February 9, 2011

At CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show that just kicked off today in Japan, Sony is showing off a see-through prototype of an upcoming translucent mirror A77 camera. It will replace the A700 DSLR as a mid-range to high-end shooter, will shoot AVCHD video at 1080p with a APS-C sensor, and will be available sometime in the middle of this year. Not much else is known about the camera at this point. Looks like the whole translucent mirror thing is working well for Sony.

One of the many thank you notes Leah Dieterich has on her "thank you note a day" blog, thxthxthx.

Remember Wafaa Bilal, that NYU professor that decided to have a camera implanted on the back of his skull? Well, turns out the human body doesn't like it when random electronic devices are fused with it, so the cost of having the camera on his nogging has been antibiotic and steroid treatments to get the body to ignore the thing. Despite the treatments, his body still decided to reject one of the three posts onto which the camera is screwed, forcing him to have the camera and one of the posts …

You might have framed photographs up in your home, but what about using an entire wall to show off your pictures? Photographer Lyanne Wylde turned her hallway into a photo wall by putting up wallpaper with frames and slowly filling in the frames with her own photographs. You can buy the wallpaper, titled "Frames", yourself from Graham & Brown for $45 a roll and start your own wall!

Nikon announced the high-end compact P300 today to compete against the likes of Canon's popular S95 and Olympus' XZ-1. First, the good things -- the 12 megapixel camera has a sweet f/1.8 24-100mm equivalent lens that should perform quite nicely in low light situations (especially with an ISO that can be boosted up to 3200). It can also record HD video at 1080p and 30fps, and has a 3-inch LCD that's easy on the eyes.

External hard drives are a convenient way to store your digital photographs, but they have finite lifetimes and eventually fail. Failing drives have a number of distinctive sounds that can warn you and give you some time to start a data-exodus to a healthier hard drive. Datacent, a data recovery company, has a useful page on which you can listen to some of the most common "bad drive sounds". These are categorized by manufacturer, and include things like stuck spindles, disk heads crashing, …

For Christmas, I received a Canon 60D. I’m definitely still learning how to use it, but I’m excited to have it. The first big problem I encountered, besides the need for more regular exercise so I can lift the beast, is that I am going to lose the camera lens cap. I take this cover off the lens and leave it everywhere. I had the camera for about 4 days before I was considering checking the price on replacing it. Lucky for me, I came up with a better idea while I still knew where it was.

Sigma isn't planning to let EVIL cameras have all the large-sensor fun. They've decided to stuff their new DP2x compact camera with a Foveon X3 sensor -- similar to the ones found in the Sigma SD15 and SD1 DSLR cameras (about 12 times larger than traditional compact camera sensors). The camera is capable of capturing 14 megapixels worth of data with its stack of three sensors, generating 4.7 megapixel photographs. It also shoots RAW, lacks HD recording (video clips are a paltry 320x240), has a …