New technology releases

Mike McCarty · 07-20-2006, 06:48 PM

New Nikon coming soon...

Nikon Japan has today started a teaser campaign promoting a new compact 10.2 megapixel digital SLR which will be announced in 20 days, we can only guess that this would be the natural successor to the D70/D70s. The teaser gives away few details other than the fact that the camera will have 10.2 megapixels (just in case you were thinking of buying a Sony Alpha mentioned above).

Jeff Fuchs · 07-22-2006, 12:20 AM

Face detection is important indeed

Mike McCarty · 07-22-2006, 10:25 AM

Face recognition? They can pick out Osama Bin McCarty in his Irish disguise from a space satellite.

It's an amazing thing when you think about the kind of electronic logic that must go into this. It's not something that would send me off to the camera store for a quick purchase, but it is an amazing thing to contemplate.

This is my understanding: lets say you have a scene with five people on and around a couch. Some down on the floor in front, one or two sitting on the couch, and a couple variously standing behind. The problem that can arise if your not careful is one of depth of field. The distance from the face of the closest subject sitting in front to the person standing in the back could be six or more. You nail the focus on grandma sitting in the middle on the couch and the front and backs are out of focus. Dang, you say, I wish I had had some of those face recognition algorithms going for me.

If you had, the camera would have tagged the position of each face and adjusted (made deeper) the depth of field (aperture, fstop) such that it would include the closest and the farthest subject. Also adjusted the exposure for the faces.

I understand that it will also track these faces while in motion.

A horse is a horse unless of course ... it's uncle Harry! I'd like to test this algorithm on some of the faces I've woke up with.

Is skilled labor a thing of the past? It may be in our lifetime.

Speaking of sitting on the couch.

Mike McCarty · 07-30-2006, 09:21 AM

I pulled this off of the dpreview.com site. It was given in the context of this years big photo manufacturers annual convention when all the new products are trotted out.

Under the heading of "future trends" ...

Quote:

This year will see the end of the megapixel race for compact cameras, while we will still see some manufacturers releasing cameras with higher pixel counts the majority of sensible manufacturers will realize that most buyers know that they have a large enough image and that there are other more important things for the R&D guys to be working on.

We also need to be aware of the increasing use of marketing speak, image stabilization that isn't (it just increases sensitivity) and high ISO on compacts which is unusable, use of the word RAW where there isn't any. Other things to expect are larger and larger LCD's (3.0" won't be unusual) and some with touch-screen. It's a year when all the manufacturers will have to start thinking again, the last three or so years have been a megapixel staircase (without necessarily the step up in image quality), this year cameras are going to need be better, faster and more featured.

Mike McCarty · 08-02-2006, 07:25 PM

I'm not sure how this could impact our portrait photo taking but I thought I'd post it just because it's kinda neat and pretty high tech. Here's Sony's release of their latest gadget.

Also, if you haven't tried the Google mapping that they speak of below it's a real handy time saver. Just dial up www.google.com and click on maps. Try typing in your own address and then choose the sattelite image option which may show you standing in your front yard!

***

Wednesday, 2 August 2006

Sony GPS tracker for photographers

Sony has today announced a very interesting little device for recording the position where photographs are taken. The GPS-CS1 is a small (9 cm / 3.5 in) cylindrical device which you simply attach to a backback or belt loop and carry with you while you shoot, it records your GPS location and this information can later be synchronized with your digital images to provide a map of where your photos were taken. We assume it does this using date and time information stored in the image header (which obviously requires your camera's clock to be synchronized). Interestingly the mapping solution is an online website with maps provided by Google Maps (it appears that the synchronization software will write the GPS location into JPEG EXIF headers).

Mike McCarty · 08-09-2006, 06:15 PM

Today Nikon introduced the D80, their new 10 mp digital SLR. The body alone will be $999 and the kit (w/lens) will be $1299. This was exactly the pricing of the first D70 which I bought when it was first introduced about two and a half years ago. The kit lens sounds like a dandy: AF-S DX 18 - 135 mm F3.5 - F5.6G ED (27 - 202.5 mm equiv. FOV, 7.5x zoom). It is one of two new lenses being newly introduced. The other being: AF-S 70 - 300 mm F4.5 - F5.6G VR (105 - 450 mm equiv. FOV, 4.3x zoom).

This camera will produce an image of 3872 x 2592 compared to the D70's 3008 x 2000. If you have all your dials pointed in the right direction this should produce a devastating image. Especially considering where we were in the cost / quality equation just five years ago.

So, I wish I had one but I don't and won't. I have another seven and a half years to go on my D70. By then cameras will be an attachment to our contact lenses.

You can get all the details here including a side by side comparison to the D70s:

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/nikond80/

Garth Herrick · 08-10-2006, 03:16 PM

Thanks Mike for the comparison link.

The D80 looks sweet, and my D100 is getting aged (having exceeded the shutter life projections).

I wish Phil Askey would also compare the D80 to the D200. There are many similarities. Strangely, a same size CF card in a D200 holds more shots than an SD card in a D80. Why? (according to the Nikon PDF brochures for each camera)

Garth