If you shoot film and aren’t much into chemicals (or don’t have a basement in which to keep a gigantic 5×7″ enlarger), you’ll soon find yourself needing a way to import those beautiful pictures you’ve taken onto your computer. What? Why didn’t I say, “you’ll need a scanner”? After all, it’s not 1987 anymore — scanners are as common as toaster ovens.
Well, I didn’t say “a scanner” because it’s not the only way you can digitalize those pictures. Indeed, even though it’s the first (and often only) technique most people will think of, it is also the most inefficient and time consuming. And it can lose a lot, I mean a lot, of the quality of the original slide or negative. Read more…
Astrophotography enthusiast Don Marcotte wanted to find out whether the Canon 6D or Canon 5D Mark III was more suitable for his area of photography, so he pitted the two cameras against one another in a few noise tests at his local camera store. He simply shot long exposures without any light (the cap was on) in order to see how much noise would show up in the frame. Read more…
The Canon EOS M is quickly becoming the laughingstock of the mirrorless party due to its autofocus system, which leaves much to be desired in terms of speed. To show just how sluggish the system really is, Tomek Kulas over at M43.eu did this very simple yet informative “hands-on test” that pits the EOS M against one of its archrivals: the Olympus OM-D EM-5. Read more…
Earlier this month, Nokia found itself in a public relations nightmare after it came to light that photos and videos in a video promoting the Lumia 920 smartphone had been faked. The company quickly began to do damage control by inviting the press to test out the PureView camera against competing smartphone cameras. The Verge’s test was quite promising, and now Engadget is confirming those results after doing tests of their own:
The 920 took the cake, without question, but the iPhone didn’t fare too poorly itself, snatching up nearly as much light as the Nokia device. The 808 PureView also performed quite well, but the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III yielded unusable results.
It’s one thing to snag proper exposure, though — capturing sharp details with little noise and superior color balance is an entirely different beast, and the Lumia managed to do just that [...] The 920 did present some issues with exaggerated shake and other rapid movements, but it offered up excellent results overall, even in scenes that were too dark for us to make out any details with our own eyes
We live in strange and exciting times in which phone camera photos can be compared side-by-side with top-of-the-line DSLR photos without anyone laughing (too hard). Having just gotten his hands on a shiny new iPhone 5, photographer Dustin Curtis decided to test out its camera’s quality by pitting it against his Canon 5D Mark III (with a 50mm lens fixed at f/2.8). Read more…
After The Verge broke the story this week about Nokia’s dishonest promo video for its PureView camera technology, Nokia went into damage control mode. As its stock took a tumble, the company hired an internal ethics investigation into the matter, and took steps to turn the media’s attention back to its revolutionary PureView features rather than the dishonesty seen in the video promoting them.
Nokia has endured a torrent of bad press over the past couple days over its faked promo video, but the truth is, the company is investing heavily in improving photography in its mobile phones, and its PureView technology is definitely something we should be keeping our eyes on.
In order to back up its claim that PureView low light performance is “unbeatable”, Nokia set up a “photo challenge” booth at its launch party and invited passers-by to pit their cameraphones against the Lumia 920. The challenge involved shooting a photograph of a still life setup stuffed inside a dark cubby hole in a brick wall. Check out the video above for a glimpse of how the phone’s camera stacked up against the iPhone’s and the Samsung Galaxy’s. Read more…
Nokia’s 808 PureView phone packs a hefty 41-megapixel sensor, but how do its megapixels compare to a “real” 40+ megapixel camera photo? Spanish website Quesabesde decided to find out by putting the phone head-to-head with the 40MP Pentax 645D medium format DSLR. They shot the same scenes with both cameras, and blew them up to examine the quality. The article is in Spanish, but a little Google Translate magic does the trick.
On the heels of my guest blog post over at Tiffinbox, I wanted to showcase a little camera comparison I used to illustrate my points on gear acquisition. We are all at fault for lusting after the latest and greatest gear available to us on the market. I know I have, but that lust comes with a price tag and a trade-off.
Having dusted off my very first DSLR (Canon D30), I put it to the test against my current Canon 1D Mark IV. In doing so, I made some startling and not-so-startling discoveries (as one could only imagine)… Read more…
Leica’s new black & white rangefinder, the M Monochrom, eschews the standard color filter found in ordinary camera sensors in order to capture higher quality monochrome photographs. How much of a difference does this make compared to the standard practice of converting color images to B&W? David Farkas over at Red Dot Forum decided to find out by doing a head-to-head comparison of the camera with a Leica M9. He photographed the same scene at different ISOs, and then published the photos with a nifty slider that lets you easily compare the resulting images. Here’s a spoiler: the difference is quite noticeable.
