Researchers at the ZSL London Zoo have created the world's first plant-powered camera, a breakthrough that promises to revolutionize field conservation. But just as importantly, a fern named Pete has used the camera to take the "world's first plant-powered selfie."
Sony is working hard to keep its image sensor supremacy. The company is planning to show off two new image sensors at the 2019 International Electronic Devices Meeting (IEDM) that should have photographers excited: a 3-layer organic image sensor that will require no demosaicing, and "the world’s first all PDAF CMOS image sensor."
Anti-drone tech has run the gamut from radio-frequency bazookas to trained eagles. But the latest anti-drone technology from controversial security company Anduril is actually... another drone. The Anduril Anvil is a "battering-ram drone system" that is tailor made to knock other drones out of the sky.
While reading the reaction to our coverage of the Sony a9 II announcement yesterday, one comment really stuck out to me as an excellent summation of a subject that's been buzzing around my mind for about a month now: "Sony reaching the edge of feasible. Now they don't know what to add anymore."
Photographer Ted Forbes of The Art of Photography recently published a well-reasoned and logical response to the Mirrorless vs DSLR debate that recently peaked with the announcement of the Nikon D6. In his video, Forbes offers a much more nuanced take than many of the arguments you've probably seen in various corners of the Internet.
Real-time in-camera VFX might sound like a pipe dream, but Unreal Engine has just published a demo that shows exactly that with Project Spotlight. Using "next-generation virtual production tools," Project Spotlight is able to render and manipulate real-time environments with startling realism, replacing green or blue screens with LED walls.
Like it or not, much of the conversation around image quality these days revolves around sensor size. When Sony announced the a7R IV, it boasted image quality that “rivaled medium format.” When people defend Micro Four Thirds, they show off their ultra-portable system and claim the images are “indistinguishable from full-frame.”
Canon is one of the most prolific companies in the world when it comes to filing patents, making it hard to judge what's actually coming down the pike. But we really hope its two most recent patents—one for Eye-Controlled Autofocus and another for Wireless Charging—become a reality.
A group of researchers and engineers from UC San Diego and Google have trained a neural network to "relight" portraits after the fact "according to any provided environment map." In other words: their system can take any photo and adjust the lighting at will—including the direction, temperature, and quality of the light.
A team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have figured out how to capture super slow-motion footage using what's called an "Event Camera." That is: a camera that sees the world in a continuous stream of information, the way humans do.
Photographers use tools called flags to block and control light. NASA has detailed a new technology called a starshade that's essentially a gigantic flag in space for doing photo shoots with space telescopes.
Fake photos are a rampant issue in our digital age, but researchers are working hard to restore a greater degree of trust to photography. One team has created a new AI that can detect when faces in photos were manipulated using Photoshop.
To avoid the dreaded "camera notch" interrupting smartphone screens, some manufacturers have begun introducing pop-up or flip-up selfie cameras. But, thankfully, the future looks like it will be more elegant with the introduction of cameras hidden under the displays themselves.
Since there are physical limits to how large sensors can be in smartphones, companies like Google have been pushing heavily into computational photography, the use of digital rather than optical processes to improve the capabilities of a camera. Here's a 3-minute video that explains how Google's super-resolution technology works.
There have been huge advancements in recent years in the area of AI "deepfakes", or fake photos or videos of humans created using neural networks. Fake videos of a person usually require a large number of photos of that individual, but Samsung has figured out how to create realistic talking heads from as little as a single portrait photo.
Sony announced today that it has developed a new rewritable film material. Just as rewritable optical discs can be erased and written to again, Sony's new film can have full-color photos drawn onto them, be erased, and then be reused for another photo.
Samsung just announced the world's first 64-megapixel smartphone camera sensor, less than a year after Sony made waves with its groundbreaking 48-megapixel smartphone sensor.
Russia has created a new drone with a built-in shotgun that's specifically designed to shoot other drones out of the sky.
Impressed by NVIDIA's AI creating photorealistic portraits of people who don't exist? Check out what the company is doing with landscapes. NVIDIA has developed a powerful AI that can turn your doodles into photorealistic landscape images in real-time.
Canon is apparently getting ready to introduce a new lens technology to the world. It's called "defocus smoothing," and it'll appear as a DS feature abbreviation on future lenses.
Check out these rather ordinary looking portraits. They're all fake. Not in the sense that they were Photoshopped, but rather they were completely generated by artificial intelligence. That's right: none of these people actually exist.
Think modern day Photoshop beauty retouching is impressive? In the future, your professional-grade camera might be able to retouch subjects for you in real-time. Here's a 30-second video that shows this technology in action.
Color fringing in photos is most often due to chromatic aberration, when a camera lens doesn't focus all colors onto the same point. It's a common problem, especially with cheaper lenses, but we may soon be seeing much less of it thanks to a new breakthrough at Harvard.
At the ongoing Adobe MAX 2018 conference, Adobe is showing off some sneak peeks of features being developed for the Creative Cloud. One of them is MovingStills, which lets you add realistic camera moves to any still photograph, bringing it to life.
Camera manufacturers have been utilizing different types of autofocus systems in modern digital cameras. If you'd like a primer on how each one works, here's a fantastic 18-minute video by tech tester Gerald Undone that will bring you up to speed.
It’s September, which means another generation of Apple iPhones. This year, the iPhone XS (pronounced “ten ess”) adds a slightly larger sensor plus significantly more computing power via the A12 Bionic Chip to enhance the phone’s image signal processing.
Scientists have created a new lensless camera that can capture photos using a standard pane of window glass.
Sony has just announced a new CMOS sensor for smartphones that captures 48-megapixel photos -- the highest pixel count in the industry. The sensor is the world's first to feature an ultra-small pixel size of just 0.8μm, which is what allows it to stuff 48-megapixels onto a 1/2-inch sensor.
Canon is known to be working on fingerprint sensors for cameras and lenses, but Nikon is apparently going a step further: it's developing biometric sensors for cameras and lenses that can detect biological information as well as your mood when shooting a photo.
Canon DSLRs can trigger Canon Speedlites using the pop-up flash. If you try triggering those same Speedlites with a different camera's flash, it doesn't work, which means that there's actual light-based communication going on between the DSLR and Speedlite. In this 9-minute video, Roger Nieh of Science'n'me explores the technology behind this communication.