At a launch event in NYC last night, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship smartphone: the Galaxy S4. It’s a phone that looks remarkably similar to its predecessor, and one that is heavily geared toward photography. Having just launched a smartphone-style compact camera, the Galaxy Camera, Samsung appears to have stuffed many of the same technologies and features inside this latest smartphone.
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Are you a Canonite who’s sick of hanging out in the same forums as photographers who pledge allegiance to other brands? If so, that’s kinda sad — why can’t we all just get along? — but Canon has something new that’s perfect for you. The company has just launched its own official online forum, giving photography enthusiasts a new place to “ask questions, get answers and share experiences with peers.”
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At a special event in San Francisco tonight, GoPro launched its latest action camera: the Hero3. Compared to the Hero2 that it succeeds, the new camera is both more portable and more capable. It’s 30% smaller and 25% lighter, making it great for helmet cams and attaching to random things. The image processor inside is twice as fast, allowing the camera to shoot both video and photographs at faster frame rates.
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Apple officially announced the new iPad today (called “the new iPad” rather than the “iPad 3″). It’s a tablet computer, but its new features make the device much more camera-like than the iPad 2. There’s a new 5-megapixel iSight camera on the back that features a backside illuminated sensor and a five-element f/2.4 lens. It’s also able to record HD video in full 1080p. On the frontside is a 9.7-inch 2048×1536 retina display that packs 4 times more pixels than the iPad 2 and 1 million more pixels than an HDTV. Get ready for a world in which more and more people take Instagram photos using large “cameratablets”.
The New iPad [Apple]
Beta testers still have until the end of the month to play around with the program, but Adobe has now officially launched Lightroom 4 to the general public. The program features an improved develop module, a new map module, book creation, new video features, and space saving lossy compression for DNG files. It’s also significantly cheaper than prior versions: the full program costs just $149, while the upgrade costs $79.
Lomography has launched the LomoKino, the world’s first consumer 35mm movie camera. It’s an old-school hand-cranked camera that uses standard rolls of 35mm film (yeah, the kind you use in film cameras). The camera captures 144 individual frames onto each roll of film, producing a video that lasts 50-60 seconds. Once you have your film developed, you can watch it using a separate LomoKinoScope: a hand-cranked movie viewer!
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The success of Instagram has shown that photo filters are very much in demand with the general population. Facebook is rumored to be working on its own retro filters, but Google has beaten it to the punch: today the company introduced a wide range of creative filters to Google+’s Creative Kit. The filters (called “Effects”) include looks that mimic daguerreotypes, Reala 400 film, Polaroid pictures, Lomo, Holga, and even cross processed film.
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By Martin Pannier on picuous
Unlike most videos you find on the web, images aren’t very easy for the average person to share. Rather than hotlink photos from their original source, as is done for videos, most “sharing” involves downloading the photos, uploading them somewhere else, and then publishing that new version of the image. Picuous, a new service that launched today, aims to change that by bringing one-click Vimeo-style sharing to online photographs.
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If you’re a Flickr loyalist that hasn’t jumped ship for competing services, Flickr is rewarding you with a couple new tools for sharing your photos. Today the company announced an official app for Android and a new photo-sharing feature called Photo Sessions.
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Google’s new Photovine mobile photo sharing app for iOS is now out of private beta and open to public signups. Here’s how the iTunes download page describes it:
Photovine is a fun way to learn more about your friends, meet new people, and share your world like never before. It all starts with what we call a photovine: a group of photos around a single, shared caption. Start a new vine with a photo and caption of your own or add your photo/take on someone else’s vine.
It has a long ways to go before it can catch Instagram, which is currently the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Instagram has already passed 7 million registered users, who have uploaded more than 700 million photos. Google has a pretty big reach though, so products launched by the company can get really big, really fast — just look at Google+.
Photovine (via TechCrunch)
