By CrunchGear, on 2010.03.11, 10:00.44 pm
The Polaroid saga is a long and strange one. And the last couple years have been especially strange. Bankrupt, reanimated, relaunched, sold out, bought up… I wouldn’t be surprised if Polaroid showed up on Dancing With The Stars.
They keep saying they’re coming back, but I’ll believe it when I see it. In the mean time, your options for instant film are depressingly limited, and it’ll cost you a bundle — but it’s not like it disappeared completely. The main rival for Polaroid was Fujifilm, which also makes digital cameras and lots of other films and media. Among their many products is Instax film, which is still manufactured and comes in cartridges of 10 exposures. It ends up costing ~75¢ per shot, which is technically infinity percent more than a digital, so understandably not too many people go for it.
Add in the fact that the Instax 200 camera is the size of a bear, and you could forgive the general public for thinking instant film is more or less dead. What reminded me of all this was, first, this hands-on with a new, smaller (weirder) Instax format camera, and also the relatively recent marriage of Lomo cameras with the reduced-size Instax Mini film.
The LC-A+ I wrote up is a bit expensive, however, at around $300 for the camera and Instax back. I’ll have a review soon of the Diana+ and its instant back, which is much more affordable, but still very cool. Depending on how that goes, I’ll be able to tell you with a little more conviction, but it seems to me that if instant is really what you want, you’ve got a couple ways of going about it. Just don’t count on Polaroid just yet.
By CrunchGear, on 2010.02.06, 08:02.31 pm
There are a billion ways to get the right shot. Most of them, pros will tell you, involve taking a huge amount of pictures. Macro shots of in-flight insects are no exception — I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to take a picture of a bug flying around but it’s hard. However, what if your shot was pretty much guaranteed to be perfect exposure technically? You could take shot after shot of bees zooming around and they’d all come out perfectly-focused and framed just right. All you’d have to do is pick out the best ones.
Well, Belgian photographer Fotoopa (nickname, I’m supposing) has put together a seriously cool rig that does this. It’s not easy to make, but if you’re dedicated, it looks like this might be the best way on earth to capture bugs in flight.
As far as I can tell, it has a second lens that is constantly checking the in-focus spot of the actual lens, using infrared LEDs and an IR rangefinder. Just get a bug in the general area of the sweet spot and as soon as it flies into the zone, the camera will snap a picture. Because it uses IR LEDs, it even works in total darkness. He’s put together the instructions here, including the board layout and other components.
I’m not going to lie: using this rig, you can get a better shot in 10 seconds than I did after an hour and a couple hundred exposures. Still a nice shot, but if I were a robot camera whose only purpose in life was to get bees exactly in focus mere inches from my lens, I probably would have had a higher success rate.
[via Lifehacker and Make]
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.13, 10:30.28 pm
Uh oh! Looks like the British Journal of Photography isn’t going to be invited to next year’s big Nikon event. Well, their loss is our gain as they confirm the details we suspected for the D3s. The actual announcement is supposed to go up in about six hours, but hey, it’s out there in the open. What’s new? Well, before you read any further, consider that this camera has been priced at £4200, or around $6700, for the body only. This is a professional camera. But that said, features that start pro-only tend to trickle down in the next generation of prosumer and consumer cameras, so let’s take a look.
Perhaps the most eye-catching new feature is ISO boost that can take you up to an ISO of 102,400. You read that correctly: ISO of one hundred and two thousand, four hundred. I tend not to shoot over 800. I’m not a sports or action photographer so this doesn’t affect me, but this does mean shorter exposures in worse light. And hey, if they’re being printed on newspaper or spread on the web, no one’s going to notice a little noise if the shot is right.
HD video is… improved but not apparently by much. 1280×720 at 24p, plus ISO boost is available so low light might really be an option. One actual benefit of the throw-away-and-resize DSLR method of creating video is that it minimizes ISO noise due to the resizing. Onlookers are said to have noted high-ISO video from the D3s as looking natural, which I don’t doubt. Video from the D300s looked solid, though autofocus is still slow, loud, and inaccurate.
It’ll shoot 9 frames per second at full res, or 11 if you only use the cropped sensor size. Other features:
- 12 megapixels (honestly, you don’t need more)
- Improved viewfinder (probably brighter and closer to 100%)
- 51-point autofocus (standard and good)
-
14-bit A/D conversion and 16-bit image processing (why not)
- Twin CF slots (hmm)
Looks like a solid camera, but unless you really need that insane ISO range, I don’t see a lot here that necessitates a purchase. If you’re a Nikon man, the D300s should be sufficient, and if not… why are you reading this?
We may as well note here that speculation on this camera was way off. There are no unicorns mentioned anywhere in the article.
Ah, there is a new picture, this one of the back of the sucker. Also from Nikon rumors. Here we go:
I’m not familiar with Nikon rear-layout. Anybody want to step in?
[via Nikon Rumors]
|
|
