Archive for April, 2008

I noticed two important announcements for airline passengers. Things will be changing in terms of accepting new technologies useful for most international frequent flyers:

• GSM mobile phones will be accepted in planes by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority. But prices may be hard on your wallet, of course. [1]
• American Airlines to start WiFi broadband service in planes as soon as 2008. Same risk on prices… [2]

Surprising? Not really. We know for a long that there is no technical problem, just nobody was willing to try (in the airline companies and the public authorities).

Everything is moving if you stare at this optical illusion.

If you have a simple Point-n-Shoot digital camera, you may not know it, but you are limited more by the marketing teams than by the real technical constraints of your hardware. But if your camera is from Canon you may find an easy way out.

The Canon Hacker’s Development Kit is an open-source software project that can be loaded on cameras using Canon’s DIGIC II or DIGIC III processors. Interestingly, it has the following features:

• It’s free (as in free beer)
• Its installation is completely reversible (it does not remove anything, does not replace the existing firmaware, just adds new features installed on-the-fly from an SD card)
• Faster shutter speed: up to 1/60,000 of a second!
• Slower shutter speed: down to 65 seconds!
• Automatic bracketing of exposures
• RAW file format
• Live histogram display
• Battery readout
• Scripted actions
• Longer videos
• More image compression options
• Use USB for remote control
• Depth-of-Field calculator

Impressive! The list is long enough to give your food for thought and it applies to an impressive list of compatible cameras.

Sources: Wired article, CHDK source.

I found the user manuals of several Nikon SLR cameras on the web:

• Nikon D300
• Nikon D3

The age-old Acid3 test is a small (but challenging) test of the compatibility of web browsers. Very few of them are able to even display something remotely similar to the expected result. But things changed a lot recently with a few important news:

• On March 26, Opera was announced to be the very first browser to succeed to obtain a 100/100 or 100% test score.
• Safari 3.1 is the first non-beta release of Safari for Windows (usually Safari is available on Mac OsX). While it is still unfinished, it reached the imposing 100% score only a few days after Opera.
• Internet Explorer 8 which is still in closed beta has been said to be able to pass the test, then not to, then again. It seems that Microsoft has the code for a 100% score but feels it should not be the default operation of its future browser.

Reference: The Acid3 test page.

See them all at http://www.naturesbestphotography.com/

Jürgen Freund
OCEANS
Dwarf Minke Whale
Ribbon Reefs, Great Barrier Reef, Australia

We do not often see the sceenplay of a movie we like. Maybe it’s fortunate because they are hardly exhilarating except when they come from Alfred Hitchcock (the man was a maniac of detailed preparation) or when they describe all about animation movies.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

It is pretty unusual for photographic equipment (to my knowledge) to have an educational discount program (a discount for students and teachers). We have seen this on software and computers. But, now, it’s time for Pentax to start such a discount program. And this is good news because most of the recent Pentax D-SLR cameras are pretty good bargains already without the 25$ to 100$ rebates.

Pentax student program

According to IDC, the sales of photo cameras progressed by 24% in 2007 to 131 million cameras. The global market is in the hands of several companies:

• Canon: 24.5 millions (18%)
• Sony: 20.9 millions (16%)
• Kodak: 12.6 millions (10%)
• Samsung: 11.7 millions (9%)
• Nikon: 11.4 mililons (8.4%)
• Olympus: 11.3 mililons (8.3%)

For the SLR market (Single Lens Reflex), two companies are overwhelming:

• Canon: 43%
• Nikon: 40%

Canon looses some ground to Nikon, but the margins were going down thanks to added competition.

Sometimes, you need to change your images from a bitmap (JPEG, TIFF, BMP or raw file) to a vector file that can be stretched and grown seamlessly. This is useful when the image is more or less a drawing (not a photo) with clear drawn borders (a logo, a signature, a technical drawing, etc.)

Here comes VectorMagic that can do a pretty good job of this (even if some details will probably be lost in the process).

Master Chong, in Malaysia, recently published photos of the future Sony Alpha 900, high-end D-SLR not yet officially announced by Sony, but that should be the pro pilar of the Japanese brand with a Full-Frame (24×36mm) sensor of 20 to 24 millions of pixels.

  

There are only images to judge, but it leaves some possibilities for (preliminary) analysis.

The back face of the camera shows an interface impressively similar to the usual one found previously on the Konica-Minolta Maxxum/Dynax 7D and the Sony Alpha 700. Position and meaning of the buttons seems to be nearly identical. I would just point at the will to mark the presence of the HDMI interface by engraving on the connector caps (on the left-hand side as on the A-700). But this is no news.

Notice the complementary/optional grip that really includes a full set of commands to ease moving to vertical position of the camera. Those adepts of optional battery grips will definitely appreciate.

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