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.
Digital picture frames seemed like a brilliant idea about six or seven years ago. But the low-res screens, clunky interfaces and lack of any sort of standard operational platform left them to be a fairly niche market floundered when it arrived into the world.
Fireside is a small start-up that's looking to breathe new life and ideas into this market. After two years of development, they’ve created a "smart" picture frame called SmartFrame that rethinks how photos are curated and displayed on the walls of your home.
Cameras have many different methods of guiding photographers toward capturing quality shots, but physical feedback isn't really one of them... yet. In addition to providing useful visual and auditory information, DSLRs in the future might actually guide photographers through their sense of touch.
A recently published Nikon patent shows a DSLR that helps photographers capture moving objects without having to look through their viewfinder. Instead, the camera uses vibrations to guide the shooter.
Here's both a neat picture and a mind-blowing fact for you. What you see above is the IBM Model 350 Disk File from 1956. It weighed over a ton, contained fifty 24-inch disks, and was leased to companies for $3,200 per month. It could hold... 3.75 Megabytes.
That means that it would take 21 of these puppies to hold the largest 14-bit RAW file the Nikon D800 spits out.
Dacuda, a company known for its camera-related applications, is getting ready to release 3DAround, an intuitive 360-degree interactive photo capturing app.
Designed with simplicity in mind, 3DAround uses a clever interface to help direct you as to how to capture objects with minimal ‘scanning’ of your smartphone’s camera.
Macro photography is a wonderful tool for scientists and researchers, but the complex nature of capturing detailed, focus-stacked macro images of everything from insects to the human tongue puts the tool out of reach of many.
The Macropod photographic system solves this by making the entire process both portable and automatic, and producing some of the sharpest, most striking macro photographs we've ever seen.
Your smartphone's camera might fall short of the typical DSLR in just about every respect, but there is one thing it now do that not even your ultra-portable mirrorless camera can handle: your math homework.
No, we're not talking about shutting down the camera and opening your calculator app, what we're talking about is PhotoMath, a new app from MicroBLINK that uses your smartphone camera to solve equations for you.
It might not be the most useful website ever designed, but Flickr's new Park or Bird microsite serves a purpose: namely, it's the Flickr Vision team's response to a challenge by the popular webcomic XKCD.
A single pixel color digital camera sounds an awful lot like a camera that captures a single bright red, green or blue dot, but when scientist Ben Greer set out to build his own single pixel camera, that's not what he was creating at all.
No, by moving a little autmatic arm in front of the sensor, scanning the scene multiple times, and then getting into a bit of math, he built something that can take actual pictures.
In the future, "Auto" may be an option for choosing between JPEG and RAW on Canon DSLRs. A recently published patent reveals that the company has tinkered with the idea of a feature that could automatically choose which photos to save in RAW and which ones to save as JPEG only.
Sony today announced the new IMX224MQV 1/3-inch 1.27MP CMOS sensor, which is said to have the world’s highest level of sensitivity for any sensor in its class. But before you get excited about that night vision point-and-shoot you've been wanting, you should know something: it was designed specifically for use in automobile cameras.
Scientists at the University of California are looking to crowdsource their efforts to measure and track the unimaginable number of cosmic ray particles that bombard the Earth every second of the day. And all you need to participate is a smartphone with a camera and the researchers' app.
If you've ever used a lithium-ion battery for many years, you've probably experienced the gradual loss of the ability to hold charge over time. Thanks to researchers over in Singapore, however, future Li-ion batteries will last much, much longer than present day ones.
Scientists at Nanyang Technology University have developed a new type of lithium ion battery that can reach a 70% charge in a mere two minutes and will keep charging day in and day out for over 20 years. Yes, you read that right. Two decades.
In the ongoing app battle to keep private photos safe and sound from unintended recipients (and the general public), a new app called Yovo – You Only View Once – brings an interesting technology to the table.
It's called D-fence, and is based around the idea that your eyes can see what's behind a slatted fence as you're driving by at a high speed.
While it’s the fifth most common type of cancer in the United States and the deadliest of all skin cancers, melanoma can often be cured if caught early enough. So, in an effort to step up early detection efforts, a team of researchers at Duke University have developed a gigapixel whole-body camera that captures high-resolution images that will allow doctors to more quickly and effectively diagnose melanoma.
One day soon, people around the world may be contributing vast amounts of information to the science of space using a cheap 3D-printed telescope and smartphone with a high-res camera.
The Open Space Agency (OSA) is trying to make that dream happen, and the telescope they've created is called the Ultrascope.
At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.
Ever wonder how the tech packed inside of your new Nikon lens actually works? How does Vibration Reduction provide 4.5 stops of stabilization? And what about the silent motors, how do those work?
In a video released earlier today, Nikon Asia decided to peel away the outer shell of its glass and show you, revealing the technology that makes a Nikkor Lens a Nikkor.
Panasonic might have found the last piece of the puzzle keeping many DSLR users from switching over to mirrorless cameras.
The above image is taken from a patent that diagrams the basics behind adding an optical viewfinder to mirrorless cameras. Even more interesting, the viewfinder would be able to change focal length when synced with any Micro Four Thirds lens.
In Google’s ongoing effort to ‘Street View’ some of the most incredible places on Earth, the company has pushed the limits of the 360-degree genre once again.
This time, Google set out to capture a panoramic view of the Liwa Desert in the United Arab Emirates, by strapping their Street View Trekker Camera onto the back of a willing camel.
The other day I created a Google+ album of photos from our holiday in France. Google’s AutoAwesome algorithms applied some nice Instagram-like filters to some of them, and sent me emails to let me have a look at the results. But there was one AutoAwesome that I found peculiar. It was this one, labeled with the word “Smile!” in the corner, surrounded by little sparkle symbols.
It’s a nice picture, a sweet moment with my wife, taken by my father-in-law, in a Normandy bistro. There’s only one problem with it. This moment never happened.
What's the use of an image sensor that's 12 times more color sensitive than the human eye? We're not entirely sure, but thanks to a team of researchers at Universities of Granada, Spain and Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy you may someday get to try it out and find out for yourself.
Researchers at those two universities are using "Transverse Field Detector" technology to distinguish 36 individual color channels without any need for a filter, making it 12-times more color sensitive than standard Red/Green/Blue sensors and the human eye both.