Hope you guys had a good holiday season. Welcome to 2012! As is our tradition, here’s our annual “state of the blog” post, in which we’ll briefly share on how this blog grew in the past year and where it is now.
Read more…
Fujifilm officially unveiled the XS-1 today after details and photos of the camera first appeared last month. Unlike the X100 and X10, the XS-1 isn’t a rangefinger-esque mirrorless camera but is instead a beastly bridge camera. The camera packs the same 12-megapixel 2/3-inch sensor as the X10, and features a 26x zoom lens that’s the 35mm equivalent of a 24-624mm lens. As if that range wasn’t enough, they also decided to include a macro mode that allows the camera to focus from just 1cm away.
Read more…
Canon’s historic announcement is here, and as most people predicted, it’s geared towards filmmaking rather than photography. The company just unveiled its new C300 cinema camera in an effort to break into a Hollywood digital filmmaking scene that’s dominated by the Arri Alexa and the RED EPIC. While it’s not particularly powerful in any specific category, the new camera comes in EOS or PL lens mounts, shoots 1080p video with a 4K sensor, has dual CF card slots, and offers high quality footage in a relatively small form factor.
Read more…
GoPro has unveiled the HD Hero2, the followup to the highly popular HD Hero from 2009 that has been adopted by daredevils around the world. The new camera is similar in design but offers major upgrades: more angles of view (90°, 127°, and 170°), 11-megapixel still photos (up from 5MP) at 10fps, a helpful LCD display instead of a single character code system, a mini-HDMI port, and a faster sensor that allows for faster frame rates (e.g. 960p at 48fps, up from 30).
The Hero2 is available in three different kits (outdoor, motorsports, and surf) for $300, and the price of the old Hero has been reduced to $200.
Here’s a super-awesome way of using stop-motion photography to announce the birth of a new baby.
(via Fstoppers)
Lytro has finally announced its revolutionary consumer light field camera. It’s a tiny camera with built-in storage, an 8x f/2 lens, and a design that looks more like a futuristic flashlight than a point-and-shoot camera. The camera captures “living pictures” that can be refocused by the photographer and the viewer, which means focusing is completely eliminated from the process of taking a picture. An 8GB that stores 350 pictures will be priced at $400, while a 16GB with a 750 image capacity will cost $500. The camera will start shipping in early 2012, but you can order one now over on the Lytro website.
Read more…
As the rumors foretold, Canon has announced a new DSLR today combining the 1D and 1Ds line of DSLRs into a single camera: the EOS-1D X. This beastly DSLR is an 18-megapixel jack of all trades. It’s full frame, but still shoots 14fps using 61 autofocus points and a 252-zone metering system. ISO can be boosted up to a whopping 204,000. There’s a large 3.2-inch LCD screen on the back, and a futuristic optical viewfinder that offers things such as a dual-axis electronic level and an on-demand grid. For remote shooting and file transferring, there’s a handy built-in wired LAN connection. In terms of video, camera can also do 1080p recording at 24/25/30fps, along with 720p at 50/60fps. You’ll have to start saving up though — the 1D X will cost $6,800 when it’s released in March 2012.
Read more…
Back in August, it came to light that some of Leica’s $7,000 M9 cameras had a problem in which they would corrupt the SD card being used — a problem that caused one photographer to permanently lose work after a day of shooting. The company quickly acknowledged the problem, and today announced that they had finally discovered the cause:
Thanks to the close collaboration with SD card manufacturers, Leica has now managed to rectify the fault by making adjustments to the firmware. To ensure compatibility with as many cards as possible and to ensure that all the related processes remain fault-free and are not compromised, comprehensive testing must be carried out in the development phase.
In the coming weeks we will test a beta version of the firmware in practice in cooperation with affected and selected customers.
The firmware fix will be released to the general public after they’ve thoroughly tested it.
MIT scientists have discovered that graphene, a material consisting of one-atom thick sheets of carbon, produces electric current when struck by light. The researchers say the finding could impact a number of fields, including photography:
Graphene “could be a good photodetector” because it produces current in a different way than other materials used to detect light. It also “can detect over a very wide energy range,” Jarillo-Herrero says. For example, it works very well in infrared light, which can be difficult for other detectors to handle. That could make it an important component of devices from night-vision systems to advanced detectors for new astronomical telescopes.
No word on when DSLRs will start packing graphene sensors.
(via MIT via ExtremeTech)
P.S. Did you know that graphene was first discovered in 2004 after a thin layer of pencil lead was pulled off using some ordinary tape?
Image credit: Illustration by AlexanderAlUS
Fujifilm’s press event yesterday wasn’t just to announce that they’re working on a new mirrorless system camera: they also announced the X-S1, the first non-retro styled camera to appear in the X lineup. The camera looks like a DSLR with a kit lens attached, but actually uses a fixed 26x f/2.8-5.6 lens and an electronic viewfinder. It uses the same 2/3-inch sensor size as the X10, which has about 1/4 of the area of a Micro Four Thirds sensor.
It’s strange that the company decided to add a camera like this to what was a pretty unique X Series lineup, but maybe there’s something special about the camera that hasn’t been announced yet…
(via Photo Rumors)
