Digital Cameras

Canada's Tamaggo Inc. previewed an egg-shaped photographic device at this year's CES that's claimed to capture navigable high resolution 360-degree panoramas of its surroundings with a single click. Rather than stitch together lots of different photos taken one after the other in quick succession, the Tamaggo 360-Imager would appear to do for photography what lens attachments like the GoPano micro did for iPhone video. I say appear to do because the device on show in Las Vegas was a non-functioning prototype, so we've yet to see what the technology can actually do. Read More

Be it on increasingly powerful dedicated camcorders or via a smartphone, capturing hours (and hours and hours …) of video has never been easier or cheaper. That’s both a blessing and a curse, as even though you’re more likely to capture something worthwhile at some point, at the editing stage you’ll also have to wade through more crap to get to the good stuff. This can be time consuming to say the least and many just don’t bother, preferring to upload the whole kit and caboodle to their video-sharing site of choice. Now there’s an iPhone app called Magisto that is designed to take care of the editing for you and increase the chances of someone actually sitting through the video of Aunt Maude’s birthday dinner. Read More

While once a standard, you'd be hard-pressed to find an 8mm film camera today outside of a second-hand shop or eBay. If still want the look of the vintage camera in your video, however, one company Fuuvi has created an alternative: the Fuuvi Bee. Modeled after a traditional 8 mm movie camera, the pint-sized Bee captures video at 640 x 480 pixels and 30fps, with the ability to capture 100 minutes of video on a single charge. Read More

As someone who spends a good deal of time taking photographs of new consumer technology, only to subsequently enjoy hours of tedium touching up my snaps in image manipulation software, I have to admit to being pretty excited by the new 3D PhotoBench 260 from Ortery Technologies. Shown at CES 2012 this week, the desktop photography studio is claimed to be the first system in the world to take product shots or create 360 degree Flash/HTML 5 animations with a pure white background. Read More

About eighteen months ago, SanDisk revealed the world's fastest 32GB SDHC media card, pushing the format's data transfer speeds up to a rather lively 30 megabytes per second (MB/s). Since then, the SDXC standard has been let loose on the world, with the promise of theoretical capacities of anything up to 2TB and file transfer rates up to 104 MB/s for the UHS-I flavor and 312MB/s for UHS-II. While we're not quite there yet, SanDisk is again claiming the "world's fastest" crown with its new 128GB Extreme SDXC UHS-I card, which boasts read/write speeds of up to 45 MB/s. Read More

With most people happy to make do with camera phones for their digital image snapping needs in the majority of situations and the quality of such devices improving markedly in recent years, makers of dedicated consumer-level cameras face an increasingly tough row to hoe. At CES 2012, Polaroid has announced its SC1630 Smart Camera that attempts to blur the lines between a camera phone and dedicated camera with its smartphone-like form factor and being one of the first dedicated cameras to run on Android. Read More

Panasonic has now priced its new twin-lens 2D/3D camcorder - the HDC-Z10000, which is said to achieve the industry's nearest close-up for a twin-lens 3D camcorder of approximately 17.7 inches (45 cm). The CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Awards Honoree features the company's unique Double 3MOS System for color and detail reproduction, has a high resolution electronic viewfinder and an LCD panel which cater for glasses-free 3D viewing, and is Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound-capable. Read More

Many readers will perhaps know Liquid Image for its HD Scuba Series dive masks, that feature a built-in video camera for recording hands-free underwater footage. The California-based company also makes ski and ATV goggles, which likewise capture the action from the shooter’s point of view. Recently, however, the designers at LI decided that they should also offer a camera that can be mounted on things like handlebars, roll bars, surfboards, or even a good ol’ tripod – so that “extreme videographers” can get shots of themselves, to add to their adrenaline-pumping masterpieces. The result is a tiny HD video camcorder appropriately enough named the EGO, and it was unveiled this week in Las Vegas at CES. Read More

When Fujifilm unveiled its new line-up ahead of CES 2012, there was a feeling among enthusiasts that the company was holding something back. Sure enough, the Japanese photography behemoth has now pulled back the curtain to reveal a new interchangeable lens digital camera system called the X-Pro1. The 16 megapixel camera will be initially joined by three prime lenses when made available next month, with more to follow later on. It features a number of new digital photography developments, including a brand new sensor, a film-like color filter array and the second generation hybrid multi viewfinder first seen in the FinePix X100. Read More