November 4, 2010

Last year, Canon celebrated its 50th anniversary in manufacturing SLR cameras and released three super detailed paper craft cameras that you can print out and build yourself. These included the Canonflex, the AE-1, and the EOS 5D Mk II. Unless you have a good amount of time you can set aside for arts and crafts, this probably isn't for you -- each camera has dozens of pages of detailed instructions and a ton of tiny pieces that come together to form the final replica camera.

Did you know that the first digital camera invented in 1975 didn't actually produce the first digital photograph? The first digital photo actually came almost two decades earlier in 1957 when Russell Kirsch made a 176x176 pixel digital image by scanning a photograph of his three-month-old son. The low resolution was due to the fact that the computer they used wasn't capable of storing more information.

As the cameras on mobile devices are used more and more for augmented reality applications, one thing we'll undoubtedly see more of is augmented reality gaming, where the real world becomes part of the game. The above video shows some test footage of the upcoming game "Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner", which uses the camera on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) to turn real locations into places you need to defend from the Empire's attack.

Panasonic has just pulled the wraps off the Lumix DMC-GF2, the company's smallest and lightest Micro Four Thirds camera. The cameras has a built in flash, employs a 3 inch touchscreen on the back, shoots stills at 12.1MP, captures 1920 x 1080 HD video, and has an ISO range of 100 to 6400. It'll start shipping in January 2011, with the price secret until about a month before then.