Imaging
”Sound Wave-Driven Liquid Lenses Good For Lightweight Future Phones, UAVs
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with this freaky adaptive liquid-lens that can capture 250 in-focus images per second. It's essentially droplets of water in a pair, trapped in chamber and driven by a high-frequency sound wave to oscillate. More »Ricoh R10 Digital Compact Cam is Updated R8, Bigger Screen
Ricoh's previous-gen R8 digital cam only hit the streets back in February, and it's now being replaced by the new R10. The R10 has a larger 3-inch screen, 7.1x optical zoom, and a 10-megapixel CCD sensor that can shoot at ISO80 to ISO1600. There's also four-person face recognition, CCD-shift anti-shake compensation, a 1-cm macro mode and lots of "easy" presets that make the camera do automatic leveling of contrast and sharpness in the images it takes. It's out in black, brown and silver September 5th in Japan at first for around $450. [DCWatch]Fujifilm F60FD Point-And Shoot Has 12 Megapixels, Auto Scene Detection
FujiFilm has just added to its series of FinePix digital cameras with the F60FD, designed for easy point-and-shoot operation. It's got a 12-megapixel SuperCCD sensor, 3-inch display, mechanical image stabilization and 3x optical zoom. Plus its software lets it do advanced face detection of up to 10 faces for optimum focus and exposure settings, with auto red-eye removal. And there's a new feature dubbed Scene Recognition where the camera detects the kind of picture you're trying to take, then adjusts itself into macro, landscape or night-shot modes automatically: Handy for the beginner photographer. It's available September for around $300. [TFTS]Sony Updates Cybershot Range with Skinny T700 and T77 Cameras
Sony just updated its T-series of Cybershot digital cameras with the DSC-T700 and DSC-T77 models. Both have a 10.1-megapixels CCD, with Carl Zeiss Barrio Tessa optics, including a 4x optical zoom, the "smile shutter" and Bionz image processing engine. The T77, an update on the earlier T70, is apparently the "worlds thinnest touchscreen point-and-shoot camera" at just 0.55-inches deep, has a 3-inch touchscreen, 15MB of internal memory and shoots up to ISO3200. Its bigger brother, the T700, has 4GB of built-in storage and a 3.5-inch touchscreen that has close to a million display pixels. Both will be available at the end of September, in a variety of colors: the T77 will cost you around $300, the T700 nearly $400. Press release below. More »Scientists Develop Micro Microscope: Fits on a Chip, Costs $10
There's been a bit of a rush of pocket/USB digital microscopes recently, but none can hold a candle to this development from the clever chaps at Caltech. They've done a neat bit of thinking and redesigned how microscopes work: their new optofluidic microscope combines microfluidics and standard chip design, and floats samples over a pinhole-camera-like detector. More »Canon Updates HD Palmcorders With HF11, HG21 Versions
Canon's AVCHD HF10 camcorder got an excellent reception earlier this year, and now Canon have tweaked it slightly into the upcoming HF11 version. The most important tweaks are doubling the internal storage from 16GB to 32GB and the addition of a 24Mbps high quality MXP imaging mode. Otherwise, most features of the camera remain the same. Similar tweaks have been made to last year's HG10 HDD camera, adding in the 24Mbps shooting mode, a 120GB drive and now allowing movies to be saved onto SD card whereas before it was limited to still imagery. Both cameras will be available in August for $1,300. [AVWatch]3R Systems ViTiny Pocket Digital Microscope, for Viewing Pocket Fluff?
Well, it might be for viewing your pocket fluff, if you've got a scientific mind and it's interesting to you. This new 'scope is a little smaller and more portable than ones we've shown before and features 24-90x zoom, a 1.8-inch LCD, 2MB of internal memory and a 300,000-pixel CMOS sensor. If you like exploring the world of the small and wiggly, then you'll have to wait as there's no info on pricing or availability. [Akihabaranews]
Printoutable Pinhole Cameras: Old, New Imaging Tech Collide
Did you ever do a pinhole camera experiment in school? No? You missed out on some good long-exposure fun. But now you can catch up: the folks at picture agency Corbis have got a bunch of strange designs you can print out, stick to some card and turn into your very own pinhole camera. The idea is that you stick some 35mm film in them, but if you want to mess around with chemicals (always the most fun part of it all, to my mind) you could always pop a bit of photo paper inside. Should take you right back to the early days of photography... great for landscapes, or those stern-looking portraits of people prepared to sit very still for a while. [Corbis via Crave]
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