Speaking of things with magic filters, Canon has announced two new consumer printers today whose most notable features are that they let you skip Photoshop if all you want is something like toy camera, miniature or fisheye to jazz up your shots. There’s also something that claims to be able to give you softer depth-of-field more like DSLRs. Both models can print to DVDs and CDs directly. The MG5320 is a wireless all-in-one model and the iP4920 just a mere inkjet printer. If you want to read all the sordid details, including how later this fall Canon’s app for Android and Apple will update to let you scan documents and beam them right to your productivity-killer Angry Birds handheld smartphone, hit the jump and slug away through Canon’s press release.
› archive for July, 2011
Olympus SP-810UZ Joins Superzoom Party, Brings Lots of Zoom
Olympus, who for ages and ages owned the super and later the “ultra” zoom market, have announced a new entry to that legacy in the form of the SP-810UZ. If you didn’t guess, the main attraction here is the lens, which in this case has 36x of zoom ranging from 24-864mm f3.3-5.7 in equivalent 35mm terms. 864mm f.57 is going to be prone to blurring while wielded by your shaky, not-propped-against-my-face-as-I-chimp-this-LCD hands. So lucky for you Olympus has included Dual Image Stabilization which combines real shift-based IS with the marketing lie of auto-ISO to keep your images blur-free, if not noise free.
The rest of the specs look a bit less exciting next to the lens, but, it’s backed up by a 3″ LCD, 14 megapixels, 720p video, Eye-Fi compatibility, and Olympus’ trademark Beauty Mode and Magic Filters (which actually aren’t nearly so bad as that name would make you think,someone spent a lot of time on these filters.)
Price will be $329.99 or thereabouts… sometime.
Olympus announces proposed ship date of E-PL3, new viewfinder
The Pen-Lite should be hitting us in September, along with the VF-3. The VF-3 will feature adjustable brightness and color temperature as well as the ability to rotate 90 degrees. Check it out on Olympus America’s press release.
New Olympus E-P3 and Olympus 12mm MFT F2.0 are here!
The wait is over. The new E-P3 from Olympus arrived today and it doesn’t disappoint.
For those folks who already have a Micro 4/3 camera from Olympus, specifically the E-P1 or E-P2; the differences are very noticeable. First, the screen is amazing. The 3-inch OLED screen is very sharp and the color will knock you out. A far cry from the previous models. The other obvious difference is the speed of the auto focus. Wow. This thing is fast! Testing with the kit lens and the new 12mm proved as fast as any SLR I have tried. Auto subject tracking and face recognition proved dead on as well. Olympus was also nice enough to include a pop-up flash on this model. A much needed addition and something I really miss on the E-P2. The touch screen interface on the OLED screen is a nice feature too. You can make easy adjustments to color, exposure, saturation, etc without needing to go into a menu to do it. It is all on the right side of the screen and does not interfere with the view. A real nice package.
The new 12mm MFT f2.0 is a lens that those of us in the Micro 4/3 camp have really been waiting on. It is a very solidly built lens with a clutch to switch to manual focus on the fly. The depth of field on the lens looks great! It reminds me of the old Voigtlander lenses in it’s construction and in it’s sharpness. Really feels like an old rangefinder when you use this thing.
We’ve got them in stock today. Come on in and test one out for yourself!
Sony Announces TX55 Touchscreen Compact
Sony today has announced a new addition to its high-end stylish compact line, the TX series. The new guy is called the TX55 (Cybershot DSC-TX55 if you’re being all formal). The basic specs are a 16.2 megapixel Exmor R Backlit CMOS sensor (if you’re unsure why backlit technology is important, check out Camera Technica’s excellent explanation of it), a 5x optical zoom (26-130mm equiv, f3.5-4.8), and a 3.3″ OLED touchscreen. This is solidly a casual snapshooter, and Smart Auto is going to mostly run the show for you, switching between scene modes as it sees fit and defaulting to auto when it can’t decide. It records Full HD and has Sony’s pretty competent Sweep Panorama, and can also take 3D still images using the first one to gauge depths and what not and then shooting a couple more in quick succession to make this possible.
Also, it features some new ‘Clear Image Zoom’ feature that uses ‘By Pixel Super Resolution’ processing to give you 2x digital zoom while claiming to not lose any megapixels or performance. We’re curious to see how that works, as it will represent a major break in our understanding of how digital zoom works if it’s as claimed.
The slim, metal shooter will be thinner than a AA and will come out at an expected MSRP of around $350 next month(ish).
DPReview now reviewing printers, secrets of the universe revealed
For those of you looking to take up the exciting practice of printing your photos at home the fine folks at DPReview have added reviews of printers on their site. As of this post they have just over 204 printers in their database for side-by-side comparison of their specifications, but no in-depth reviews have been posted yet. Having relied heavily on DPReview’s database of D-SLR and lens specifications and reviews in the earliest part of my time here at Roberts, I’m glad to see that they’re adding more data to the database.
Panasonic announces FZ-47 Superzoom
It’ll have 12MP, 3D image recording (fixed at 2MP resolution and 16:9 ratio), and ‘software free’ integration with Facebook and YouTube (and probably wont’ save FB from Google+). The price point is supposed to be less than the FZ100.
Check it out on DPReview and DCResource.
Nikon Announces New 40mm DX Micro Lens
Nikon today announced a new addition to it’s DX crop-frame lens line up, the AF-S DX Micro-NIKKOR 40mm f/2.8G. As a DX lens, this is designed for the crop factor bodies, and will only work on an FX full-frame body if you’re willing to accept a more than halving of your available megapixels. But, if you shoot DX, this is an effective 60mm f2.8 macro, filling a gap on the short macro end that has been a niggle in the DX line-up for a while. It’s got a maximum magnification ratio of 1:1, although I don’t know if that’s native or after the crop factor. If it’s native, that makes the effective reproduction 1.5:1, which is pretty swank for a lens that’ll cost under $300. The AF-S indicates the inclusion of an internal silent focus motor, and gurantees it’ll work even with the smaller bodies like the D3100 and D5100, which otherwise lack an AF drive motor.
You can of course preorder one from us by hitting the external link.
SpyderGallery Calibrates Your iPad Screen
If you could be a color, which one would you be? Whatever your choice, you want it to be accurate and true.
If you happen to be in the group of people who own both a Spyder3 calibrator and an iPad or iPad 2, then you’re exactly the sort of person DataColor would like to show their new-ish app to. It lets you calibrate your display… sorta. Obviously it can’t access the root level functions of your iPad, Apple’s toys don’t work that way. But, it can calibrate the screen while it is open itself, and that’s what it does. You run the app, and you access your photo library from inside it, and so long as you’re doing that then you can show your pictures off with accurate color calibration.
It’s a free bit of software, so, it’s worth the try if you’ve picked up a Spyder3 along the line for your other calibration needs. You can grab it from the Apple App Store via the external link.
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