly try it out if it were indeed the price of a box of McNuggets.
Panasonic is dead serious about Micro Four Thirds, the big-sensor format that it has up until now been stuffing into small, mirrorless stills cameras. Yesterday it announced a M4/3 camcorder, a video camera which can use the whole range of M4/3 lenses.
The M4/3 sensor is a lot bigger than those in both digicams and many consumer camcorders. This means you get some sweet, shallow depth-of-field for Hollywood-like out-of-focus backgrounds. Panasonic is calling the new AG-AF100 camera “professional”, but it is more like a high-end prosumer model in features.
The recording format is AVCHD/H.264, an efficient and high-quality codec. The camera shoots 1080p at 24p (the frame-rate of film-based movie-cameras) and stores it on two SDHC cards. You also get a choice of other sizes and speeds. As for sound, there is a built-in stereo microphone along with a pair of XLR-inputs, and the camera supports Dolby-AC3. In short, it ticks all the boxes it needs to.
But the best part is the fact that the camera uses the M4/3 lens-mount. This means that, with cheap adapters, you can use pretty much any 35mm-format lens out there. And because movie-makers tend to prefer manual focus and exposure, there really is no penalty to using ancient Nikon or Canon lenses. As an extra bonus, fast, second-hand prime lenses are a fraction of the cost of new movie lenses.
The camera will be available by the end of the year, for a still-undecided price. Hopefully it will also look a little more real than the CGI-rendering above.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
The DP-SLR is a secondary monitor for your camera. It is designed for movie-makers who use the latest video-shooting DSLRs but need a screen that’s bigger than the one on the back of the camera.
