Hasta La Gadget!

Take one high-end, medium-format digital camera back, and one plastic-lensed Holga film camera. Cut, stitch, and wait for a thunderstorm. Throw the switch and let the lightning flow into the Frankencam. It’s alive. Alive!

You may wonder why you’d do such a thing, but admit it, you’re intrigued. The trouble with digital photography is that it is so damned predictable. Cameras guess the exposure correctly almost all the time, the images are clean and if you don’t like it, you can try again, immediately.

Sticking a crap-cam onto the front of a high-quality capture device brings some unpredictability and some analog surprises back to photography. It’s the same thing as putting a Lenbaby, the low-fi, bendy lens that lets you send most of your pictures to blur, on the front of a full-frame DSLR: Fun.

And it’s exactly what Ted Dillard did when he hooked a Holga onto an Imacon 96 back. The Imacon was joined to a gutted Holga so that the 36 x 36 mm sensor sat in the film plane and the unit is triggered by a simple connection to the Holga’s hot-shoe. This sensor, although large, is still not as big as 6 x 6 film, so you don’t get the trademark dark edges on the pictures. Ironically, the bigger, better and more expensive the sensor you use, the more “Holga-like” (or “worse”) the pictures get.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, stop. The Imacon is impossible to get ahold of, and a new Mamiya digital back goes for well over $3,000. If you already have one, hack away. If not, try a cheaper solution, and just stick a Holga lens on the front of your camera. Flickr user Joachim Guanzon did it already and you’ll find the instructions, along with some great pictures, over at his page.

The Digital Holga How-To [H2H]

EOS Holga [Flickr]

Putting a cheap memory card into a DSLR is like putting vegetable oil into the tank of a Ferrari*. The camera will write slower and you’ll saturate its internal buffer sooner. In short, if you have spent the money for a fast camera, then you should spend the money for a fast card.

I use SanDisk Extreme IV cards as they go great with my Nikon and have rather resplendent packaging (since reduced in size). They’re fast, to-ing and fro-ing data at up to 45MB/sec, which keeps my camera’s buffer free and means transfers from card to computer are also quick.

Today, these have been superseded by the Extreme Pro, a Compact Flash card available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB sizes. They run at a blistering 90MB/sec, or double that of the previous cards. The catch is the price, which starts at $300 and rises quickly to $800. Extreme indeed.

Even the next model down, the Extreme III, has been ousted. This time the new range is simply called “Extreme” and offers rates up to 60MB/sec on cards from 8GB to 32GB and prices from $130 to $375. My lowly 4GB cards are starting to look a little old-fashioned.

Product page [SanDisk]

Press release [DP Review]

*OK, it’s not quite the same. A slow card won’t actually trash your camera, but you get the point.

Apple could have put the iPhone’s camera in the iPod Touch, but it would have been a very tight squeeze, according to a repair company that disassembles iPods and iPhones.

That’s because the iPod Touch measures 8.5 mm thick, and the iPhone’s camera measures 6 mm, leaving a mere 2.5 mm of wiggle room for the iPod Touch. By comparison, the iPhone measures 12.3 mm thick, leaving plenty of space for its auto-focus camera.

“Unlike the Nano, the iPod Touch could conceivably support an iPhone-sized camera, although it would certainly be an engineering challenge,” said Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixIt.

Apple on Wednesday released updates for its iPod family, including a new iPod Nano featuring a video camera and an iPod Touch with a performance boost. However, many questioned why the Nano gained a camera while the iPod Touch did not. Prior to the event, dozens of photos of third-party iPod Touch cases containing camera holes surfaced on the internet.

Michael Gartenberg, a tech strategist with Interpret, said Apple likely left the camera out of the iPod Touch to create “segmentation” of the products. This move would make consumers desire both an iPod Touch and an iPod Nano, he said.

However, iFixIt’s observations suggest that Apple may have left the camera out of the iPod Touch because it was technically too difficult to install. Prior to the event, a rumor report also said iPods with cameras might see a delay because of technical issues. This engineering challenge may have been the problem delaying a camera-equipped iPod Touch. That means an iPod Touch with a camera could be on the road map, and Apple’s engineers are probably devising a way to cram that camera inside.

Another question that arose from yesterday’s iPod event was why the iPod Nano can only capture video but not still images. iFixIt performed a teardown of the iPod Nano and discovered its low-resolution VGA camera is only 2.75 mm; the iPod Nano is 6.2 mm thick. The iPhone’s 6 mm camera, which must also account for a rubber mount, is thicker than the entire iPod Nano. In short, the low-resolution (640-by-480) VGA camera — with no focusing capability — would produce poor-quality still shots, which is likely why Apple opted to leave a still-shot function out.

See Also:

• Cameras in iPods. Game Over?
• Hands on With the Camera-Equipped iPod Nano
• Apple Rumors Abound: iPod Delay, Jobs Keynote, More
• Apple Unveils Flip-Killing iPod Nano, Revamped iTunes, No Beatles …

Photo: Mike Rohde/Flickr

Apple’s decision not to include a camera in the new iPod Touch is somewhat surprising. After all, there is already a perfect camera for the job, and it sits inside the iPhone. That Apple included a video camera inside the iPod Nano makes this more inexplicable still — the Apple of today is clearly happy to put cameras into its media players (unlike the first iPhone, whose camera was so poor we thought it was just a petulant capitulation to cellphone norms).

Leaving the camera out is also a clear signal not to upgrade the Touch, as — apart from a larger 64-GB model — the only hardware change is a juiced-up processor, making the iPod Touch run faster like its older brother the iPhone 3GS. Perhaps Apple is putting the Touch on a two-year update plan like the iPhone, letting people keep their pocket computers for a little longer than usual.

It’s also likely that Apple wants to maintain enough differences between the Touch and the iPhone to give people plenty of reasons to buy the more expensive device.

Had the Touch included a camera, I would be knocking on the store doors right now to buy one, along with 64 GB ready to be filled with photos and video.

So the excitement falls to the Nano, which, sports a new shiny coating, a 640 x 480 video camera (no stills) and a larger screen on the outside, and an FM radio on the inside with a Tivo-esque live-pause feature. The radio itself is odd enough, and the first to be included in any iPod. More on that in a moment.

The Nano’s video camera was introduced with reference to Flip’s own tiny, no-zoom camcorder. There are two Flip camcorders at the 8-GB Nano’s $150 price: the 2-GB Mino and the 4-GB Ultra. To get 4 GB and 8 GB you jump to $200. The 16-GB Nano costs $180. Why would somebody buy a Flip? The easy, one-button recording, perhaps (with the Nano, you need to go to a menu item to open the video camera application), but that’s it. Take a look at the sample videos at the Apple store and you’ll see that the Nano’s quality is easily “good enough.”

There is another surprise in there, too. The tiny Nano frame has a chip big enough to add real-time effects to video. Gimmicky, but as we guess this is aimed at the teenage market, a nice feature.

The Nano is the fitness iPod, too, and in this guise it makes another piece of hardware obsolete: the shoe-mounted Nike+ dongle. The Nano comes with the Nike+ software, with workout history, power songs and the like, but the accelerometer now works as a pedometer, counting your steps to flab-loss. You can also connect it to a Nike+ iPod-compatible cardio machine via the dock connector.

One mystery remains, though. Why would Apple put an FM tuner into an iPod, something it has refused for almost 10 years? The answer comes with iTunes-Tagging. In addition to live pausing of the radio stream (and rewinding up to 15 minutes through the buffer) you can tag tracks by hitting the center button. If a radio station supports it, the song info is saved and later you can see a list in iTunes alongside, you guessed it, the option to buy the song. Of course, the fact that the new Zune HD has an HD radio inside may also have influenced Apple’s decision.

So now I’m torn. Do I buy a new Touch to replace my current model which has a loose headphone connection, or should I get the Nano, with its video camera and sport-friendly features? If Apple had piled the features onto the Touch, the decision would be made, and Apple would have $400 of my money. As it is, I think I’ll wait.

Product page [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Drops iPod Prices: Old Models to Stay in Store, Shuffle to …
• Apple Preparing iPod Touch With Camera, Microphone: Source …
• Apple Unveils Flip-Killing iPod Nano, Revamped iTunes, No Beatles

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

More interesting to most people than the new M9, not least because of price, is Leica’s new X1. Think of it as a miniature M-series camera, only with a single, fixed lens.

The 12.2 megapixel camera isn’t cheap – the list price is $2,200 – but it should do most of what the M9 does. First, that lens. You can’t change it, and it doesn’t zoom, but as most Leica-M users stick to a 35mm lens anyway, the Elmarit 24mm f/2.8 Ashperical should do the trick. The math nerds will have noticed that 35 divided by 24 is 1.46. This betrays the X1’s huge sensor. It is bigger than the micro four thirds sensors, and essentially puts a DSLR-sized (APS-C) chip into a compact camera.

The numbers: ISO runs from 100 to 3200, shutter speeds up to 1/2000th of a second, and there are 11 focus points plus face-detection. There is also a pop-up flash and a 2.7-inch, 230,000 dot LCD screen.

What the numbers don’t tell us is that, in addition to the usual auto-modes, the X1 has manual aperture and shutter-speed dials on the top plate, and that when you buy it, it comes with a license for Adobe’s Lightroom software, a very welcome addition as bundled software is usually awful.

The one thing missing is an optical viewfinder, but following the trend set by the Olympus EP-1, you can buy one to slot into the hot-shoe mount up top. It’ll cost you, of course (another $350), but if these optional finders become popular then a third-party market might grow to sell them, just like in the olden days of ‘finder-less “rangefinders”.

We’re looking forward to this. It could actually be the true spiritual successor to Leica’s now anachronistic M-series.

The X1 will be arriving in January 2010.

Press release [DP Review]