Archive for June, 2008

For once, here is a realtively good photo of the future Nikon D700 SLR camera. It could be a fake or a god Photoshopped image, but I doubt it. It looks a lot like a shot from a photo phone on a corner of a table in bad conditions.

Source: Photo.net.

• AceBackup: Free Windows backup
• Ad-Aware 2008: Free anti-spyware
• StarBurn: Free disc burning, audio ripping utility (download Nero for free)
• LogoEase: Create your own logo for free
• AutoGK: Rip your DVDs to DivX and Xvid formats
• Opera 9.5: an excellent replacement for Internet Explorer
• Comodo Friewall Pro Free: Free Windows firewall for Windows XP
• Antivir: Free anti-virus for Windows
• Avast: Free anti-virus for Windows
• AVG 8.0 free: Free anti-virus and anti-spyware for Windows
• Replace data backup with data sync, thanks to these articles from Tom’s Hardware: [1] and [2]

Have a good Summer working on installing and testing all these.

Sony can’t be stopped when they want to show off their upcoming flagship camera, the Sony Alpha 900 as everybody is naming it. But there’s still no official announcement. However, Chinese web site 163.com gives a lot of images of the camera (apparently still not working model).

Sony Alpha 900 along with the newest Sony flash

Will there be something before Photokina?

After years of preparation and beta-phase, finally, Wine has been able to reach launch as Wine 1.0. Why is it significant? Because this is the software package designed to be able to run many Windows applications from a GNU/Linux distribution. If you want to switch to Linux, you may not be willing to abandon some of the applications that were developped for Windows.

Wine is there to solve the problem. It runs many games and it runs Photoshop CS2 and CS3 from the box (I did not test it myself, though). It was the plain objective of Google when they allocated money and developers to support this project. They reached their goal.

It is probably the right time to try OpenSuse 11.0 (one of the best new Linux distributions) with Wine.

See also: Run Windows Apps in Linux with Wine 1.0.

With all this talk about existing Full-Frame photo cameras (Canon EOS 5D, Nikon D3) and about possibly upcoming new ones (Sony Alpha 900, Canon EOS 5D Mk II or some other similar name, etc.) many photographers happy with their existing digital equipment are wondering: “What’s all the fuss about?”

And it’s a good question to ask, but the answer goes with some of the comments about sensor resolution. About the same people who noticed that resolution is not all that counts (despite what is said or implied by some of the major brands on this market) also understand that going Full Frame is a possibly very important decision for the attentive digital photographer.

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We have been used to receiving one update of Crysis, the PC FPS video game of the year, for a long time. But it seems that there is now an upcoming change: No update, just a new extension named Warhead or Crysis Warhead.

Crytek was a little imprecise on this, but there is one major advantage to it: It will bring enormous performance increases. It is ssaid to be able to run Crysis at high-quality settings on a $600 or 400€ budget PC. Probably nearly any PC a gamer could buy will be able to get max quality.

Unfortunately, all photos I could find are just plain bad.

While it is difficult to find any ground for these speculations, people keep repeating that Nikon is about to announce simultaneously a Nikon D700 high-end DSLR camera and a lower-end Nikon D90 to provide an able DSLR for most photographers.

It seems that most of the original information comes from Thom Hogan’s web site and is fed by countless comments on web forums. However, we saw recently Chasseur d’Image supporting this rumour within its own Nikon D700 rants.

The most common set of characteristics and features seems to be:

• 12 MP sensor in APS-C size (x1.5 crop factor)
• 14-bit A/D conversion and image management
• dust-cleaning sensor
• 3″ LCD with LiveView
• 5 fps shutter bursts

But it looks a lot like a mere marketing evaluation of what Nikon needs to put in its SLR camera range to fight on the current market and to make it fully able to cover all kinds of photo customers. Everybody seems to expect this to be the feature list of a $1300 camera to reach under the current D300 (or the upcoming D700).

Will this be part of an launch event that Nikon seems readying for the very first days of July (maybe 1st of July)?

A photographer must love his models to make the best possible portraits and to serve completely the models. This is all the more obvious when it comes to photographing celebrities and famous people.

Platon does a great job for this.

Source : Platon.
All photos are Copyright (c) Platon - All rights reserved.

Surprisingly, the information collected about the upcoming Nikon D700 digital SLR camera seems to have been confirmed indirectly by several sources.

French magazine Chasseur d’Image went to the extreme of reporting about it “as a rumour confirming the information they already have”.

And a Nikon representative said that the manual pages that were used to base the disclosure were taken from the printing agency in charge of producing the actual manuals.

We will not get more, but it seems that 99% of what was told about the Nikon D700 is true. But, possibly, the name of the D700 will be actually Nikon D700 FX to clearly reflect the presence of the Full Frame sensor in a near-D300 body.

“When hell freezes over“. This expression has been replaced by “When Duke Nukem Forever is ready for launch” in some circles of PC gamers, of FPS gamers. This video game has been 12 years in the making. Announced about once per year for more than a decade, but never really seen, nobody really expected it to be delivered to the market. But, this year, there is something totally wacky: In a video, the game itself seems to be appearing. As if it existed in alpha or beta status…

As if the guys had really been working on it all these years.

3D Realms may finally be able to launch such a game. But when? Will the game play reaching the level expected by hard core gamers of today? Will the graphic design have stayed back in time with a disappointing quality? Only time will tell…

I was very troubled by the initial annoucement of Far Cry 2. This FPS game, taking after the exceptionally good Far Cry, was not really a sequel and not even done by the same team. So, what would you expect? Probably a major failure merely re-using the name of a previous hit. But, months after months, news after news, we discovered that the development team was really working to make it nice and big. An enormous area where you will be able to move around, a Wild African landscape with lots of efforts put in making the changes to the environment as credible as possible (some day-to-night effects that should make it interesting even after STALKER similar effects).

So, before the full availability (sometime in September according to our latest information), it is important to try and check the PC requirements for the FPS gamer willing to run Far Cry 2.

Minimum requirements

• Processor: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better
• Memory: 1 GB of SDRAM
• Graphics: GeForce 68xx or Radeon X1650

Recommended requirements

• Processor: Dual core CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD 64 x2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better)
• Memory: 2 GB of SDRAM
• Graphics: GeForce 8600 GTS or Radeon X1900 series (Shader model 3.0 and 512 MB of graphic memory)