Hasta La Gadget!

Sony announced the successor to its NEX-3 digital camera earlier this week, so we decided to take a post-E3 road trip down to the electronics maker’s US headquarters in San Diego to check out the $599 NEX-C3 for ourselves. We’ll analyze the new sensor’s image quality in a full review before the camera hits stores later this summer, but from our initial impressions, the new cam appears to offer fairly minor tweaks compared to its predecessor. It’s incredibly small for a camera with an APS-C sensor — perhaps even awkwardly so, when paired with the comparatively massive 18-55mm kit lens or Sony’s enormous 18-200mm optic — but not small enough to be any less functional than the previous iteration. Like the NEX-3, the camera was designed to be held by resting the lens on your left palm, rather than by the grip, so size isn’t likely to be an issue. Cosmetic changes include a magnesium alloy top panel, front microphone positioning, and a more efficient display hinge, which helped reduce the camera’s thickness. We’ll be posting a full review in several weeks, but jump past the break for more observations, and a hands-on video from Sony HQ, shot with the NEX-C3.

Continue reading Sony NEX-C3 hands-on (video)

Sony NEX-C3 hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Could Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen seriously go toe to toe with the Dos Equis guy? Don’t laugh… well, until you watch his training video just after the break. Something tells us he’s got quite a few lessons to go before getting the Ari Gold seal of approval.

Continue reading Adobe’s CEO trains to become The Most Interesting Man in the World (video)

Adobe’s CEO trains to become The Most Interesting Man in the World (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Jun 2011 21:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alan Sailer’s incredible high-speed photos are taken with a death-dealing home-made flash. Photo: Alan Sailer

Alan Sailer is a photographer. He fires things very fast at other things, and then uses a homemade high-speed flash to capture some quite stunning images. Here’s how he got famous:

Was a very, very obscure photographer working in his garage shooting stuff with a pellet rifle and photographing the results with a home built flash.

Then in early 2009, someone linked one of my pictures to a social networking site. My boss came by one day and told me my site was getting a huge number of views. Emails from magazines, newspapers and even Good Morning America started clogging my FlickrMail box.

It was very stressful.

Stressful indeed. Thankfully, things settled down a bit for Alan and now he continues to add to the almost 1,000 high-speed photos on his Flickr photostream.

Why build a special flash? Because even with a flash duration of just 1/40,000th of a second, a typical flashgun isn’t fast enough to capture a speeding bullet, which will travel a blur-inducing third of an inch in that time. An air-gap microflash, however, lights up for just 1/1,000,000th of a second, fast enough to freeze pretty much anything.

The makings of a high-speed air-gap flash are detailed over at the Hobby Robotocs blog, although the author — Maurice Ribble — warns against making one thanks to the dangerous high voltages (35,000v) involved. He is fairly emphatic about this: “Do not build one! If you go against my advice and do build one, I am not responsible for any injury, death, or any other problems it causes,” he says.

The general principle, though, is that you load up a capacitor with 35,000 volts and then dump the electricity into a tiny glass tube which houses two wires with a gap between them. The resulting spark causes an incredibly short burst of light, perfect for capturing the moment that a lime tears through a hunk of raw meat.

Almost as inventive as the flash is Alan’s choice of subject matter. These include bullets hitting Christmas bulbs filled with water or jello, limes hitting, well, everything, and the amazing picture above, of a junk-store ceramic figurine with jello for a brain.

Alan Sailer’s Photostream [Flickr via BoingBoing]

High Speed Air-gap Flash [Hobby Robotics]

See Also:

• Low-Tech Geekery Makes Beautiful High-Speed Photography
• Super Slow-Motion Camera Catches a Wave
• Casio EX-F1 Is a Speed-Demon Snapper
• Lightning Reveals Its Power in Slow Motion

Speed may be a relative thing, but whatever you choose to compare Micron’s new RealSSD P320h series to, you’ll probably find them pretty competitive. Coming in 350GB and 700GB capacities, these PCI Express solid state drives can process data at a rate of 3GB per second and write it at a no less impressive 2GBps. If you’re more interested in input / output operations per second, the P320h clocks in at 750,000 IOPS when running Linux or 650,000 with Windows Server as the OS. You don’t need us to tell you that both numbers represent screaming-fast performance. Such mighty feats are achieved with the use of 34nm SLC NAND flash memory and Micron’s own controller chip. Samples of the P320h are trickling out now and mass production is coming in the third quarter of 2011, and while no pricing info has been offered yet, it’s safe to say you’ll be needing your company CFO’s blessing before making any P320h purchases. Video and full PR after the break.

Continue reading Micron RealSSD P320h can read 3GBps, write 2GBps, impress millions of geeks per second

Micron RealSSD P320h can read 3GBps, write 2GBps, impress millions of geeks per second originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gigabyte has decided to simplify matters for those who want the power of an SSD in their desktop, but don’t want to deal with the hassle of buying and connecting one. The company’s new Z68XP-UD3-iSSD (catchy, no?) motherboard comes with a 20GB Intel SSD 311 mounted right on it. It’s not clear if you can simply dump files on it like a normal drive — what it can do, however, is use Intel’s Smart Response tech to cache frequently accessed data, like your OS, to improve performance. Essentially, it turns any hard disk you connect to the system into a hybrid drive with a much larger reserve of flash storage, which should sound somewhat familiar. The board also features the ability to switch between discrete and built-in graphics thanks to Lucid Logix’s Virtu. The rest of the features are pretty standard fare: USB 3.0, a pair of 16x PCI-E slots, and 6GB SATA connections. The latest Z68 board from Gigabyte will go on sale early in June and, while we don’t have a price, we’ve done a little (PR) embedding of our own after the break.

Continue reading Gigabyte bolts an SSD to a motherboard (so you don’t have to)

Gigabyte bolts an SSD to a motherboard (so you don’t have to) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 May 2011 15:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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