This vintage Russian Swedish jukebox, the AMI I (1958), was photographed by Flickr user woodztream with an almost divine level of hipness through HDR (high dynamic range) techniques.

And for a moment, I wonder if my iPhone has destroyed style, not defined it. [flickr via Unplggd]

Boulder Dash!: Whether you're just leaving college or having your third kid, there's a pretty good chance that you played Boulder Dash as a kid. The official 25th anniversary iPhone edition is as faithful as you want it to be: you can choose either classic, spritey graphics or a modern, cartoonish look, and opt for either an overlaid d-pad control scheme or a new swipe-based system. The game looks great and both control system work a treat, so collecting jewels on the iPhone feels about as natural as it did on the Commodore. $4.99.

Deer Hunter 3D: A hunting video game! What kind of bizarre nerd bumpki—oh, wait, this is actually pretty fun. Deer Hunter 3D for iPhone, licensed from the Walmart-famous Deer Hunter PC franchise, takes you on hunting trips to various locations to shoot various animals with various types of guns. It looks great, and the aiming system—the core of the game—is executed well. The walk-aim-shoot routine seems repetitive at first, but the game has enough unlockable content to keep it interesting for a while. $5.99.

Nightglow: This browser brings proper tabs, more gestures and a few other little odds and ends to your iPhone. Its tab switcher is definitely faster than Safari's, though the app as a whole can be a bit sluggish, and the screen grab feature, which lets you explore the page while still maintaining focus on a text field, is sometimes useful. It kinda reminds me of one of those old Internet Explorer tabbed shells from 2003: it's mildly attractive for power users, but wouldn't be necessary at all if Safari was just a little bit better. $0.99.

Pickin' Stix: A vintage vintage game, this app asks you to do precisely one thing. Doing that one thing is easy, and strangely gratifying. It feels like it ought to be free, but $0.99 isn't so bad.

HDR Camera: No, you can't take DSLR-grade, hyper-realistic dynamic range photos with your iPhone. You just can't. That said, HDR Camera does do a convincing fake. The app coaxes some decent pseudo-HDR imagery out of the iPhone's sad little camera, albeit with filters and effects you could easily just apply in Photoshop. Its $1.99 pricetag is too high.

UpNext 3D NYC: If your life revolves around NYC, there really isn't a better way—wait, let me rephrase that: a prettier way—to navigate the city on your iPhone. If it doesn't, UpNext 3D's exquisitely detailed view of the city is still great eye candy. It does everything you could want from a mapping app: subway schedules, local listings and basic mapping functions and restaurant reviews. Tapping buildings even tells you what's inside (but only sometimes). Sorry, Brooklynites, it's Manhattan only for now. $2.99.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Card Master Pro iPhone App Exposes Brian Lam's Poor Gambling Skills

• 8Bitone Chiptunes Synthesizer App Lets You Mix It Like Mario

• Kindle 1.1 for iPhone Now Available

• New Slacker iPhone App Works Harder to Smack Pandora

• iPrivus Brings Reverse Call Lookup App To The iPhone

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

Granted, we also like shooting HD video with every possible thing we own, but it's nice to see some fairly unique photography-focused features pop up here and there, like in-camera high dynamic range shooting for more balanced exposure in unevenly lit scenes, to remind us that we can use our cameras to take photos too; that's exactly what Ricoh is going for, and even better, it's all packed into a nice minimalistic camera body that feels solid and light at the same time and has great style. I like the black one even better than the silver, but the black review unit we received had a faulty lens cover.

Specs:
• 1/2.3" CMOS Sensor, 9.29MP
• 28-200mm, f/3.3-f/5.2 optical zoom lens (7.1x)
• 1cm macro focusing distance
• 7fps continuous shooting, with 60fps and 120fps 1-second burst shooting modes
• "Dynamic Range Double Shot" mode for in-camera HDR, 12ev stops of coverage
• VGA movie mode
• ISO up to 1600

In-Camera High Dynamic Range
The major selling point of the CX1 is its ability to take two exposures of an unevenly lit scene and combine them into a single shot that more accurately captures what your human eye sees. We did a guide to doing the exact same thing with Photoshop, but the CX1 joins just a few other cameras that do it automatically. And it works.

Granted, you can get much more dramatic results (and way more exposure lee-way) by dumping 7 RAW files into Photoshop, and it won't work perfectly in every situation (night shots don't show much effect), but it's a very cool feature to play around with. And keep in mind, this is HDR of the actually useful, exposure-enhancing variety—no clown vomit colors here.

Here's an example shot of Matt hard at work making Gizmodo blog sausage:

As you can see, the shot in HDR mode captures detail from out the window above Matt's head without greatly darkening the rest of the scene, like his face. HDR mode takes an additional second or so to capture and drops your shutter speed down a stop or two, but other than that, it's indistinguishable from regular shooting. Very nicely done.

Image Quality/Sensitiviy
Overall I found it to be very good—nice colors with a bit of the video-y color palette many other point-and-shoots have but nothing extreme. ISO sensitivity is OK, but not great: ISO 800 is useable at small sizes, but you'll want to stick to ISO 400 or below to keep the noise in check for most shots:

One thing that's awesome is the CX1's macro-mode, as is the case on lots of newer point-and-shoots. It focuses down to one centimeter, has a movable focus point (many macro modes get caught hunting if what you want in focus isn't right in the middle of the frame) and is razor sharp. Check out this clementine peel:

Shooting With the CX1
It's a pretty nice experience, due in large part to the wide range of custom functions available. A "Function" button, one of four on the camera's back, can be assigned one of nine jobs, from locking exposure to bracketing to setting the macro focus point.

And in addition, four quick-access function buttons that pop up when you hit the main "OK" button can also be custom-defined to whatever you want for immediate access to exposure compensation, white balance, ISO, image size—10 possible options. Super-handy.

The 60fps and 120fps burst modes (limited to VGA resolution) are usable, but they're not as smoothly implemented as other parts of the camera. It's really hard to know exactly when recording starts, and the output is a practically useless .MPO file, which you have to open in Ricoh's software, split the MPO out into 120 JPEGs, then, if you want a movie, link them back together in something like Quicktime. That's what I did here; the results are nice (although limited to one second), but it's a pain in the ass since even VLC can't open these MPO files.

Conclusion
In-camera HDR is not a gimmick here—it's both usable and useful. Which is awesome. At $370, the CX1 is in the same price ballpark as most higher-end compacts, so your choice is basically HD video or the CX1's unique photo features. The CX1 implements the latter very nicely, in a classically sleek, compact metal body. It's not a huge surprise that tons of Japanese pros carry a Ricoh P+S in their pocket to supplement their DSLRs.

In-camera HDR works well and is handy

Super-sharp macro mode

Deeply customizable interface

Great-looking body

Decent ISO sensitivity

High-speed burst kind of sucks

No HD video capture

No RAW shooting or manual exposure controls

[Ricoh]

Like the original Epic, it transforms the art of panorama into a machine process, automatically tilting and moving your camera to capture hundreds (or however many) photos of the large-scale scene you want to capture. It then downloads all of those photos from your camera and stitches them together with its proprietary software to create ginormous photos with thousands of megapixels, like this.

It has a bunch of smaller tweaks to the original as well, like the ability to take nine shots in the same position before moving, which Charlie notes means you can shoot high-dynamic range photos panoramas with the Epic 100, provided you've got the memory card space and the battery juice. Speaking of, it apparently still uses six AA batteries, meaning the original Epic's Achilles' heel Mark found is intact—actually, since it's moving a heavier camera and now has a backlit LCD, it seems like it could be worse. Not bad for $450, still.

If you're still not satisfied with the size of this thing, don't worry—GigaPan promises at the bottom of the page that they're working on the GigaPan DSLR imager. Could you imagine an uberpanorama of a city skyline at night composed with a 5D Mark II or Nikon D700? Hold on, I think I need to change my pants. [GigaPan Gadget Lab]

So when should you use HDR? It's simple: when you're trying to capture a scene with a wide range between its lightest and darkest areas (aka dynamic range) as accurately as possible. Your camera's sensor can only capture a small portion of the light that your eye can take in and process, so to make up for that, HDR images are created by combining the pixel information from several pictures into one 32-bit Voltron-file that contains the full dynamic range of each of the individual shots used to create it.

Take this range of shots of the Cairo skyline I took last week from the top of the highest minaret of the Al Azhar mosque in that lovely city. Neither one of the three accurately exposes the whole scene—in the shot that captures the sky correctly, the buildings below are too dark, and when the buildings are exposed accurately, the sun behind the clouds gets blown out, losing all detail. So this is the perfect situation for an HDR image.

But in many cases rightfully, HDR has a reputation as a gimmick that can easily be abused to turn your photos into dreadful, over-saturated, tacky looking messes of clown vomit. But if your main intent is to accurately capture a scene as your eye sees it, you can come away with some believable but still otherworldly (for a photograph, in a good way) images. In the end, it all comes down to personal preference; you may think my shot above looks like garbage. That's cool, save your comments, photo snob trolls. You're free to make your shots look however you want, and here's the best way I've found to do just that.

What You'll Need:
• A camera that has auto exposure bracketing (not essential, but without it, you'll have to set the range of exposures manually and will need a tripod). At the very least you'll need manual exposure controls.

• Photoshop CS2 or higher (you can also use specialized HDR software like Photomatix, but for this guide I'm using Photoshop CS4).

• Some knowledge of curves and histograms in Photoshop. This video tutorial is a great start for curves.

Take Your Shots
As mentioned before, you'll get the most bang for your HDR buck with scenes that have both extremely bright and extremely dark areas of interesting detail to bring out. So choosing the right scene is an obvious first step.

1. Set your camera to auto exposure bracketing mode, which takes three (usually) sequential shots at three different exposure levels: one correctly exposed, one overexposed, and one underexposed. You can usually specifiy the amount of exposure stops to under- and overexpose—you probably want the maximum range, which is usually a full two stops in either direction.

2. You want to take the three shots in the quickest succession possible since we'll be merging them later and you don't want moving objects to foul that up. So turn your camera on burst shooting where possible and hold down the button, firing off three quickies without moving. This is where you'll need a tripod for cameras without AEB to keep the shots uniform.

Note: If you can, shoot in RAW. Photoshop can handle RAW files just fine, and the extra exposure information within compared to JPEG will make your HDR images all the more juicy. Also, the more source images you have the better, so if you do have a tripod and are shooting an immovable scene, bringing more than 3 images to your HDR file will only give you more detail to work with.

Create Your HDR Image
3. In Photoshop, go to File -> Automate -> Merge to HDR. Select your three images, click "Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images" if you think they may be slightly crooked, and then hit OK. Photoshop will chew on them for a while and then present you with your 32-bit HDR image.

You may notice that the file you have now doesn't look so hot. That's because a 32-bit HDR image isn't useful in itself unless you have a $50,000 HDR monitor. To look good on your screen and on paper, it must now be "tone mapped" into an 8-bit image that selectively uses parts from each exposure to accurately represent the scene.

4. Before we head to tone mapping, save your HDR as a 32-bit Portable Bit Map file so you can start fresh again if need be.

Tone Mapping Your Image
How you tone map the HDR file determines whether your result will look great or like the aforementioned clown vomit. We're using Photoshop here because it's more closely tuned, in my opinion, to achieving real-world results than HDR-specific software like Photomatix. Here, though, personal taste is everything, so if you like your images more or even less saturated and otherworldly than I do here, feel free to experiment, of course. They're your photos! It also helps to keep an eye on your originals as you're doing this to make sure you don't stray too far from reality.

To become a skilled HDR jockey in the tone mapping department, you'll need to be at least a little bit familiar with two fundamentals of digital imaging that tend to hide in the background for most users—the scary-looking graphs known as histograms and curves, both of which look like they belong in your school text book.

But no need to cower in fear! Watch this video right now to get the basic gist of curves (and also, essentially, histograms).

Now, armed with that knowledge, to tone-mapping!

5. With your 32-bit HDR file open, go to Image -> Mode -> 8 Bits/Channel. This will bring up the tone mapping window, which has four options in the drop-down: Exposure and Gamma, Highlight Compression, Equalize Histogram and Local Adaptation. The first three, to varying degrees, are automatic settings. To say I understand the specific differences between all four would be lying, but I do know this: Local Adaptation is the only one that lets you manually futz with the image curve, giving you the most creative control. Choose that one (but feel free to experiment with the others, of course).

6. Here's where things get kind of abstract. If you watched your tutorial video, you'll know you want to use the eyedropper tool to isolate areas of the image you want to work with, then create an anchor point and move that section of the curve into the ligher or darker area of the graph. You can start with the easiest adjustment, which is dragging the lower-left portion of the curve to where the histogram begins—this will make the darkest parts of your image pure black, which you want for good contrast.

7. Your next goal should be to fiddle with a point higher on the curve to make your whites whiter. So grab a point up there and move it into the top portion of the graph until the whites are to your liking in the live preview.

8. And finally, choose a point in the middle and work the midtones. Again, preference is key, but you'll want something that, in the end, represents a classic S-curve for the best contrast. In the end, you want an image that has black blacks, white whites (but few to zero completely washed out areas), and detail through the midrange. Your image may still look not so good when your curve is done, but that's OK.

9. The last step in the tone mapping process is to mess with the good ol' Radius and Threshold sliders. Again, like many things in Photoshop, I have no idea exactly what's being jiggered here, but these essentially control how HDR-ed out your HDR images will look, if that makes sense. The wrong setting will peg the image's edge detail, resulting in some yucky looking mess. I like to keep a little bit of blown-out highlights in the image too, to remind everyone it's still a photo.

So fiddle with these sliders until the live preview looks good in your esteemed opinion. Again, your image won't look perfect, even now. The object here is to strike the right balance between detail and a natural look.

Toning Your Image
Now you have a good old fashioned 8-bit image that contains some elements of all three of your original source files, tone mapped. The final step is applying some of Photoshop's basic tools used for any photo in order to bring out the most detail possible.

10. First, Levels. Even though you set contrast with your tone curve, you may still be able to fine tune it with levels. So under Image -> Adjustments -> Levels, make sure the black and white sliders are aligned with the left and right edges of your histogram mountain to the extent that it pleases you.

11. Next, Image -> Adjustments -> Shadows/Highlights, one of Photoshop's most magical tools. Here is where the areas of your image that previously looked too dark will reveal their glorious hidden detail. Slowly raise the Amount and Tonal Width sliders under Shadows until the detail comes out, but not too far into ugly boosted-out territory. Do the same for Highlights.

12. And last, Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation, where you probably want to boost the Saturation just a little bit to get the colors popping to your liking.

And that's it! You should now have an HDR image that captures that amazing scene like you remembered it, without the clown vomit!

Like always, knowledge dropped in the comments of our Saturday How-To Guides is essential.Don't feel like my way is the only way—if you've got something constructive to share, please do! Happy HDR-ing this weekend everyone, and please do post your results in the comments. I want to see,

It's not the first (a few Pentax DSLRs do it, the K20 and K200) but it may very well be the first point-and-shoot to offer in-camera HDR (high dynamic range) processing.

HDR works by taking multiple exposures back-to-back (the Ricoh does two) of a difficultly-lit scene, one where there is a wide range between the brightest and darkest areas. Your eye, because it's awesome, can sort all this out on its own, but a digital camera's sensor can't. So what HDR does is blend the correctly exposed parts from each image into one shot which more closely matches what your naked eye is seeing. Generally it takes Photoshop or specialized software to merge your own manually bracketed shots into an HDR image, but the Ricoh does it automagically.

The technique can be pushed to extremes for horrifically gaudy results (see here if you don't believe me), but when done right, it's truly valuable to make the most out of difficult exposure situations. The Ricoh has four HDR strength settings so you can go for more subtle merges.

On top of that, there's a 9.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, 28-200mm zoom equivalent, and a 120 fps slow-mo video mode that captures at 640x480. It's popping in the UK in mid-march for £299 (around $430), but we'll probably hear more about a US release at PMA. Very cool stuff. [Ricoh Press Release/Specs via DPReview]

[Flickr via Neatorama]

Get in on this specialized style of photography with help from a $7.99 58-page PDF by Jack Howard entitled HDR: An Introduction to High Dynamic Range Photography. Here's how to get it, along with some free alternatives and helpful links:

Howard's PDF book looks like a great place to start, or you can just search the web and find lots of free tutorials on how to shoot and edit HDR photos, lens to screen. To get you started, here's the HDR group on Flickr, and here's a good HDR tutorial. Go ahead, violate that large-scale tonal hierarchy.

HDR: An Introduction to High Dynamic Range Photography [O'Reilly, via boing boing]

HDR: High Dynamic Range Photography [Cambridge in Color]

What I'd like to know is, cameras can autobracket exposure as it is. Why can't we build this into cameras as a feature? And then, my eyes. –Brian Lam

Tokyo HDR Shots on Flickr [via Boingboing, Jean Snow, Gridskipper]
[]

Another great feature of this recorder is its ability to record television programs in color. Hello, Bang & Olufsen? Consider high-definition—maybe you've heard of it. It just might catch on. Good luck with this 980 ($1830) brick. It's just laughable. – Charlie White

Bang and Olufsen unveil the HDR 2 hard disk recorder [Pocket Lint]