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Olympus has boosted the creativity quotient for lensslingers with its release today of its latest digital SLR based on the Four Thirds image processing system. The new 12.3 megapixel E-620 includes a set of art filters for producing on the fly effects such as

• emulating the pop art style of the 1960s
• bathing subjects in an ethereal light giving them an unworldly quality
• imitating the flat soft and pastel lighting of movie flashbacks
• softening the shade and highlight areas in a frame to add elegance to a shot
• draining the color and adding grain to an image to make it look ripped from an old documentary film and
• duplicating an image captured with a pinhole camera.

It also has the ability to capture overlapping exposures, which can open the door to all kinds of experimental effects.

Images with the DSC can be framed and shot through its pivoting 2.7-inch, 230,000 dot LCD or optical viewfinder. Pivoting displays enable a shooter to grab photos at extreme or unorthodox angles without twisting into a pretzel.

Another creative bonus built into the E-620 is the power to shoot at a variety of aspect ratios—4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 6:6 and 3:4.

The bytecam, built around a Four Thirds CMOS image sensor (17.3 x 13mm), also has a full complement of bracketing options, not only exposure bracketing but ISO, flash and white balance bracketing, too.

There's also an array of in-camera editing functions such as shadow adjustment, red-eye fix, image cropping, monotone and sepia conversion, saturation tuning and resizing.

Other features include face detection, four frame per second continuous shooting, in camera optical image stablization, shutter speeds from 60–1/4000 second and light sensitivity from ISO 100–3200.

The E-620 is scheduled to reach retailers in May at a body only price of $699.99 and a kit tab of $799.99 with 14–42mm Zuiko digital zoom lens.

A slew of new point-and-shoot digital cameras have been introduced by Canon—most of them with the company's powerful Digic 4 image processor and a Smart Auto feature that intelligently analyzes a scene and finds the optimal focus, exposure, image stabilization and white balance for it.

Some models also have face detection, motion detection and post shot blink detection, which alerts a shutterbug after a picture is captured that someone in the image blinked. One knock against typical blink detection is that it prevents a shot from being taken if it detects hooded orbs. That can leave many a clickster wondering if there's something broken in their new camera or just plain irritated that nothing happens when they press the shutter button.

Another neat treat in some of these new offerings is something that Canon's calling Active Display. It lets a photog page through photos in a camera with a simple wrist shake.

The priciest shooter of the new bunch is the 10-megapixel SX1 IS (photo above). It has a 20x optical zoom (28-560mm equivalent) and optical image stabilization. It can shoot 1080p HD video and has an HDMI interface. What's more, it shoots RAW and JPEG stills. The unit, which has a 2.8-inch LCD, is headed for retail shelves in April at $599.99.

Winners of the Nature Conservancy's annual Best Nature Photo contest for 2008 were named today by the organization. The Grand Prize was garnered by Howard B. Cheek of Kempner, Texas, for his arresting photo of a female cardinal about to make a landing (photo above). Runners up in the competition were David Moynahan, of Crawfordville, Florida, for his image of a yellow-crowned night heron in mating plumage and Patrick Smith, of Pleasant Hill, California, for his picture of Pinnacle Rock at Point Lobos State Park in the Golden State.

Steganography is a technology used to hide text documents in photos. To the human eye, the photo appears as a simple image but, in fact, the snapshot may be giving new meaning to the old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words.

If you're intrigued with the idea of burying secret text in your photos, a program released this week, QuickCrypto, may be worth trying.

The Windows software is a general purpose encryption application, but in includes among its many features a steganography function. The function allows you to hide plain text or encrypted files in photos. Those files can only be viewed by someone with a copy of QuickCrypto and knowledge of a password needed to unlock them.

One agreeable feature of QuickCrypto is it permits you to encrypt individual files on your hard disk. Some programs allow that to be done only to entire folders.

The software also has a password vault where passwords can be encrypted and hidden from prying hackers and a password generator for creating hard-to-break passwords.

Other features include a file shredding utility that meets U.S. Department of Defense standards and support of AES and Blowfish encryption methods.

QuickCrypto Professional costs $39.95. There's also a home edition offered at $14.95. A 15-day free trial version is available for download from the software writer's Web site.

Wireless USB technology hasn't exactly been taking off like gangbusters, but Samsung may be poised to change that with some new system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology it announced today. According to Samsung, its new W-USB SoC combines the convenience of wireless connectivity, the security level of wired USB, and the high performance of ultra wideband to instantly transform mass storage data such as digital photos, movie videos or MP3 music files between electronic devices. The company boasts that its new W-USB SoC can download a 700 megabyte movie in approximately one minute.

Initially, the technology is expected to be applied to digital cameras and mobile phones and gradually expand into other electronic devices such as wireless printers, beam projectors, wireless hard disks, wireless displays and wireless speakers. One application for the new tech cited by Samsung is the ability to directly send photos from a digital camera to a PC or view them instantly on a TV.

Samsung noted that its new SoC consumes very little power--less than 300 milliwatts--making it ideal for use with electronic devices like mobile phones and digital cameras.

Samsung's W-USB SoC is expected to go into mass production in the second quarter of this year.

Fujifilm's point-and-shoot digtial camera announcement this week adds to the company's reputation as a camera maker that refuses to be enslaved to the megapixel myth. The new pashoo, the FinePix F200EX, has a sensor that Fuji is calling the Super CCD EXR. It has three modes aimed at optimizing the quality of a photo by manipulating how the sensor's pixels are used to capture the shot.

There's a Fine Capture mode, which uses the sensor's entire 12 million pixels to snag images when lighting conditions are full and even.

There's a Pixel Fusion mode that melds adjacent pixels together to improve light gathering capabilities in low light scenarios.

And there's a Dual Capture mode that takes two 6MP pictures of a scene at different exposures then combines the pics to improve the dynamic range of the shot.

Any of the sensor's modes can be chosen manually or choice can be turned over to the camera through an auto EXR mode.

“There is strong demand in the digital camera market to increase the number of pixels on a sensor, which, all too often, is used as a convenient yardstick for image quality,” Fujifilm's Consumer Digital Cameras Marketing Manager David Troy said in a statement.

“Consumers," he continued, "have realized there’s more to a good picture than just the number of megapixels, and with our Super CCD EXR sensor we prove that true image quality is about a combination of many factors like tone, hue, color fidelity, dynamic range, sharpness, and resolution...."

Pentax got the jump on traditional Presidents' Day sales this week by rolling out a package of deals on its K line of digital cameras. Here's what the company is offering

• From February 1-22, a $100 in-store instant rebate will be issued with the purchase of any K20D ($724-$1400) body or kit.
• To March 31, free extension of K20D warranty to three years.
• To March 31, D-BG3 battery grip ($50-$140) for K200D will be $19.95 with the purchase of a K200D body and a Pentax lens.

Effective from February 1, these deals will be offered on the camera maker's K2000 (photo above) model.

• K2000 flash kit (camera, AF200FG Auto Flash and 18-55mm, F/3.5-5.6 lens) will sell for $599.95.
• K2000 two lens kit (camera; 18-55mm, F/3.5-5.6 lens and 50-200mm, F/4.5-5.6 lens) will be priced at $649.95.
• K2000 single lens kit (camera and 18-55mm, F/3.6-5.6 lens) will have a pricetag of $549.95.
• K2000 body only will be $499.95.

In additoin, the Pentax pricing package includes repricing of its Limited Edition white body K2000 two lens kit (camera; 18-55mm, F/3.5-5.6 lens and 50-200mm, F/4.5-5.6 lens) to sell for $679.95.

Not to be outdone by Panasonic, Nikon rolled out eight new Coolpix digital camera models this week, including two with monster zooms.

All the new DSCs have Nikkor lenses and are built around Nikon's Expeed processor. They also have a Smart Portrait feature that includes blink and smile detection and face detection for up to 12 mugs in a shot. In addition, they have 4-Way VR Image Stabilization that uses a quartet of technologies--digital image stabilization, motion detection, shutter speed boosting and "best shot"--to bash blur from photos.

The 12 megapixel Coolpix P90 has a 24x (28-624mm equivalent) optical zoom and three-inch tilting LCD, as well as an electronic viewfinder. It can shoot up to 45 2MP images at 15 frames per second and can capture 3MP pictures at ISO 3200 or 6400. The P90 will be available in March at $399.95.