Digital Cameras

Who says all the good stuff has to be announced at CES? It's just a few days before the show, and Nikon has taken the wraps off its newest flagship DSLR - the Nikon D4. The 16-megapixel camera has been optimized for “speed and precision,” with a number of new features to make the camera both faster and to improve its overall image quality over its predecessor. The D4 has an ISO range from 100 to 204,800, allowing it to capture crisp photos in exceptionally low-light situations, a faster shutter speed that allows it to capture photos at 10 frames-per-second, and the ability to capture 1080p high definition video. Read More

Samsung has unveiled its latest DualView compact camera. The range, which kicked-off in 2009 with the release of the TL225 and TL220 models, packs front and rear LCD displays so photographers can get themselves in the picture without the hit and miss framing that results from holding the camera at arm's length. The new DV300F is the first in the DualView line to include Wi-Fi connectivity to allow users to cut out the middleman and email shots or upload them to their social media site of choice directly from the camera. Read More

Those cheeky gear hackers at the Magic Lantern team have announced a very interesting upgrade to their custom Canon firmware mod. As of tomorrow, owners of 550D, 600D and 60D DSLR cameras will be able to use a very cool new tool to shoot video in HDR, meaning that you can capture scenes where the lights would normally be too bright and the shadows too dark to get a workable exposure level. Check out the demo video after the jump. Read More

Along with GI Joes, Slinkies and Sea Monkeys, View-Masters are probably one of the most-remembered childhood products of the past few generations. Even if you yourself never got the chance to flip through disks of still images using one of the manually-operated stereoscopic viewers, chances are you at least knew someone who did. Well, now that you're all grown-up, you have the chance not only to relive your childhood by buying a View-Master-like Image3D viewer, but also to create a reel of your own photos to view in it. As a ten year-old, you would have thought that was pretty amazing. Read More

If nothing else, the iPhone 4’s ability to shoot 1080p high-def video has certainly done one thing – provided inventors with things to make. There is currently what could almost be described as a gold rush, as products are being designed to augment the smartphone’s camera, to the point that it could be used for all of the same things as traditional, stand-alone video cameras. Some of these innovations have included interchangeable lenses, a mini SteadiCam, and a rugged helmet-mount system. Now, an underwater housing system for the iPhone 4 and 4S is in the works, which will allow users to shoot undersea video at depths of up to 100 feet (30.5 meters). Read More

We've been hearing about trillions in the news so much lately, it's easy to become desensitized to just what a colossal number that is. Recently, a team of brilliant researchers at MIT's Media Lab (ML) built an imaging system capable of making an exposure every picosecond- one trillionth of a second. Just how fast is that? Why, a thousand times faster than a nanosecond, of course. Put another way, one picosecond is to one second as one second is to about 31,700 years. That's fast. So fast, in fact, this system can literally slow down light itself and it does so in a manner unlike any other camera. Read More

Snapheal, to be released on Wednesday, is a photo editing app for Mac which "can do magic", at least according to MacPhun, the app's developer. In addition to the usual tweaks and minor edits allowed by vanilla entry-level photo editing software, Snapheal allows you to erase whole objects - including large ones - from your photographs. Gizmag took an advance copy of Snapheal 1.0 for a spin. Could it be magic? Judge for yourself. Read More

For more than twenty years, the software program Photoshop has been the industry standard for seamlessly manipulating images, especially the removal of unwanted items like blemishes, wires and telephone poles. When it comes to adding something to a photo, however, the process is still rather involved. Now, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), led by PhD candidate Kevin Karsch, is presenting a new algorithm at Siggraph Asia 2011 that promises to radically simplify the procedure of believably incorporating new or "synthetic" objects in still shots and the results are quite impressive. Read More

How many times have you been going about your usual business of cheating on your spouse, being an idiot around your boss, or drunkenly harassing fellow party-goers when some wildly irresponsible person tags you in a photo and posts it online? What's that? "Never," you say? Well congratulations on being an alright human being then. You can feel good about the fact that you don't need the Norte Photoblocker to ruin any potentially damaging photos of your night out as they're being taken. Read More