Cameras

The Viennese WestLicht Photographica Auction House continued its stellar run of success with its 21st Camera auction in just its eleventh year as an auction house, when it recently broke its own world record for the fifth consecutive time by selling one of the original Leica 0-series cameras for €2,160,000 (US$2.77 million), including the buyer’s premium. Read More

When you think of Leica, you probably think of cameras which are built like a tank and feature that famous red dot. But if you were to take a photo of the iconic red logo with the latest rangefinder camera from the German firm, it might not come out as you'd expect … because the Leica M-Monochrom is the world’s first digital rangefinder which only shoots in black and white. Read More

Instagram is enjoying a wealth of success right now, particularly after being picked up by Facebook last month for a cool US$1 billion. The photo-sharing network's social apps have become some of the most popular in the world, and one design studio in Italy is wondering what it would look like if the company decided to make its own hardware as well. ADR Studio has put together a fairly detailed concept for just such a device, called the "Instagram Socialmatic," which merges online photo-sharing with instant Polaroid-like prints for sharing in the offline world. Read More

If you see what appears at first glance to be a short version of Robocop stumbling through the streets of Tokyo, worry not folks it will likely be Eric Siu or one of his friends using Touchy. The wearer of the head-mounted camera is effectively in darkness until someone touches him, at which point the automated shutters blinding the wearer open briefly and he can once again view the world around him. If the person maintains touch for ten seconds or more, the built-in camera snaps an image and then displays it on a small screen to the rear of the helmet. Read More

Most cameras today have settings that log the time, date, camera settings, and even location of any photos taken. Unfortunately though, no camera out there can automatically note what a picture actually shows ... until now, that is. Matt Richardson, a student in the Computational Cameras class at New York University‘s Interactive Telecommunications Program, recently created a quirky device called the "Descriptive Camera," which works like a regular camera, but instead of displaying images, it prints out a description of the photo's content in plain English. Read More

It's getting rarer these days to find the kind of specialist shops that have so much stock from years gone by that they're more like a mini-museum than a retail outlet. Grays of Westminster is just such an emporium. Exclusively dealing in products spanning the whole history of the Nikon Corporation, the award-winning central London curiosity shop managed to generate a huge online buzz this week by announcing the sale of an exceptionally rare monster of a wide-angle Nikkor lens for an equally gargantuan price of £100,000 (US$162,312). Read More

Samsung has announced three new additions to its NX Series of compact, mirrorless, interchangeable lens cameras. Where other large sensor cameras might require users to slot in an Eye-Fi memory card before being able to get online, the 20.3 megapixel NX1000, NX20 and NX210 cameras all feature built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. Read More

Blackmagic Design, best known for its well designed, keenly priced video peripherals and the DaVinci color-grading software, has created quite a buzz at the 2012 National Association of Broadcaster’s Show in Las Vegas. Like RED did five years ago, BMD seems to have suddenly changed the game by announcing a new digital cinema camera that breaks all the accepted conventions - including price. Read More

The list of add-ons that let you to tinker with the photo taking capabilities of your iPhone is about to get even bigger with the launch of Magnifi. Rather than tacking a zoom or fish-eye lens onto the smartphone, Magnifi integrates an adapter into the case so that your phone can be hooked-up to most optical instruments with an eye-piece such as binoculars, microscopes or telescopes. Read More