WorldCAD Access

Going old school camera

Yashica GS rangefinder I grew up in an era when the SLR was the true way to take photographs. Rangerfinders were sniffed upon. (SLR, single-lens reflex, cameras showed us the true view, directly through the camera lens -- hence the SL part. The R part came from the mirror, which allowed us to look through the lens, flipping up when we pressed the shutter button, exposing the film to the light. Rangerfinders, by contrast, mounted two viewfinders above the lens, so we saw an offset image. There were two viewfinders, so that as we rotated the focus ring, one moved... Read more →

When I shot a roll of film, it was the first time in 17 years

Minolta XE-7 film camera I wrote in an earlier blog about me re-acquiring the only 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) camera I ever bought -- the Minolta XE-7, in fall of 1976. (I had sold it to acquire a zoom lens for my wife's much lighter Olympus SLR.) Earlier this year in a bout of nostalgia, I found one with the standard f1.4 50mm lens in near-perfect condition on eBay and snapped it up. (See figure below; image source Casual Camera Collector.) Then it came time for me to actually use it. Like, put in a roll of film and... Read more →

foto of the sunday: Early Rising Birds

Wollongong, Australia Sea birds out early on the Pacific Ocean beach off the coast of Wollongong, Australia, 2012 Read more →

foto of the sunday: Surfers Waiting and Watching

Wollongong, Australia Surfers waiting in the Pacific Ocean and watching for the next big wave off the coast of Wollongong, Australia, 2012 Read more →

The stunning complexity of electro-mechanical cameras

Minolta XE-7 I finally got some rolls of film, put one in my re-acquired Minolta XE7 SLR, and took a few shots on a walk yesterday. The shutter button and film forward mechanism feel so satisfying, and the sound gratifying. The "feel" is quite remarkable, considering it derives from a complex electro-mechanical process. I suppose that in slower times it was easier to get the visceral feel just right. This camera was built 40 years ago. I came across the repair manual for the camera and was stunned at the complex interactions that take place inside its heavy body. It's... Read more →

foto of the sunday: Vancouver Harbourfront

Sea and ski Panoramic photo of the Vancouver harbour taken by my son-in-law Read more →

photos of the sunday: snowmen like you've never seen them

from Kitimat BC Canada My dad sent along photos taken by friends living in the northern seaport town of Kitimat, where I recall growing up with (as much as) 40 feet of snowfall in winter. What Buffalo residents residents experienced once is what we experienced every winter. The bus stop sign is shown for scale Cougar Snowbuilders shown for scale And finally, a photo showing the raw material from which these snowmen are constructed: Vehicle shown for scale Read more →

foto of the sunday: when dogs look like their rocks

I'm not a dog man, preferring cats, but then this dog posed for us on the beach at Lions Bay BC last week. Read more →

foto of the sunday: christmas concert

Mother video records her daughter's recital at a Christmas concert on her smartphone Read more →

OK, so now I like my new Canon SX500 after all

Most any digital camera takes a decent picture under ideal conditions, bright light and no zoom. It's when the light is dim and the zoom long when cameras buckle under my demands. This is the situation in which I take photos at conferences to illustrate my live blogging. Room lighting is dimmed to let the slides stand out, the presenters are moving about, dozens of feet away. And I want a great action pic, close up. Earlier in Three reasons I can't stand my new Canon camera; three reasons why I love it, I wrote that a year ago I... Read more →

Using WiFi with a digital camera, part iii

My new Samsung EX2F point-and-shoot camera has seven ways it can communicate over WiFi. Some are direct WiFi links, some are indirect: Direct WiFi means that the camera communicates directly with another device, like an Android tablet or a smart tv. It's as if there were a USB cable or Bluetooth connection between them. The benefit of direct WiFi is that we don't need to have a WiFi hotspot nearby -- or need to use cables; it just needs two devices that have WiFi. The drawback is any other WiFi connection is lost. I can't have this camera communicate to... Read more →

Using WiFi with a digital camera, part ii

Samsung's EX2F offers many WiFi modes, but none of them work on the camera while taking pictures. (There is one exception.) It won't transmit photos to my nearby laptop computer as I take photos at a seminar, for instance. I wish it would, and maybe a future update to the firmware will allow this. Or maybe the camera's computer architecture makes this function impossible. This EX2F camera cannot take photos when in WiFi mode Samsung EX2F WiFi Modes Here is a summary of the modes available when the camera's Selector dial is set to WiFi: WiFi modes displayed by the... Read more →

Using WiFi with a digital camera, part i

(I've merged the content from my Gizmos Grabowski blog into this one, and this is the first Gizmos Grabowski-style posting.) I've been spoiled by how well Dropbox integrates with my Android phone and tablet. I take any number of pictures, and the next time I am at my desktop or laptop computer, the pictures I took with the Android devices are already there. Very slick. (DropBox running on the Android device automatically uploads the image files to the DropBox servers, which then download them to my computers. This works best when preset WiFi connections are present.) Dropbox running on my... Read more →

5x Zoom Becoming Standard

Watching camera specs in the weekly fliers, it appears that 5x zoom is slowly supplanting 3x as the standard for point'n shoot cameras. Read more →

Experimental 3D Camera Lens

CNET's Stephen Shankland describes an experimental camera lens for taking 3D pictures. Fife's 3-megapixel sensor prototype breaks the scene up into many small, slightly overlapping 16x16-pixel patches called subarrays... After a photo is taken, image-processing software then analyzes the slight location differences for the same element appearing in different patches--for example, where a spot on a subject's shirt is relative to the wallpaper behind it. These differences from one subarray to the next can be used to deduce the distance of the shirt and the wall. Read more →

Wow! 20x Zoom

Olympus now has a digital camera with 20x zoom, which works out to a 26 - 520mm range. Remember, though, that 20x is not as nice as it sounds, because part of the range goes down to wideangle. The reference point is 50mm: this is the normal view, no zoom, no wide angle. * Wideangle -- from 50mm to 26mm. * Zoom -- from 50mm to 520mm. Thus, the actual magnification is 10.4x (= 520 / 50). Still, that's pretty good. All those common cameras with their 3x "zooms" provide just 2x, because of the wideangle factor. Many binoculars enlarge... Read more →

The End of the Computer

When I helped my mother-in-law buy her first digital camera last Christmas, I also got her the de-rigueur 2GB memory card. "How many pictures can I take," she wondered. 1,500. Her camera, a Canon SD100, also supports SDHC (secure digital high capacity) cards, which can now be purchased in 8GB capacities locally for just over $100. One of those 8GB cards would hold six thousand photographs. With the large LCD screen, I suddenly realized that her greatest worry (how to get the photos from the camera onto the computer) was rendered moot. She didn't need to deal with her computer... Read more →

Review: VideoSpin, part 1

Pinnacle Systems is offering its VideoSpin software free -- or nearly so. (I figure the software is a long-delayed reaction towards MovieMaker which Microsoft includes free with Windows XP and Vista. And it is pretty good software; I've used it myself.) The basic software is free from www.videospin.com . The download consists of two parts: (1) first a 2.3MB setup file is downloaded; which then (2) downloads the rest of the software to a folder on my computer -- 146MB worth. Install was not without its problems. It requires shutting down all apps, following which they are relaunched automatically. Following... Read more →

Video HD = SDHC

Desperate to distinguish itself from the all too me-too world of SD memory cards and their plunging prices, SanDisk has relabeled some of its SDHC cards with a "High-Definition Video" sticker. (How plunging are the prices? Our local Wal-Mart has three 2GB SD cards for $44 a pack -- $14.67 each.) The only difference on these "new" cards: the label, which shows how many hours of high-def video fit on. For example, an 8GB card holds 2 hours of HD video. But in fact, the memory cards can be used for any device that supports the SDHC format -- newer... Read more →

Super Slow Motion

Using timelapse photography lets you notice things that you might not otherwise; same with slow motion photos. Casio is blowing us away by showing their new $999 super-high-speed digital camera, the EX-F1. It is capable of the following speeds: -- 1200fps at 336x96 resolution. -- 300fps at 640x480 (VGA) -- 60fps at 6 megapixels (full resolution). -- 30fps at 1080i in H.264 movie format. Engaget has photos and video here. Read more →

Which Camera to Buy?

My in-laws are staying with us over Christmas, and my mother-in-law asked which digital camera to buy. "Everyone seems to have one these days," she used as her excuse. No kidding; two strips in last week's color comics featured digital cameras. By coincidence, FutureShop has one on sale that I would recommend for her: Canon SD1000 for $189. On top of that price, she'll have to add 13% sales tax, an environment levy, and another $25 or so for a 2GB memory card. Here's why I picked it: -- small size, but not as small as the ELPH series, which... Read more →

I'm All in Favor of Proprietary Batteries

I used to insist on buying cameras that used rechargeable AA batteries. Replacements are universally available, relatively cheap, and it's easy to take along several spare sets for extended trips. In contrast, I used to not like proprietary batteries, because (1) the expense and difficulty of getting spares; and (2) if the battery quit, but no replacement could be found, the entre camera would be wasted. No longer. I've changed my mind, because proprietary batteries: 1. reduce confusion for the neophyte. Need to recharge the battery? Just plug the entire camera to the charging cord. The battery never need come... Read more →

Boo! Scared You Into Printing Your Photos

As digital photography became popular, Kodak, Fuji, and stores that print photographs became scared, because photo buffs no longer needed to have their photos printed. What to do? How to turn around their fading market? They decided to turn their fears back onto their customers. Kodak is running ads with the headline, "Mothers don't let your babies grow up to become pixels" urging mommies to print out all digital photographs of their precious darlings. And last week, London Drugs sent out a glossy 20-page booklet to reinforce the fear: Print Them So You Can Count On Them Unfortunately, computer memory... Read more →

Athletic Improvement

It's common for coaches to video tape athletes, so both can examine the style and progress of training. The son of a friend is into the Triple Jump, and he took the process a step further. He used a digital camera to video tape his son doing the triple jump about ten times in a row. In this case, he borrowed my Samsung NV-3 digital camera, which records movies at 720x480 at 20fps or 640x480 at 30fps. ("How long a movie can this take?" asked my friend. About 1.5 hours on the 2GB memory card.) By using the digital camera... Read more →

Canon Stays #1

Research firm IDC says that Canon remains #1 in the digital camera market. For all sales, they were up 14% to to 106 million units last year. Digital SLRs sold 5.2 million cameras, up 39%. Worldwide rankings were: 1. Canon 2. Sony 3. Kodak 4. Olympus 5. Samsung 6. Nikon For digitalSLR sales: 1. Canon 2. Nikon 3. Sony (sells the fomer Konica-Minolta camera) 4. Olympus 5. Pentax Kodak stopped selling its digitalSLR. More details here. I am not surprised. There are a lot of dreadful cameras out there, and it appears that the best are made by those who... Read more →

Fade-free Printed Photos

You print out digital photos of loved ones, pin them up on the bulletin board, and a year later the colors look yellowish. One solution is to print out another copy. Another solution is to use a printer, printer ink, and paper that resists fading. Engaget reports on an 11-month trial, where photos were printed with several brands, posted in a sun-facing window, and copies kept in the dark for comparison. The winner was the HP PhotoSmart 385. You can read the full story at Fade resistance test takes a look at photo printers / paper. Especially read the comments... Read more →

How Low Can Memory Card Prices Get?

We are now used to paying $1 per GB of hard disk space, and I supposed flash memory may get that cheap too. Today I noticed that Wal-mart was selling 512MB SD memory cards in bulk: 4 in a blister pack for CDN$40 (about US$34). Ten bucks each! Makes me weep to recall paying $330 for a 64MB card back in 2000 -- though mail order, because the local electronics stores couldn't understand why anyone would need more than 16MB for their digital camera. But now I think the same thing: why would anyone want four 512MB cards instead of... Read more →

Is a 300x Card Worth it?

Lexar is now selling a CompactFlash memory card rated at 300x speed -- meaning it is 300x faster than the speed of a standard 1x CD drive (150KB/sec). In theory, this card moves 45MB of data per second. Is it worthwhile paying extra for this theoretical speed? The short answer is, No. You can read the long answer at Imaging Resource: Testing the Lexar 8GB 300x Card. On most cameras and computer equipment, the read and write speeds differ little from the 60x card that was also tested. Only when the tester used it with extremely fast computers and very... Read more →

My Daughter's New Digital Camera is Pink

My daughter's digital camera had been acting up recently, and now doesn't work at all. I think the problem is with the on/off switch being worn out. I decided to buy her a new one as her birthday present. Digital cameras have improved so much since she bought the Pentax 2.5 years ago. How old is it? Pentax doesn't even have XP drivers for it. I began looking for a digital camera with these specs : - uses the memory card she already has (SD). That cuts out Olympus, Fuji, and Sony. - has a large 2.4" LCD screen on... Read more →

Expect 64GB Memory Cards in 2 Years

The Register has an article of interest to us photo buffs: Samsung says it will be able to ship 64GB memory cards in 2008, because of a new process that crams more memory into the same amount of space. Shown are CompactFlash memory cards. It's of interest, because I wonder if there is much of a market for such a card. I could see professional photographers taking high-rez RAW-format photos at sporting events -- where there isn't time to repeatedly take out and plug in lower-capacity cards. OTOH, wouldn't such an event be better served by transmitting photos from the... Read more →

Agfa is Dead; Long Live Agfa

From the many trips my parents made with me to Germany (during my youth, because all our relatives still lived there), the Agfa brand name became as special as other brand names that dominate Germany, like Cafe Hag coffee and Ritter Sport chocolate. Like Polaroid, Agfa didn't survive the switch to the digital era, and is now being liquidated. Like Polaroid, another company has bought up the brand-name and hopes to profit from sticking Agfa and its red logo it on mundane digital cameras made by third-parties in Taiwan. More coverage by Imaging Resource. Read more →

Sony's M2 Memory Card

I didn't even know this memory card existed until my son bought a new Sony cell phone. It's a cell phone, text messenger, MP3 player, still camera, movie camera, sound recorder, games player, Web browser, and more. For storage, the phone uses Sony's new M2 Memorystick memory card -- 512MB on a chip about the size of my thumbnail. Easy to lose, eh? To transfer data, it comes with a Memorystick adapter to fit card readers. Naturally, the week after my son buys the 512MB phone, the 1GB model comes out. Naturally, the next thing my son wants to buy... Read more →

WiFi Warning

Some cameras have WiFi built-in. Specific models of camera from Nikon, Kodak, and others can transmit their photo files to your computer through wireless networking. Problem is that some photo Web sites are now reporting that this represents a security risk. More details are to come, but I suspect the problem is that the camera makers did not implement WiFi encryption, which prevents outsiders from hijacking the wireless stream of data. I think the risk is low, because of obscurity. Hijackers are not looking for wireless cameras to intercept because they are so rare -- just like very few viruses... Read more →

What I Never Knew About SD Cards

Did you know that... ... SD [secure digital] memory cards are limited to a maximum capacity of 2GB? That's why a new standard had to be developed to extend the memory capacity -- called SD-HD [high density]. Initially you'll see 4GB SD-HD cards, but 32GB SD-HD cards are being promised. Warning! These new cards do not work with your digital cameras and other SD devices. They only work with new hardware built to the new specification. ...memory cards from Sony were even worse off. The initial spec allowed a max of 128MB. Sony has since had to twice re-engineer their... Read more →

Photo Tutorials

I generally don't care for online photography tutorials, because I find them, well, not concise enough. A lot of talking, not much useful detail. Don Beaton alerted me to a tutorial by George Mann at the Digital Photography & Macintosh Computers site. Again, too much verbiage for my liking, and an emphasis on software I don't use (PhotoShop), but I was relieved to read his commonsense advice, such as: + "I have to confess that I myself do not often look at histograms and also leave the camera on full automatic in many cases..." but he recognizes that manual mode... Read more →

Future Camera Technology

Digital Photo Newsletter describes a Media Day where Kodak showed off new products and described technology that they are working on for future release. Two of the items include: + A high-speed scanner that processes two prints per second. The scanner reads both sides of photos, and uses optical character recognition to attempt to collect any info it can, including hand-written dates. It attempts to also date photos by how they were made, such as rounded corners or serrated edges. (Fashion has a purpose after all!). And it attempts to group photos by color and backgrounds in the images, and... Read more →

Extreme Speed Photography

Sony engineers want to make digital photography as fast as video recording. Right now, some digital cameras can take 60 frames per second, but at low resolutions, like 640x480 or less. That's good enough for moving video footage, but looks coarse for prints. Old-timers remember the early days of digital cameras, when the std resolution was 640x480 and return rates to stores were 50% or more. What Sony hopes to achieve is to make digital camera chips fast enough that every camera takes photos at video speeds. That means 30 high-resolution photos per second and a heck of a lot... Read more →

Fired Employee: EasyShare Planned Overcompression

Danit Lidor reports on Forbes.com that Kodak planned on increasing JPEG compression levels in order to save money, resulting in digital photos with lowered quality. Kodak EasyShare Gallery is an online photo-sharing site storing one billion photographs -- taking up 380 terrabytes of diskpace (according to my quick calcs) -- the equivalent of 380,000 100GB hard drives. Maintaining that many drives gets expensive, not to mention the electricity needed to run and air condition them. A director of engineering claims she was fired when she revealed plans by Kodak to increase the compression as photos were uploaded by customers. Increased... Read more →

Photo Albumn of Trains

I've posted a new photo album on this blog. These photos are of trains and stations in northern Germany and The Netherlands, which I took on a business trip there last October. Typead lists photo albumn in alphabetical order, so you need to scroll down and look for "German & Dutch Trains". Read more →

Borrowing Memory Cards

Before going on significant trips, I usually freak out over camera memory: do I have enough memory cards, and do I have a good enough backup system with me. With memory cards becoming so common, one solution is to loan/borrow cards from friends. A friend is going on vacation, has an older Kodak digital camera, wanted to buy a bigger memory card, but was also in the market for a new camera. I suggested that it didn't make sense to buy a new CompactFlash memory card when the new camera most likely would take a SecureDigital card. Then I realized,... Read more →

My Next Camera

With my Canon S1is out of warranty and in the repair shop, I am casting about for my next camera. Problem was that the S1 is, for me, the near-pefect camera. OTOH, the big photo show is coming up soon, and we're starting to hear about new camera models, so I could be convinced to switch. (Most cameras have pretty much uniform specs now -- high megapixel resolution, high-quality movie mode, 3x optical zoom, etc -- I can concentrate on extra special specs.) + For example, there is a new Sony with clean images up to ISO 1000. That would... Read more →

10th Anniversary of the Digital Camera

DC Views has a 10th anniversary review of the very first digital camera, the Kodak Digital Science DC50. Some features from ten years ago: - 756 x 504 resolution (0.3-megapixel). - 1MB internal memory, with a PCMCIA card slot for more. - Took about 5 seconds to record an image to the memory. - Pictures transfered at a rate of about four images per minute to the computer through a serial port. The review concludes with this 1996 quote from Eastman Kodak CEO George M.C. Fisher: "Over time, consumers will be able to store and index images on a worldwide... Read more →

Built-in Video Games

I lamented yesterday that digital cameras have become boringly predictive with their uniform specs. What will vendors do towards product differentiations? Some answers today: - Fuji's V10 has four games built-in, that run on its 3" LCD screen. - Kodak's Z650 has married a 10x optical zoom lens with a 6-megapixel sensor, a tough job to accomplish. - Pentax's Optio A10 has figured out how to remove lens elements during the zoom process, allowing for a thinner camera. But not all new cameras progress. The new Pentax A400 and A500 regress, using xD-Picture Cards for storage (meaning you get to... Read more →

Digital Cameras Become Boring

The CES show is going on, which means lots of announcements this week about gadgets. What strikes me about the camera announcements is their uniformity. Digital cameras have become as predictable as MP3 players, in that the specs are nearly identical between brands and models; only the exteriors are different -- like American cars in the 60s and 70s. Digital cameras now all seem to feature these same specs: - 5 megapixel or better resolution - SD memory cards - built-in memory of 32MB - 30fps VGA movie mode - 3x optical zoom - 2.4" LCD screen - slim design... Read more →

Dual-Lens Kodak

Kodak is showing a new dual-lens camera this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. The slim EASYSHARE V570 (US$400) has two lenses: the regular 3x zoom lens, plus a second fixed lens for taking wide-angle pictures. Software inside the camera corrects (or not) the fish-eye distortion created by the wide-angle. No word yet on how effective the wide-angle lens is, but I could see this being a great idea for interior designers, etc, trying to get pictures of room interiors. Also, I wonder about switching between the two lenses: is it automatic (like pressing the zoom lever back one more... Read more →

8GB Photo Zen = $249

After months of delays, Creative says it'll start shipping its Zen Micro Photo device in September. Specs include an 8GB hard drive and a 256,ooo-color screen made from OLED [organic LED] -- all in the same size package as the original Zen Micro. Oh, and it plays MP3s and has an FM radio. Thing I can't figure out is how to get photographs from my camera to this device: there's no slots for inserting memory cards, nor is Creative mentioning any USB linkage to cameras. I guess I'll hang onto my 20GB PhotoTainer with its CompactFlash slot and USB v2... Read more →

It's a Brutish Business

Forbes.com is reporting that Konica Minolta sold 23% fewer digital cameras during the last quarter (three months), but that the average retail price rose 17%. How's that possible? It's possible by selling more expensive cameras and fewer cheaper cameras, specifically digital SLRs. Tthe camera maker's quarterly loss was US$6.3 million, an improvement on the $18 million lost a year earlier. This shows how brutish the camera business has become, where competition causes prices to plummet faster than companies can adjust. Read more →

HP Rationalizes

Yesterday it was the iPod. Today, digital cameras in Asia. HP is rationalizing its business, getting rid of products that don't sell well. And HP-brand cameras sell very poorly in Asia. Instead, the company wants to emphasize its printer business, specifically photo printers. More details by Michael Singer at CNET. Read more →

Kodak Ends B/W Film

Kodak this week announced it was ending the production of black-white film. Hmmm... I always thought photographers used black-white film from Ilford. During my teen years, I shot with black-white film, because it was so much cheaper than color. The most fun I ever had was with a roll of super high speed (Kodak) black-white film, rated at ASA 1600 (ISO). I took photographs (sans flash) of university students' nighttime pranks, and then had the lab push the development to ASA 3200. Grainy, but legible. The black-white era came to an end for me in 1976 when London Drugs came... Read more →

8GB CompactFlash Drive

With Seagate announcing its 8GB hard drive in CompactFlash II form factor, I really feel inadequate. Two years ago, I was so cool with the IBM 1GB drive for my digital camera, which holds about 2,500 3-megapixel photos -- meaning the 8GB drive holds 20 thousand! Price was not announced. I don't know that I need my camera to store 20,000 photos while on vacation. In fact, I'd be nervous about trusting it. While on a band trip to Seattle, the 512MB memory card starting having corruption problems. Fortunately, I had a 128MB card and even several 32MB cards along... Read more →