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Nikon Announces New Coolpix S1100pj Camera with Projector

Nikon Coolpix S1100pj

Nikon today has announced the update to last year’s novelty S1000pj, the first camera with a built in projector. This year’s model ups the ante, and adds a lot of features to this concept that help to make it a much more appealing package. And then they made it cheaper. Hard to complain about that, isn’t it?

Key changes include an upgrade to a 14 megapixel sensor and a switch to a 3″ touchscreen LCD with twice the pixel resolution. And, on the projector front (you know, that big honky lens on the front that makes this thing unique), we’re looking at 14 lumens, up from 10, and it can now be used as an ad hoc projector for any JPEGS on the memory card, or can be hooked up to your computer and used as a projector for that.

And, let’s not forget these slick new colors on that much nicer looking body there, yeah? It’s good to see someone else taking visual cues from those nifty Olympus Tough cameras, which the design on this is admittedly very reminiscent of (*cough cough Stylus 750SW cough*).

It’ll be available yet this year, and it’ll debut at around $350, or about $80 bucks less that its predecessor did, and not much more than the S1000pj is currently at. Impressive.



Panasonic Micro-Four Thirds Camera Users Are Sexier

OKCupid, an online dating site which I may or may not be fond of myself, has let loose possibly the best blog article ever, where they have collected data on user attractiveness and correlated it against the EXIFs of the photographs. The results are kind of amazing and definitely interesting to read through. They looked at the results based on camera type, aperture, flash usage, and time of day. Some of the key findings? Interchangeable lens cameras make you hotter than point-and-shoots, and they’ll both make you way hotter than camera phones. Flash makes you look 6-8 years less attractive (not that many working shooters couldn’t have already told you that), and big, wide apertures add attractiveness to your shots. No, really, keep it at f3.5 or lower, kids.

Oh, yeah, and apparently people using Panasonic Micro-Four Thirds shooters like the GF1 or GH1 are just way totally sexy. Or something.

They break down how they collected everything in their post, which is worth reading in detail before running off and making big scandalous claims that Canon shooters are homely. Seriously people, be responsible with tantalizing data taken out of context. We’re obviously not to be trusted with it, so it’s up to you.



Epson Mail-In Rebates for your R1400 or R1900

Kicking off a new practice here at Roberts -we’ll be posting info about Mail In Rebates here on Roberts Raw! I’m now the Web Lackey overseeing the uploading of the rebate documents, so if you’ve got questions, comments, concerns -you can drop me a line at nhenry@robertsimaging.com.

Right, serving up a pair of Mail In Rebates from Epson – Get $80 back on an Epson Stylus 1400 Ink Jet purchased from us between July 4th and October 2nd 2010. Epson Stylus R1900 Ink Jet printers garner a $150 rebate. Now the money comes back in the form of a check from Epson, and it could take 8 weeks -but this is pretty standard Mail In Rebate behavior.

Give us a ring at 1-800-726-5544 to speak with a sales associate about the full details or visit our rebate center.



Canon VIXIA HF S21 HD Camcorders In Stock

So, this butterfly-lovin’ bit of tackle here is the Canon VIXIA HF S21 HD camcorder. And, while it’s no show stopper, and there’re no unique, headline grabbing-features to make it jump out in the sea of compact, flip-out touchscreen HD camcorders, we can tell you that it is, in fact, a very solid and worthwhile product.

It’s got the usual suspects in there. 10x optical zoom (with Canon’s Dynamic SuperRange Optical Image Stabilization with Powered IS which does, in fact, make things buttery smooth), a 3.5″ touch LCD with 922,000 dots (that means it is sharp), the ability to grab 8 megapixel stills, and yes, it even records high-def 1080 videos. Go figure.

But, it also has 64GB of built-in memory, for up to 24 hours of HD video, and it slots two additional SD/SDHC cards, and will automatically switch form the internal drive to the next card with space if you fill it up. Which is nice, because you could easily double the capacity with two 32gb SDHC cards. or even just another 12 hours by adding on two not-unreasonably-priced 16Gb Sandisk Extreme III SDHC cards with a max write speed of 30 mb/s.

And, should this piece of hardware be sounding like something you’d want to capture your life with, you’re in luck. We just got a handful in stock. Better hurry before they disappear, though.



Canon and Epson Rebate Synergy!

Yeah, that title has me a little freaked out too.

If you’re looking to buy an Epson Stylus R1900 or an Epson Stylus R2880 and a current Canon D-SLR* you can get $450 back from Epson -so long as you purchase them together between August 1st, 2010 and August 31st, 2010.

For full terms and conditions, give us a ring at 1-800-726-5544 or check out the .pdf on in our Rebate Center.

*EOS 50 D, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 7D, EOS Rebel T1i, EOS Rebel T2i, EOS Rebel XSi, EOS Rebel XS



Don’t Forget Our North Store’s Grand Opening!

Quick reminder everybody: our north store is celebrating it’s grand opening tomorrow and Saturday. That’d be August 6th and 7th, for those in THE FUTURE reading this in the archives (ha! you missed it!). For those of you reading it live, in the present, we hope to see you tomorrow or Saturday. It’s being catered by MBP Catering, and there’ll be prizes. We mentioned those before, yeah?

So, don’t forget to swing out and see us. What’s that? You need the address? Why, sure!

Roberts North Store
12761 Old Meridian
Carmel, IN 46032
317-818-9800

Alright, so, you got the address, you know we’re giving away free things (including one of those hot Kodak Zi8 Pocket Camcorders we’ve been talking about, and a Nikon D3000 kit), so, there’s no reason for us to not see you there, right?



Microsoft Can Undo The Jitters

If you own any modern smartphone, and we’re guessing at least a few of you must, than you’re already familiar with accelerometers, those things in your phone that let it decide which way it’s moving and operate everything from games to the simple act of auto-rotating the screen. Well, the news is that Microsoft is developing an algorithm that reads all the accelerometer and gyroscope data from when a picture was taken and uses it to know exactly how you were moving, and can use that to fairly accurately cancel out blur. For real.

Obviously the initial implication is maybe we ca finally get better images from our cameraphones (where installing optical lens or sensor shift stabilization is difficult, to say the least), but there’s no reason so far this technology couldn’t come to affect cameras of every variety, so long as there’s room for a few accelerometers.

They’ve got a few demos of this, including the image of the cans of Coke there (click it to see the full size which cycles between before and after. And, that’s the worst demo they have. That’s as bad as it gets, and boy it gets a lot better), so, why not hop over to Engadget’s write-up on it to see more?




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