Phase One, a Copenhagen-based maker of professional-grade digital camera technology, has invested in and assumed some control over Japanese camera maker Mamiya.
(Credit: Phase One)Phase One and Mamiya already had a partnership for one medium-format camera through a partnership begun in 2006, but now the alliance is much tighter, ...
Photo Finder finds contacts photos and suggests names for them when it thinks it knows the correct identity.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Start-up Face.com announced a Facebook application on Tuesday called Photo Finder that can identify your contacts' faces--and your own--on the social-networking site.
The software analyzes ...
Originally posted at Webware
MotionDSP, the company that offered a novel approach to improving photos and video through its now-discontinued FixMyMovie Web site, plans to release a promised version of its software for personal computers.
MotionDSP's vReveal software can extract higher quality from videos by drawing on the data in multiple frames ...
Bruce Livingstone, founder and leader of microstock pioneer iStockphoto, is leaving the company he sold to Getty Images three years ago.
iStockphoto founder and former CEO Bruce Livingstone
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Livingstone, who launched the low-cost photo-licensing company nine years ago, said he's leaving of his own volition, ...
Google has begun showing ads on search results at its Picasa site for sharing photos, part of its gradual expansion of advertising across its numerous Web properties.
Pages for photos and galleries doesn't show ads, but search results do for some people. The ads are located in a yellow-tinted "...
Getty Images' Flickr collection is now live.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Getty Images, one of the stock photography powerhouses, has switched on a program by which selected Flickr photographers can license their images to paying customers.
In earlier days of the microstock business, in which photographers license ...
DxO Labs added scores for three Sony SLRs to its site for image sensor tests. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: DxO Labs)Three midrange Sony SLRs now are included in DxO Labs' measurements of image sensor performance, and the Alpha A700 proves to be reasonably competitive.
Sony's A700, which costs about $1,100 with an 18-70mm lens, has a score of 66.3 on the test, which calculates how well the sensor handles color, a range brightness and darkness, and low-light shooting. That puts it behind the top-scoring camera with a comparably sized sensor, the Nikon D90, almost ties it with the Pentax K10D and Nikon D300, and gives it a a few points' lead over Canon's 40D and 50D.
Meanwhile, the A200 scores 62.9 and the A300 an even 64, according to the DxOMark Sensor test results that were updated Tuesday. A five-point difference makes a difference of about 1/3 stop in exposure, DxO says, meaning that a higher-scoring camera can attain the same raw image quality as a rival even though the higher-scoring camera is using a faster exposure or higher ISO.
DxO Labs, a French company, makes a business of measuring camera image quality, developing technology for image-processing hardware and software, and selling software to convert the raw files produced by higher-end cameras into less flexible but more convenient formats such as JPEG. The DxOMark score measures sensor performance based on the raw file, a foundation for overall image quality but only a facet of a camera's overall performance.
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A correction has been made to this story. See below for details.
LAS VEGAS--Olympus has declared an end to the megapixel race.
"Twelve megapixels is, I think, enough for covering most applications most customers need," said Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department, in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA). "We have no intention to compete in the megapixel wars for E-System," Olympus' line of SLR cameras, he said.
Instead, Olympus will focus on other characteristics such as dynamic range, color reproduction, and a better ISO range for low-light shooting, he said.
Increasing the number of megapixels on cameras is an easy selling point for camera makers, in part because it's a simple concept for people to understand. Even though having more megapixels can enable larger prints and enlargement of subject matter through cropping, adding megapixels comes with some drawbacks.
For one thing, smaller pixels can mean more noisy speckles at the pixel level and can reduce the dynamic range, so brighter areas wash out and darker areas become swaths of black. For another, images take more room on memory cards, hard drives, and Web servers, and cameras need more powerful image processors to handle them. And yesteryear's cameras already had plenty of pixels for making 8x10-inch prints, a size few people exceed.
...Originally posted at PMA 2009
A correction has been made to this story. See below for details.
LAS VEGAS--Olympus has declared an end to the megapixel race.
"Twelve megapixels is, I think, enough for covering most applications most customers need," said Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department, in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA). "We have no intention to compete in the megapixel wars for E-System," Olympus' line of SLR cameras, he said.
Instead, Olympus will focus on other characteristics such as dynamic range, color reproduction, and a better ISO range for low-light shooting, he said.
Increasing the number of megapixels on cameras is an easy selling point for camera makers, in part because it's a simple concept for people to understand. Even though having more megapixels can enable larger prints and enlargement of subject matter through cropping, adding megapixels comes with some drawbacks.
For one thing, smaller pixels can mean more noisy speckles at the pixel level and can reduce the dynamic range, so brighter areas wash out and darker areas become swaths of black. For another, images take more room on memory cards, hard drives, and Web servers, and cameras need more powerful image processors to handle them. And yesteryear's cameras already had plenty of pixels for making 8x10-inch prints, a size few people exceed.
...LAS VEGAS--Lexar plans to introduce faster, higher-capacity CompactFlash cards using a new generation of the flash memory technology, a company executive said Wednesday.
Lexar's top-end 300X cards will be outpaced by new models shipping later this year.
(Credit: Lexar)Lexar's current top-end 300X-rated CompactFlash cards use a standard called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) to transfer data at 45MB/second, and their capacity tops out at 16GB. But using a new generation of the standard, UDMA 6, Lexar will release cards that have significantly faster transfer speeds and larger capacity, Jeff Cable, director of marketing, said in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.
Cable wouldn't be pinned down on precise details, but he said the new cards' capacity "probably" would be 32GB, and their transfer speeds likely would "pretty close to" UDMA 6's threshold of 100MB/sec, which is more than double that of today's UDMA.
Only newer SLR (single lens reflex) cameras support current UDMA technology, but it's spreading, and there are benefits. For example, cameras can take longer continuous bursts of photos, and photographers can zoom faster to check focus when reviewing shots on the camera LCD. Video, which is arriving in new SLRs, also can saturate data-transfer pathways.
...Originally posted at PMA 2009