A recent patent filing by Apple suggests that the company is working on a new periscope-style camera module design that offers better optical stabilization with the use of mirrors.
Hanging a picture frame up on a wall often isn't the simplest of tasks, at least if you're a perfectionist, but a new product has arrived to change that. Called the Beehive Picture Hanger, it's a new hanging system that makes hanging a frame perfectly a breeze and something that only takes a few moments without any measurements.
Want to make sure a photograph survives your lifetime? Print it out. That's the warning Internet pioneer Vint Cerf gave at a talk recently, saying that vast amounts of digital information may soon be lost in a new digital "dark age."
Google is hard at work on Project Ara, a modular smartphone that will allow users to swap critical components in and out, including the onboard camera. One of the third party companies working on modules is Toshiba, which is offering a look into its progress in creating the first swappable camera modules for the ecosystem.
One of the main innovations found in the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 II is its ability to shoot massive 40MP photos with its 16MP sensor by doing "sensor shifting" and combining multiple shots. The main downside, however, is that you need a tripod to make sure the camera doesn't move between shots.
That may soon change: Olympus says its working on making the sensor shift technology work even when the photographer is shooting handheld without stabilization.
Google is partnering with Mattel to reboot the iconic View-Master stereoscopic 3D photo viewing device. Instead of static photos with circular film reels, however, the new View-Master offers an immersive digital experience that puts people inside 360° "photospheres."
There's an innovative new light technology that's trying to shake up the way people think about "artificial light." In Italian company called CoeLux has developed a new light source that recreates the look of sunlight through a skylight so well that it can trick both human brains and cameras.
Wundershine is a new Dutch company that's trying to revolutionize how we view and interact with wall-mounted picture frames. They're working on an ecosystem based around a product known as the Makerframe, a wooden picture frame that can print and frame your photos using its built-in thermal printer.
Microsoft Research has announced version 2.0 of its Image Composite Editor (ICE) software, a free program that offers advanced panoramic photo stitching technology. If you're on a Windows machine and need a way to combine multiple photos into single shots, ICE is a download you may want to look into.
Want a portable generator for recharging your devices that you can literally fill up in just seconds? It'll soon be available... but you'll need to be comfortable carrying a gas-powered power plant around in your bag.
The kraftwerk is the world's first fuel cell power generator that's operated on standard gas. It takes just 3 seconds to refill.
Want to ensure sunshine for bright and happy outdoor wedding photographs? All you need is $150,000.
A UK-based company has begun offering a "cloud bursting" service that can 100% guarantee fair weather for your wedding day and photographs.
The world's largest camera is now one step closer to becoming a reality. The 3.2-gigapixel camera being built for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile has secured the funding it needs to ensure it will go into operation according to schedule.
Project Ara is an ongoing effort by Google to create a modular smartphone for which you can swap critical components in and out, allowing users to build the perfect phone for their specific needs.
If its modular design takes over the consumer market in the future, we could be seeing a whole new approach to how smartphone cameras work.
If you're ever in a situation in which you need to understand some text in a foreign language, getting a translation is now as free and easy as loading up your phone's camera app. Google has updated its Translate app to include real-time on-screen translations of text you point your camera at.
Weighing just 1.66 pounds, Nikon's newly announced 300mm f/4 is the world's lightest 300mm full frame prime autofocus lens. It's also the first Nikon DSLR lens to feature the company's new Phase Fresnel (PF) technology, which is the main reason the lens can be so small and lightweight.
At the end of 2014, we reported that Los Angeles will be the first major city in the US to equip every officer on the street with a body camera. Now the city is announcing that it's going one step further towards making sure its cops are held accountable by the devices: newly issued Tasers will trigger the cameras when fired.
In the past several years, there have been quite a few mentions of modular camera designs that split sensors, screens, and bodies of cameras into separate, replaceable parts. Today is the first time we've heard of a completely modular lens system.
A recently published Nikon patent appears to show just that: a lens that is assembled by connecting a number of circular pieces to form a complete barrel.
The Nikkor 400mm f/2.8E FL ED VR is a new $12,000 lens for sports and wildlife photographers. One of the new features to appear in the lens is a vibration reduction mode called VR Sport. The video above offers a look at how VR Sport compares to VR Normal and no stabilization.
Want to cut down on the size and weight of your photo storage system when shooting on the go? You may want to check out the new Seagate Seven external hard drive. It's the world's thinnest -- and arguably most beautiful -- external hard drive.
3D projections are often used nowadays to create eye-popping visuals on flat surfaces such as the sides of buildings or on basketball courts, but could the same concept be done out in the wild where things aren't flat and orderly? Photographer Tarek Mawad and animator Friedrich van Schoor recently decided to try it out.
What resulted is the video above, titled "Projections in the Forest". The two artists spent six weeks illuminating various things in nature with a powerful projector and then capturing the results on camera.
Cornell offers a course on designing with microcontrollers, and this year's final project submissions featured a couple of groups who decided to build robotic photographers that help capture selfies.
Want a simple battery-powered time-lapse camera that you can leave in locations for up to a year? A hacker who goes by "val3tra" is trying to build one. The goal of his project is a camera that can continuously photograph a scene for months or years on time while powered only by a handful of ordinary batteries.
People who have autism often have trouble making eye contact and reading facial expressions but enjoy using gadgets. Samsung wants to change that with a new camera app called "Look at Me" that's designed to help autistic children become better at communication skills.
Back in May 2013, Google+ began offering auto enhancement to improve the quality of users' photos. Now the magic has arrived for video as well.
Open a video through the Google+ website or through the Photos app on Android and you'll see a new "Auto Enhance" feature that can automatically help correct lighting, color, stability, and speech.
Want a camera that can automatically encrypt photos after taking them? A hacker named Doug did. After having this idea for years without seeing camera companies offer it, he decided to take matters into his own hands and make it happen himself.
What resulted is a new custom firmware for the Samsung NX300 that adds photo encryption to the camera.
Casio has announced a new Android app called SynchroShot that lets photographers perfectly synchronize up to seven of its new Exilim EX-100PRO cameras for photos or video.
Fyuse is a new "spatial photography" app that wants to be the Instagram of 3D photos. Capture a dynamic photo by moving your phone around during capture, and viewers will be able to explore your 3D photo by tilting their phone in their hands.
Camera shake could one day be used to help track down people who record footage anonymously. Researchers say that footage captured by wearable cameras contain a "motion signature" that's unique to the wearer -- a hidden "fingerprint" of sorts.
Media storage has come a long way since the days of the room-sized 3.75MB hard disk drives (HDDs) you had to carry around with a fork lift. Most recently, solid state drives (SSDs) have taken over, providing a much more durable means of storing your media, since there are no moving parts inside.
But just how durable are we talking here? It turns out, very. The Tech Report recently put six different drives through the wringer, and it’s been concluded that today’s SSDs will last a thousand years of use -- long enough to last until we find the technology to start literally storing data in the clouds.
Biomedical researchers at the University of Washington have created what they claim to be the world’s fastest 2D ‘receive-only’ camera. Just how fast exactly? Up to 100 billion frames per second with the help of a technological process called Compressed Ultrafast Photography.
This allows the scientists to SEE laser light moving... actually watch it move... think about that for a second (or 100 billion frames).
Some hugely innovative news is coming out of the Olympus rumor mill today. According to highly trusted sources, the followup to the Olympus OM-D E-M5 will take a page out of Hasselblad's multi-shot book and, using its sensor shift capabilities, spit out 40MP images from its 16MP sensor!
This year, the White House hosted its first ever Maker Faire, and amongst the barrage of incredible creations presented stood the elaborate camera/scanner/light setup responsible for capturing, rendering, and printing the world's first 3D printed presidential portrait.
Back in June, we reported that a company called Planet Labs is working to improve the efficiency of satellite photography by using a large number of tiny satellites instead of a single satellite.
Company co-founder and CEO Will Marshal recently gave a TED Talk (shown above) that sheds some light on what the company is doing.
Bellamy Hunt of Japan Camera Hunter recently shared an awesome camera poster with the world that definitely bears sharing with as many photography lovers as possible.
Scientists at Google Research and Stanford University have teamed up to develop an artificial intelligence program designed to automatically produce captions based on the content of the image.
That's right, not just tags, full on captions like "A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road."
Sony isn't short on innovation. After exciting the photo industry last week with talk of a APCS (not to be confused with APS-C) sensor that promises to take dynamic range and especially frame rates to absurd heights, they've dropped another image sensor announcement.
The Exmor RS IMX230, announced earlier today, is being hailed as the first stacked CMOS image sensor with image plane phase detection, and it promises to bring super-fast tracking AF and better HDR to future smartphone cameras.
Photographer Kevin Twomey has a fascination with capturing complex objects in the most simple of compositions, and his series Low Tech is the epitome of this. The series features photos of old, mechanical calculators stripped bare, exposing the exquisitely complicated creations that they were from the inside out.
Instant photography is making a big comeback lately. As both the success of The Impossible Project and the popularity of Fuji's most recent Instax models can attest to, people want to hold prints in their hand, and if they can do it as soon as they take the picture, all the better.
Prynt is a product that is planning to ride this popularity wave at its peak by combining instant printing with mobile photography in an extremely convenient fashion: by creating a photo printing case for your phone.
Today, at its 2014 Developer Conference, Samsung unveiled Project Beyond: a camera capable of capturing true 3D video in a full 360-degrees. The saucer-shaped design captures a gigapixel of 3D footage every single second! Which sets the stage for Samsung’s endeavors to make virtual reality more realistic than ever.
Sony's not messing around, the electronics company really does want to revolutionize digital photography. And while we still haven't seen the potential of the curved sensor technology Sony's been teasing us with for months, another Sony sensor patent is stirring up even more interest and excitement.
This one describes something called 'Active-Pixel Color Sampling' technology, or APCS (that's not gonna be confusing at all...), and it's poised to take frame-rates, dynamic range, and low-light capabilities to heights that could legitimately be called insane.
While the video above is a bit short and doesn't explain what exactly is going on, the technology at work in the video is intriguing to say the least -- especially for CCTV cameras.
The folks at Lytro have always believed that light field technology is the future, and not just for photography and storytelling. They believe that anything with a lens and a sensor can benefit from the technology, and with today's announcement of the Lytro Platform, they're opening up their proprietary tech to anybody who wants to partner up with them and expand light field into new markets.
Imagine an image sensor that can expose different parts of an image differently, not by using multiple shots and blending them intelligently, but all at once on a per-pixel basis. Seem like science fiction? We thought so too, but that's exactly what Sony is proposing in a recent patent.
Trying to record and gather data on very shy animals like emperor penguins is a big challenge for scientists. Getting close to them, even with remote-controlled rover cameras, often scares them or makes them act differently.
So, how do you solve this? If you're Yvon Le Maho and his team from the University of Strasbourg in France, you dress the rover up as a fuzzy penguin chick before sending it on its way.
Most cameras are limited in a number of ways due to the fact that their sensor is integrated into the camera body and unable to move on any axis. However, a new patent by Sony shows that they might be looking to change that in their future systems.
Aerial photography drones are more ubiquitous than ever. But as wonderful as they are for documenting the world around us from a bird's-eye view, they inherently come with a number of safety and regulatory issues.
Solving these woes in a creative and somewhat strange way is Sergei Lupashin, who has created a clever little device called the Fotokite. Essentially, he put the camera drone on a leash.
To celebrate the return of LeBron James yesterday, the Cleveland Cavaliers decided to do a massive group photo with all the fans in attendance. Today they released the 360-degree, 20-gigapixel photograph online for fans to find themselves in, tag, and share.
The giant group panorama -- and many others like it -- was captured by a company called Fancam, which specializes in shooting some of the largest group shots in history.
Wireless Internet is now commonplace, but one thing that's generally still wired is electricity. One day, however, you might be juicing up your gadgets with wireless energy routers instead of cables and battery chargers.
Energous Corporation is one company trying to make that vision a reality. It has developed a technology called WattUp that aims to change the way you think about how electronic devices are charged and powered.
Google's Nexus 5 and 6 smartphones have a new Camera app feature called HDR+. This mode uses fancy computational photography tricks to help you capture better photos in situations with uneven lighting or low amounts of light.
In a post published to the Google Research blog this past week, researchers behind the new feature offer a peek at the inner workings.
HP has announced a futuristic new personal computer called Sprout that hopes to transform the way we interact with our computers. The system consists of an all-in-one Windows 8 computer, a system of 3D scanning cameras, a large tactile touchpad, and a projector that beams a display onto the touchpad.
It's a computer that may make working with photos as easy as moving your hands around on your desk.