Archive for May, 2007

Pierre Matter is a sculptor whose production should attract the eye of most of the visitors.

You can find more at: Galerie Opera, The art of Pierre Matter on Knutz.net.

Essentially, Wallhogs is accepting your picture files to prepare special prints of large size:

• Decals, that would be nice to stick on a wall or on your fridge
• Posters (you know that don’t you?)
• Canvas prints, that would mimic a canvas paint

We wrote about the enourmous heat produced by the new AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards (around 350W when running full 3D -like an nVidia GeForce 8800GTX). Sapphire believes it has the solution with a water-cooling kit included in the Toxic kit.

This kit will be able to cool up to two cards and may also help for your CPU. I would wait for an actual test, but it could well be one of the nicest way to integrate an AMD/ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card in your PC.

Source: VR-Zone.

With about eight months of delays, AMD finally launches its new high-level grpahics card. Curiously, it is not set to beat all performance records but to fight against the GeForce 8800 GTS of nVidia (both are sold around 399$). Nonetheless, it will be necessary to wait for the future tests. As a matter of fact, the results published today on various web sites are very astonishing: The card is sometimes very powerful, sometimes slow as molasses (with no understandable pattern); Performance in CrossFire mode (associating two cards in a single PC) is desperately near to one card only; You have to understand that the drivers are not finished at all and that we need to wait for one or two more versions to see what the card can produce (this is utterly abnormal situation, but we can only suppose that the HD 2900 XT 512Mb will be as fast as the GeForce 8800 GTS 640Mb -or even better).

However, it is already clear that the power drawn and the heat produced are properly extraordinary. It is a 2-PCIe-slot card with a noisy cooling fan. But the first results show that the overclocking capability is very large.

We’ll be waiting for more information before judging the card.

DPReview has always been a very interesting photo-related web site with a vibrant community of forum users. Today, they announce that they have been bought by Amazon.com.

It came to me as a surprise that a retailer like Amazon would be interested in such a web site, but it probably proves that the giant retail online outlet is willing to put more and more emphasis on user participation, including for technology products like photography.

Most photographers know about the tripods used to stabilize a camera. Some use a monopod that is lighter even if a little less stable. But, here is an extreemely simple tripod replacement just made out of string.

String Tripod.

This is free advertising for a major launch of a DRM-free online store: AllAboutJazz.com sells jazz music online without any DRM included.

We are still waiting for the newest announcements from Sony photo departement. However, PhotoClubAlpha.com got an official image of the 2007-8 line up. We see everything that has been shown in the beginning of the year, but in a much cleared view.

Click to enlarge

For people interested in the longer focals, the most attracting part of the image is on the right. We see a black tele-zoom that points at the long awaited 100-400mm (possibly a f/5.6 to keep the AF coupling with Konica-Minolta and Sony bodies). I hope I read it well and I can’t wait to have this for wildlife photo. Then, there is a prime which looks a lot like a 300mm f/4 that is not the Minolta APO G design. It will have to compare favorably with the second-hand marvels that are still moving around eBay (my own Minolta APO G 300mm/4 is a blue diamond). The last one on the right is certainly a 600mm at f/4. Prepare your significant other now to avoid a heart attack when you will sign the check for this. Prepare your physician for the back aches after lugging this around.

On the left, it’s much more difficult to get certainties. There are three zooms and two primes. Two of the zooms and one of the primes have quite large front lenses pointing to very large apertures (more probable than only wide angles).

The pro camera (on the right) is probably no longer the wooden mock-up of PMA, but they keep the odd-looking penta-prism. I wouldn’t comment long, but many people said that this was the clue to a Full-Frame sensor. The counter-argument is still that the Canon 5D did not need to have such a beast of a prism to do full frame. However, many observers still think it would be the right time to introduce a full frame in the Sony line.

Update: Don’t ask about the availability dates. This is very hush-hush at Sony. There is a persistent rumour that the left side camera will be available in June, but it seems quite surprising knwowing that we are already mid-May. Maybe an announcement in June 2007. For the lenses, nobody seems ready to give precise dates; So, it’s still “2007-8″.

Did you think that you needed a little more space to store the RAW digital files of your digital camera? Think again. Photographer Gérard Maynard and French panorama software company Kolor created a panoramic digital photograph of no less that 13 Giga-bytes. 2045 photos stitched together using Kolor’s AutoPano Pro software. Gérard Maynard used a Nikon D200 with a 300mm lens and the software operation took several days to finish.

The full image of the Harlem quarter of New York City is at harlem-13-gigapixels.com.

Source: PhotographyBlog.

This Friday afternoon spare time intelligent time-waster will be testing your refelexes in Flash. You must click on the blue ball (not on the red one or the orange one). It looks simple? Try it.

Currently, I am wandering a lot around the the web sites for OEM suppliers to manufacturers of micro-computers. This leads me to observe some apparent trends (at least in the opinions of the experts) that could be of interest if you intend to buy PC hardware in the coming months.

• DRAM memory: All the observers announce plumetting prices, they only discuss the speed of fall. Prices in September will be much lower than today and Vista is not yet ready to push the demand up.
• NAND Flash memory: The market is strangled by demand, SAMSUNG announced that they will increase their production capacity of 90% by year’s end, but in the mean timen prices should climb steeply.
• CPU: The price war between Intel and AMD is not supposed to stop any time soon. Intel seems to be trying to strangle AMD (and they could well succeed if AMD marketing plans are late this year). Double core and Quad core CPUs are driving the market.
• LCD display screens: Prices are oriented downward, but only slightly and for small sizes (including laptop screens) the demand is such that we can expect a slight price climb in the coming months.
• B&W laser printers: In the US, HP started a amazing price fall (entry point going far under 100$) even if nobody really knows why (new laser products coming? upcoming low cost color lasers? entirely something else?)

The Old Pictures Internet web site is the elegant shrine for the most extensive collection of original historic photographs. More than 80,000 images taken from the years 1850 to 1940. These photographs will make you visit the world and recall the defining events of our collective history. You can even search by theme or freely browse the whole collection.