Camera

The World’s First 720-Degree Camera Is A Little Underwhelming

If you haven’t heard, 360-degree cameras are a thing. They’re going to be a big thing when virtual reality takes off. Imagine being able to relive any moment in your life, revisit any place you plopped down a camera. But 720-degree cameras, well… those are a bit of a marketing ploy! That’s not to fault…

The Best Camera for Every Parent

If you have kids, the impulse to document every instant of their waking lives is nearly as powerful as the impulse to feed and shelter them. I’ll help you find the perfect camera to freeze those priceless moments. If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably already come to the same conclusion I did: Smartphone cameras…

How a mobile phone camera works visualized

Many people know how a camera works—at least conceptually. In the practice, it’s not easy to imagine (in fact, it truly blows my mind if I really think of it.) This excellent 3D visualization shows exactly how the photo is taken. Very very neat. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

HTC Is Planning a Second RE Action Camera

HTC’s attempt to take on GoPro with a, err, plastic periscopewasn’t its finest hour. But now, according to its North Asia president Jack Tong, it plans to give it a second try. Speaking to Focus Taiwan, Tong said that HTC will launch a new standalone camera next year. An attempt to grow its product range…

Samsung Project Beyond: A 360° Camera For Streaming Virtual Reality

Samsung’s serious about virtual reality, and not just with a fancy headset accessory for the Note 4. The company’s also built its own lightweight 360-degree camera, dubbed Project Beyond. Though details are scarce, Samsung says it can give you a full 3D, 360 degree view of anywhere it films, and it won’t just be a…

PSA: Camera+, which has long been one of our favorite camera apps for iOS, is temporarily free, rather than $2.99. To get the deal, you have to find an ad in the Apple Store iOS app, and then redeem it in the App Store — Redmond Pie’s got the full details here. It’s worth a…

The $800 Camera I Didn’t Use To Share My Hawaiian Vacation Photos

My wife loves technology. Hell, she spotted the job posting that landed me my first tech writing gig. She also loves sharing snapshots with friends. So when I told her that the Sony RX100 IIIcould sling amazing selfies to Instagram with a tap of her phone, she was understandably stoked. When we packed our bags…

HTC’s Desire Eye Smartphone Will Stare Into Your Selfie-Taking Soul

Do you take selfies? Your answer doesn’t matter because almost all smartphone manufacturers think you do. That’s why iPhones now feature front-facing burst modes and some Lumias are designed with selfies in mind. Today, HTC is joining the parade with the new Desire Eye. The main attraction? A giant 13 megapixel front-facing camera right where…

Finally, Foolproof Teleconferencing (I Hope)

How much do you hate Polycom? GoToMeeting? Vidyo? Skype? Or whatever the hell else you use to hold meetings with distant colleagues? Well, I’m here to tell you that somebody may have finally figured out a foolproof way to make teleconferencing actually work. “May” because I only spent ten minutes with the so-called solution, but…

Watch This Madman Fix the iPhone 6’s Biggest Design Flaw With a Grinder

The industrial design of the iPhone 6 is close to flawless… Except for one flaw so weird, so major, that it’s maddening: The fact that the camera protrudes from the body of the phone, meaning it never lies completely flat and gets caught on all kinds of stuff. The perfectionists at PeripateticPandas have a solution,…

Sony’s Rumored QX1 Lens Could Turn Your Smartphone Into a DSLR

That camera breakdown above is reportedly Sony’s new ILCE-QX1 lens camera system. Originally leaked by the Xperia Blog, this lens is the next evolution in Sony’s determination to transform your smartphone lens into a more professional grade shooter. The biggest addition to Sony’s QX lineup, which includes the QX10 and the QX100fixed lenses, is that…

A Simple Trick to Protect Your PIN From Thieves With Thermal Cameras

Thermal cameras were once expensive and bulky hunks of equipment that very few people could get their hands on. No longer. With FLIR’s new iPhone case thermal imaging cameras are now both affordable and incredibly discreet, which means that evil-doers can use it to see the thermal signature your fingers leave on a keypad and…

Google’s Awesome 360-Panorama Photo Sphere App Comes to iOS

Since making its debut on Android a little over a year ago, Photo Sphere has been one of those “Hey, look what my phone can do!” things that Android users have lorded over their non-Android friends. Today, though, Google is opening the doors to iPhone users with the Photo Sphere Camera app of iOS. This…

Two of the Best iOS 8 Features Apple Didn’t Talk About

There’s plenty of great new stuff coming in iOS 8. You’ll be able to remote control your phone from your computer to send text messages. There’s soon to be an army of new keyboard options. It’s a brave new world. But Apple didn’t even mention some of the best new features on stage. There are…

Fake Camera Commercial Shows How Dumb Today’s Tech Will Someday Look

The Walley POS-86 is “the most advanced camera ever built.” It’s impossible to ignore all the power packed in its svelte 25-pound frame. And if you’ve watched a promo for any kind of consumer technology product in the past 10 years, you’ll get a chuckle out of this parody, because they nailed it. Everything about…

Leopard steals a camera because, screw you humans and your cameras

It has to be really annoying to be in your turf and have all these people come like the pest to take photos of you and leave crap around. If I were this leopard I would have stolen the camera, break it, and then poop on it. But I’m glad he didn’t so we could…

This crazy giant camera is not a fake but an awesome two-story café

When I first saw this giant camera standing bigger than the house next to it I instantly thought it had to be a fake. It wasn’t. It’s a real and quite wonderful place in South Korea: The Dreamy Café. The Dreamy Cafe looks like a giant red Rolleiflex, the legendary twin-lens medium format camera originally…

Nokia’s Lytro-like Refocus app is now available for all Lumias running WP8—not just those with PureView cameras.

The Standalone Camera is Dying

Time’s inexorable march has pushed another piece of tech to the brink of obsolescence. The dedicated camera is on the outs – or so claims designer Craig Mod in a contentious article for The New Yorker. Top photo by jeyp via flickr Mod’s piece recounts his prolonged love-affair with photography and photographic equipment, including his…

This spectacular video looks like a superhero movie but it’s real

The slow motion clips in this video by Simmon Hammond look like computer generated scenes from a superhero movie—the exquisite photography, the dramatic color, and the camera moves are just too perfect to be real. But it is real. And it feels magical. It may be a commercial for the Sony A7R cameras but I…