Equipment

The "flash units" found on the backs of smartphones may be getting more powerful, but the general idea has largely remained the same: use a powerful LED light that can illuminate a scene when you need a little extra light. The power output doesn't really stack up to the flashes found on compact cameras, but Google has one solution for making the flash a bit brighter.

In a recently published patent, the company outlines the idea of placing multiple LED flashes on smartphones, perhaps in a ring around the camera unit.

Lomography has announced a brand new line of film called LomoChrome, and the first product is LomoChrome Purple 400. Available in both 35mm and 120 formats, the film allows photographers to shoot infrared-style photographs without any special gear or filters.

Olympus isn't the only camera company toying around with the concept of cheap body cap lenses. At the CP+ show in Japan, Pentax took the wraps off a body cap lens of its own for its Q system line of mirrorless cameras. Officially called the "Mount Cap Lens," the accessory is a pint-sized hyper-focal lens that will reportedly produce toy-camera-style photographs.

Disappointed that the full-frame Sony RX1 compact camera doesn't come with an optical viewfinder? Don't worry: you can use the camera's hot shoe to attach a sweet/strange-looking universal turret viewfinder! That's how DSLR Magazine customized theirs in a recently published review.

The company formerly known as RIM changed its name to Blackberry yesterday, and launched a new flagship smartphone called …

Brighton-based photographer and product designer Maxim Grew recently came up with the idea of building an instant camera out of a Polaroid film holder and a stack of wooden popsicle sticks.

Last week, we pointed you to a piece by the New York Times on how Fujifilm is …

French optical filter company Cokin has launched a new line of lens filters under the brand name Pure Harmonie. The new filters are unique in that they're the thinnest and lightest in the world -- the UV filter in the set measures only 3.3mm (~0.13in) thick!

Reikan Technology, the company behind the FoCal automatic lens calibration tool, tells us that it has released a new web-based tool for researching the performance of camera and lens combinations.

It seems camera companies are trying to target Japanese anime fans these days. In September 2011, we wrote about how Leica had teamed up with the designer of Gundam (not to be confused with Gangnam) for a limited edition mech-themed V-LUX 30 digital camera.

Now Pentax, the king of bizarre special edition cameras, has forged an anime partnership of its own. The company has announced a limited edition line of Q10 mirrorless cameras that carry Neon Genesis Evangelion branding and colors.

Nikon just overhauled its entire compact/superzoom lineup, so we thought we'd give it a go at a broad overview. New camera models are the Coolpix P520, L820, AW110, S9500, S9400, S5200, and S31; and all of them are trying to compete with your smartphone by offering a mix and match of great zoom, Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS.

Ever since Canon’s new 24-70mm f/2.8L II arrived late last year, lens reviewers …

Photographer Brendan Taylor is currently working on an ambitious frankencamera project. He's trying to transfer the innards of a working Sony NEX 5N mirrorless camera into the body of a non-functional Nikon Nikkormat EL 35mm manual SLR.

It's ironic to the point of being tragic to think that one of the pioneers of digital camera technology was Kodak. Now bankrupt and licensing off their brand to mysterious companies, it's easy to forget that it was Kodak that hit many of the initial milestones where digital imaging is concerned.

What do you get when you combine 368 5MP cellphone cameras into a mosaic and add some other super-secret parts? You get the DARPA-funded Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (or ARGUS-IS), and this puppy can see your house from, well, wherever it darn well pleases.

Altogether, ARGUS-IS is a 1.8 Gigapixel drone-mounted surveillance system that took 30 months and $18.5M to become a reality. The video above is a clip from a new PBS documentary titled "Rise of the Drones". It offers a fascinating peek at what the drone cam is capable of.

My first roll processed and scanned from my new Lomography BelAir X 6-12 puts me in the position to share some notes about the camera that you won’t find elsewhere.

The Lomography BelAir X 6-12 is a new folding medium format camera. It can take pictures in three formats: 6×6, 6×9 and 6×12. Apart from the folding mechanism, the camera is made of plastic. Even the two included wide angle lenses (wide and really wide) are plastic. Each lens comes with its own viewfinder. They are 58mm and 90mm.

A couple of new photographs of the Olympus XZ-10 high-end compact camera have leaked, revealing that the camera will look pretty similar to the current XZ-2.

Here's a sneak peek at Olympus' upcoming high-end compact camera, the XZ-10. It will likely succeed or be sold alongside the Olympus XZ-2, which features a 1/1.7-inch sensor and competes directly against the semi-large-sensor compacts of other manufacturers (e.g. Nikon P7700, Canon G15).

There's some new activity in the world of Sony NEX mirrorless cameras and E-mount lenses -- both new product launches and rumors of soon-to-arrive gear.

Earlier this week, the company announced two new E-mount lenses: a 20mm f/2.8 pancake lens and a 18-200mm f/3.5-f/6.3 "Power Zoom" lens that has features designed for video recording.

Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.

Photographer and software engineer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old flatbed scanner into a macro rail for shooting focus-stacking photos.

When we first shared the news that Metabones had announced a "speed booster" adapter that makes your lenses faster, wider and sharper, not a lot of people had gotten their hands on it yet. But now that the most exciting accessory on the block has been accepted as definitely NOT an elaborate April Fools joke, a few websites have taken turns with it, and initial reviews all seem to be positive.

Flickr photographer RawSniper1 has a clever way of holding onto his lens caps …

Goodbye old young friend. Let me give you all a piece of wisdom that I recently learned the hard way. If you go on a fishing trip called 'Hit em' Hard' and the captain tells you that you should take your bag off and put it in the 'dry container', what he really means by 'dry container' is a place that will fill up with seawater after he accidently clogs the drainage pipe, soaking you and your friends cameras, bags, wallets and cellphones for over an hour in salty seawater.

Better yet, just never go on a fishing charter with a name like 'Hit em' Hard.'

It may not be the most popular series of compact cameras, but the Ricoh GR Digital line has attracted a sizable cult following of photographers around the world -- particularly street shooters. From the time the original GRD was announced at Photokina 2004 until the most recent GRD IV, the cameras have offered smaller 1/1.77-inch CCD sensors. That will soon change: a trusted source tells us that the Ricoh GR Digital V will feature a larger APS-C sensor.

In most ways the smartphone is the height of convenience. Phone, check; computer, check; camera, check. But one market the smartphone seems well suited for, but hasn't yet broken into with any reasonable force, is the action cam market.

One of the reasons for this (lack of serious image stabilization and durability aside) seems to simply be camera placement. Given where the lens is, mounting your phone as an action cam anywhere but your chest seems unrealistic or, at the very least, aerodynamically unwise. The new G90 Action Sports Camera case from G-Form addresses this exact problem.

Want to focus your camera simply by looking at a particular area of the viewfinder? If you're a Sony shooter, you might be enjoying that feature as early as next year. The company is reportedly working on building Eye Tracking autofocus into its cameras, with the initial version arriving in a flagship camera sometime in 2014.

Unlike many camera lens lines, Leica's lenses are group into categories under well known trademarked names. Mention the word Noctilux, and a Leica shooter will immediately know that you're referring to a f/1 lens that's geared towards shooting in low-light environments.

Photographer Thorsten Overgaard has been working on a definitions page that explains the origins of the various terms -- the explanations go beyond what the terms refer to, and include why they were given those names.

Kodak had quite the surprise for the camera world today: the company announced that it will be soon joining the Micro Four Thirds standard with a new mirrorless camera called the S1. We had reported earlier this week that the company would soon launch a mirrorless camera (just like Polaroid did recently), but it seems most people didn't expect that the news would have anything to do with the Micro Four Thirds standard.

Have you ever considered adding a prism to your camera bag? Washington DC-based wedding photographer Sam Hurd has done quite a bit of experimentation using an equilateral prism -- the kind used in schools to teach properties of light -- to add special effects to his photographs. The results are pretty interesting.

Want to see how the highly-acclaimed Sony RX1 is assembled? At CES 2013 in Las Vegas last week, Sony showed the above video at its special press event, using it as a creative countdown clock for indicating when the show would begin. The split-screen video shows three of Sony's newer products -- the Cybershot RX1 camera, the Xperia Z smartphone, and an HD camcorder -- being assembled from their basic parts.

About three quarters of the EF-mount lenses out there are not weather sealed. Because of this, using those lenses often leads to more frequent sensor cleaning, dust and even water accumulation inside your camera body.

Fortunately, a simple but effective idea from California-based photographer Tyler Sterbentz fixes that problem. It's called the Dust Donut:

Canon recently launched a new safety initiative aimed at keeping dangerous knock-off gear out of your camera. The tag line for the initiative is "Play it Safe, Power your Canon with Canon Power," and the company is hoping that a mix of warnings and education will do the trick and keep you from buying counterfeit "Canon" batteries and chargers.

After recently purchasing a Nikon 1 V1, Swedish photographer Sven Hedin decided to work on making the camera work with an external flash. Not just any external flash, mind you, but a vintage flash unit -- the kind that uses disposable bulbs.

3D technology is consistently improving. And even though Samsung may have pioneered single lens 3D technology, Panasonic have put together an impressive rig that can shoot 3D panoramas.

The array is part of a project called Dive Into World Heritage 3D, in which Panasonic went and captured seven world heritage sites so that people could experience them even if they can't afford to travel there.

Fungus is one of the banes of a camera lens' existence. In humid environments, nasty things can begin to happen if some fungus spore-laden dust particles make their way into your lens. To prevent fungus from growing inside a lens, photographers often silica gel packets to control the amount of moisture in and around their glass.

Lomography (the movement) has been called many things, including "analog Instagram;" but regardless of how you feel about the movement or the company that bears its name, it seems that Lomography (the company) has been one of the driving forces keeping film photography alive and interesting for the masses.

The company's newest project, up for your pledging pleasure on Kickstarter, is the Smartphone Film Scanner. It's exactly what it sounds like: an attachment that allows you to photographically scan your 35mm film using your phone.

A week ago, we reported that Kodak had entered into a multi-year agreement with American camera supplier …

In October of last year, we shared a beautiful wooden homemade TLR camera by photographer Kevin Kadooka. It was a personal project at the time, and we remarked that it could be wildly popular if Kadooka began selling the camera as a build-it-yourself kit.

Well, Kadooka has done just that: the product, named Duo, will soon hit the market as a camera you can assemble yourself (it's like IKEA meets vintage photography).

Google has been working some time now on a camera-equipped device that's worn over (or above) the eye. Olympus has something similar going on, but instead of a full-fledged camera, their device only serves as an external viewfinder for a separate digital camera.

One of Pentax's big announcements for this year's CES 2013 was the MX-1, a camera that is designed to compete against other retrotastic compact cameras that are currently generating a lot of buzz (namely the Fujifilm X-Series and the Olympus OM-D).

Nikon recently put out this short 3-minute video that offers an interesting glimpse into one of the critical steps of lens making: the production of the optical glass. It steps through the various stages of manufacturing, from combining the raw elements through examining the chunks of glass before they're polished and perfected.

When Fujifilm announced the X100s last week, it made the bold claim that the camera had the world's fastest autofocus system among cameras of the same class. Sluggish autofocus was one of the big complaints owners of the X100 had, so for this latest refresh the company focused its attention on making the camera faster.

Want to see how fast the new AF is? We captured the short video above during a brief hands-on time we had with the camera. It doesn't show an in-depth test or much variety in subject matter, but should offer a taste of what "world's fastest AF" looks like in the flesh.

Canon's attention grabber at this year's CES 2013 is a new compact camera designed to fight against the encroachment of smartphones: the PowerShot N.

The little guy is unlike most point-and-shoots you'll find on the market. It's extremely small, square, and simple. The design may seem gimmicky at first, but pick it up in your hands and your opinion might change.

We had some hands-on time with the new Polaroid iM1836 just now. The company is only showing off two of the units at CES 2013. One of them doesn't turn on. The other one can't take any pictures.

One of Samsung's big reveals at CES 2013 is its new 2D/3D lens, which can be paired with the new NX300 to capture true 3D photographs and video using a single lens and a single sensor. When you're feeling like switching back to 2D, a convenient switch on the side of the lens turns it into an ordinary camera lens.

Here's a quick demonstration of what Fujifilm's new focus peaking looks like on the freshly-announced X100s and the X20. When manually focusing the lens, the feature uses white pixel highlights to indicate the high contrast areas of the scene. This is one of two new features -- the other being split image focusing -- designed to make manual focusing a much nicer experience on X-Series cameras.

The war between brick and mortar stores and online retailers ended a long time ago -- online retailers won. "Showrooming" was born and the B&M store became no more than a place to try before you went home to buy online. Worst case scenario you needed something right away that you would then return once your online order arrived. It's not pretty, but that's the reality of it.

This last holiday season, in an attempt to win back some traction in the fight, Best Buy offered to match online pricing on any item. This offered a great "have your cake and eat it too" scenario for consumers; but now the holiday season is over and people are back to shopping online. Well, Target is looking to change that, and not just during the holidays.

After a substantial leak in mid-December, we expected that Polaroid would unveil its android-powered J2 (or is it J3 now?) look-alike at CES. And here it is, officially announced in all its pre-production glory alongside a few other, less-impressive products.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on rumors that Nikon was going to be announcing two new mirrorless cameras at CES -- the S1 and the J3. Now that CES has finally started it looks like the rumors were true, both cameras have indeed come to fruition with each sporting the specs we expected.

Fujifilm held its CES 2013 press conference yesterday, revealing some facts about the state of its camera business, sharing its vision moving forward, and offering a closer look at its two new fixed-lens cameras: the X100s and the X20.