Technology

The Chinese electronics company OPPO yesterday announced that they've developed the world's first sensor-based image stabilizer for smartphones. The SmartSensor, as the technology is called, is also the world's smallest image stabilizer across all devices.

One of the exciting new trends in smartphone photography is the emergence of the dual camera. LG just launched it in the new G5, and Apple will reportedly include it in the upcoming iPhone 7.

If you want to see what the dual camera hype is all about, check out the 2-minute video above by CNET. It's a dual camera demo being given by a company called Corephotonics at the Mobile World Congress 2016 over in Barcelona.

Cambits is a new modular camera being developed by scientists over in Columbia Engineering’s Computer Vision Laboratory. It's a set of colorful plastic blocks that can be assembled into a custom camera of your choice.

Tamron today announced a new accessory that helps photographers apply firmware updates and custom settings to Tamron lenses. It's called the Tamron TAP-in Console.

The British company Bullitt yesterday announced its new Cat S60 rugged smartphone, the world's first to feature a built-in thermal imaging camera. The product is essentially a fusion between Bullitt's Cat smartphones and FLIR's thermal camera technology.

Using a single, ordinary still camera, you can shoot a traditional 2D static portrait of a person. With an array of multiple still cameras, you can stitch together a 3D portrait. To add yet another dimension, you can use video cameras instead of still cameras.

That's what Tim Macmillan, the founder of a company called Timeslice Films, did. Using a crazy camera array of 53 GoPro cameras, Macmillan created a moving 4D portrait of his own head.

Sony's CMOS sensors are widely used in digital cameras and smartphones these days, and the company's latest sensor shows why. The new IMX318 sensor is designed for smartphones and features 22.5 megapixel photos, 4K videos, hybrid autofocus, and built-in 3-axis image stabilization.

If you back up your photos on optical disks or storage drives, there's a good chance your data won't last as long as you do due to things known as "disc rot" and "data rot". But what if you want to ensure that your precious photos live longer than you? Good news: a new "eternal" storage technology may be on the horizon.

Scientists have created nanostructured glass discs that can storage digital data for billions of years.

The Guangzhou, China-based company Techart has officially unveiled the Techart PRO AF adapter, world's first autofocus adapter for manual focus lenses. The adapter, which was teased last month, actually lets you autofocus with lenses that don't have that ability.

Back in 2014, the foldable pop-up lightbox called the Foldio2 got over $500,000 of funding through Kickstarter to make product photos easier to shoot.

Now the company behind that lightbox, ORANGEMUNKIE, is back with a new product: the Foldio360. It's a smart turntable that's designed to bring 360-degree photography to the masses.

Panasonic today announced a trio of new CMOS sensors that offer extreme dynamic range, incredible light sensitivity, and a global shutter.

Did you know that Facebook and Instagram both have a "secret" feature that converts your photos into ASCII art? By doing a slight tweak to the URLs of photos, you can view them as color and black and white versions that are made up of letters.

Don't have the time or money to visit a photo exhibition you're interested in? In the future, paying a visit will be as simple as strapping a virtual reality headset to your head.

At EyeEm's Photo Hack Day 4 in Berlin recently, one of the apps developed was called Rooms. It's a virtual reality Android app that lets you enjoy photos in a virtual photo exhibition, and the app gives us a taste of what may soon be commonplace in the world of art.

If you reference camera sensor ratings published by DxOMark, you may have noticed that the France-based company doesn't test Fujifilm cameras. It's surprising, given that Fujifilm sensors have been praised by many reviewers in recent years.

No, DxOMark doesn't have anything against Fujifilm, and no, it's not something fishy going on behind the scenes. The reason is simple: DxOMark isn't currently able to properly test X-Trans sensors.

Rob Spence is a filmmaker who calls himself the "Eyeborg." After losing sight in his right eye at age 9 by incorrectly shooting a shotgun, Spence decided 26 years later to have his sightless eye removed and replaced with a digital camera.

Sony has created what it believes is the world's first 48K 360-degree video. The company created a special 3D-printed camera rig that uses 12 Xperia Z5 smartphones arranged in a circle. By shooting 4K with each phone and then stitching together the resulting footage, Sony was able to create 48K video that you can explore interactively.

Google's Street View cameras have gone to the ends of the Earth, from under the sea to desolate deserts, in order to document the world in photos. The project is grand, but its latest effort is on a much smaller scale -- literally.

The company just announced Street View for the famous Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany, the world's largest model railway. To shoot the images, Google mounted tiny cameras to tiny vehicles (they also had a tiny Street View car look-alike drive around).

Another day, another innovative solution for catching, disabling, or destroying rogue drones. If your camera drone isn't taken down by a radio wave rifle or a drone with a giant net in the future, you now have another countermeasure to be aware of: a "Spider-Man" drone that shoots out a web-like net to neutralize other drones.

This is pretty wild: the lens adapter company Techart has announced that it has created the world's first Leica M-mount to Sony E-mount autofocus adapter. That's right. Autofocus.

Camera drones have exploded onto the scene in the past few years, and they're being used by photographers around the world as a cheap and easy way to obtain aerial photos and videos. But what if you want both the convenience of a drone and the joy of being able to see and shoot things from the air with your own eyes and camera?

That's where something like the Ehang 184 comes in: it's a new giant drone that may one day fly both you and your camera.

Lenticular prints use an array of lenses to cause an image to change before your eyes as you view them from different angles. Scientists have now figured out how to do a "changing photo" trick without lenses using an inkjet printer and metallic sheets.

A new patent granted to Twitter last week shows that the social networking service may be planning for Internet-connected camera drones that can share photos and be controlled by Twitter users.

Just days after Tumblr announced support for Apple's Live Photos, Facebook is following suit. The social networking giant announced today that the official Facebook app on iOS can now lets you share and experience Apple's Live Photos.

Believe it or not, what you see here is the world's smallest color inkjet photo ever printed. It's so small that it's invisible to the naked eye: you'll need a microscope to see the shot, which shows clown fishes hanging around their sea anemone home.

If you shoot with a DSLR, you might take for granted that the mirror inside your camera swings out of the way to allow light to hit the sensor. There's actually quite a bit of precise engineering behind those seemingly simple flips.

With its new Canon 5DS and 5DS R, Canon introduced a new mechanical mirror mechanism that's designed to reduce mirror flip vibrations. The 43-second video above shows how the system works.

Long-time film photographer Timothy Gilbert was frustrated with existing options for processing 4x5 large format sheet film at home, so, as an engineer, he decided to create an easy-to-use and affordable system himself.

After several prototypes and extensive testing, what he came up with is the SP-445 processing system, an extremely compact and simple tank that requires minimal chemicals and effort.

The braniacs at MIT have created an algorithm to determine the “memorability” of a photograph. The deep learning-based technology “learned” what makes a photo memorable by evaluating the rankings from 5,000 human volunteers, and even indicates which portions of an image it considers to be memorable with a heatmap depiction. The algorithm is allegedly as good as a human in determining what makes a memorable photograph.

But ranking a photo based purely on aesthetics isn’t necessarily how humans associate photographs. Context matters. Where was I? What was I doing? What is this photo representative of? I decided to test the algorithm against TIME magazine’s top 10 photos of 2015.

Some photographs have the power to burn themselves into our memories for a long time, while others are easily forgettable after they're seen. Scientists are MIT have been researching the science behind memorable images, and now they've created a web app called LaMem that can analyze any photo and assign it a memorability score.

German drone manufacturer Ascending Technologies is celebrating Christmas season this year by doing some light painting photography. Each of the photos they've made was painted by an automated drone that was programmed to follow waypoints in the sky.

The company believes this is the first drone light painting project of this kind.

Researchers at the University of Washington have figure out how to create 3D time-lapse video sequences of landmarks by using a collection of still photos found on the Internet. The 7-minute video above is a short presentation that shows the technology in action.

Clarifai, a NYC-based startup that's developing state-of-the-art image recognition software, has launched a new free photo app on iOS. It's called Forevery, and it's a new AI-powered app that helps you organize, discover, and share photos on your phone.

Is it wise to convert your raw files to the Adobe DNG format? If you are using Lightroom or Photoshop with Camera Raw, you have the option to convert your master files to DNG. In this article I want to focus on the benefits of converting, the reasons why converting to DNG may not always be ideal or necessary, as well as tackle some of the misinformation about DNG.

This is incredible: German photographer Lukas Fritz wanted an easier way to process his film at home, so he spent a year creating the Filmomat, a fully automatic film processor that can handle everything from B&W 35mm film to 5x7-inch color slides.

The PD-100 Black Hornet 2 is a high-tech camera drone that's currently being tested by the US military. Unlike consumer drones used by photographers, such as the DJI Phantom or Inspire, the PD-100 is designed to be extremely stealthy: it fits in the palm of your hand, and weighs just 18 grams -- about the same as 3 to 4 sheets of ordinary printer paper.

Oh, and they cost $40,000 each.

Google today launched Cardboard Camera for Android, an app that lets you shoot 3D virtual reality photographs with a smartphone. Resulting photos can be viewed immersively through a Google Cardboard VR headset.

Canon will start shipping its $30,000 ISO 4.46 million camera this month for people who need to shoot in pitch black environments. A similar technology that's making a splash these days is "color night vision."

A Las Vegas-based company called SPI has a color night vision sensor called the X27. The 1.5-minute video above shows what the 10-megapixel sensor can capture in extremely dark places.

Here’s a great 13-minute video in which John Hess of Filmmaker IQ teaches …

Back in 2013, Slovenia-based Lumu Labs raised over $244,000 on Kickstarter to launch the Lumu (currently available for $150), a headphone jack attachment that turns the iPhone into an accurate light meter for photographers. Now the company is back again with the Lumu Power, a next-gen attachment that doesn't just meter light -- it can measure and calculate flash and color temperature as well.

Pulse is a new camera accessory that allows you to control things wirelessly using a smartphone. It plugs into your DSLR or mirrorless camera's USB port, allowing you to shoot photos, time-lapses, or videos from an app on your phone.

Back in 2011, Lytro launched the world’s first consumer light field camera, which lets you “shoot first …

Need a light to illuminate clouds or a mountainside? Check out the world's most powerful flashlight, created by Daniel Riley of Stratus Productions. By stringing together a series of powerful 100W LEDs, Riley created an ultra-powerful 1000W light that puts out a whopping 90000 lumens.

Riley introduces his crazy light in the 5.5-minute video above.

FlatCam is a new camera with a technological breakthrough: it uses a thin mask instead of a traditional camera lens, allowing the entire camera system to be thinner than a coin.

Austin, Texas-based front end developer Una Kravets has created CSSgram, a tiny library that recreates the look of Instagram filters using CSS filters and blend modes.

Back in July, Panasonic announced an upcoming feature called "Post Focus" that allows photographers to select their focal point after photos are shot. Instead of using light field technology like Lytro or an array of cameras like Light, Panasonic's feature uses rapid-fire focus bracketing.

Panasonic has begun publishing videos around the world that show how the new feature works.

LifePrint is a new portable photo printer that aims to change the way photos are experienced. Instead of printing static photos that capture a single moment in time, LifePrint uses augmented reality to let you embed a video inside a printed photograph. The video can be watched by pointing a smartphone camera at the print.

Want to get a taste of what it's like to climb Mount Everest without the risk of dying in the process? High-res photography and virtual reality will soon make it possible.

The first time I witnessed a camera detect a face to aid the autofocus system, I was amazed. In part because the technology seemed magical and the highlighted rectangle tracking faces seemed like science fiction, and in part because I seem to possess a talent for taking out-of-focus photos.

Facebook is in the process of rolling out a new feature in its Messenger app called Photo Magic. Using facial recognition, it scans through your new photographs, spots the faces of your friends, and asks you if you'd like to send those photos to those friends.

Think the Google Glass camera glasses are funny looking? Check out the 3RDi. Pronounced "third eye," it's a new camera that lets you capture your life while you're enjoying the moment by placing a camera smack dab in the center of your forehead, making you look like a camera cyclops.

Want to see where camera drones are headed? DJI made this 3-minute video that shows a concept drone called the DJI Phantom X. It's a look at what camera drones may soon offer for capturing both daily life and high-end productions.