Recently in Technology Category

The good ship Micro Four Thirds has barely slipped from the ways but there's already a torpedo in the water aimed to strike her hull. That fish was fired by Samsung in interviews with trade writers last weekend.

In separate gab sessions at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin with Nigel Atherton, of What Dgital Camera, and Damien Demolder, of Amateur Photogrpaher, Samsung brass told the scribes that it was working on a hybrid digital camera along the lines of the one being developed by proponents of the Four Thirds imaging system. However, Samsung's hybrid would be based on an APS-C sized processor, not the Micro Four Thirds standard announced last month by Olympus and Panasonic.

It seems the Korean Company's motivation behind development of a mirrorless digital camera that uses interchangeable lenses is very similar to that of its 4/3 adversaries. Samsung Executive Vice President Byung Woo Lee is quoted by Atherton as saying: "Our research has shown us that there is a big demand for a new type of camera product. One that has the sophistication and interchangeable lenses of a digital SLR, but is smaller and more user-friendly."

Not only does Samsung's rationale for a hybrid sound familar, but so does its feature set for the snapper--electronic viewfinder, high quality LCD and new lens mount. Those similarities, reasons Atherton's colleague Demolder, may be why the company wants to make its intentions known so far in advance for a product that probably won't reach consumers until 2010,

"Establishing a public consciousness of their intensions may deflect future copying claims," he writes, "and, of course, Samsung wants the world to wait for its APS-C version."

Olympus and Panasonic (a.k.a. Matsushita Electric Industrial) rocked the digital photography world yesterday with their announcement that they were working on a scaled-down version of their 4/3 camera system. The new Micro Four Thirds standard is expected to stoke the market for digital cameras with interchangeable lenses by creating a new generation of snappers in that category that will be small, light and easier to operate than anything on the market to date.

"The global market for interchangeable lens-type digital SLR cameras is growing steadily, but still only accounts for a 7% share of the total digital camera market," the companies said in a joint statement.

"Considering the much larger share held by interchangeable lens-type SLR camera systems when film was the dominant imaging medium, it seems that there is still ample room for sales growth in the category," they continued.

Cameras using the new MFTS technology will be thinner--even slimmer and lighter than the Olympus E-410, an ultra-compact DSLR that uses standard 4/3 technology--and their lenses will be smaller than DSLRs being sold now. That's because the distance from the lens mount to the sensor has been reduced 50% and six millimeters have been shaved off the outer diameter of the lens mount. Moreover, the guts of the camera has been redesigned so it doesn't need a mirror, prism or optical viewfinder to take photos.

In addition, the number of electrical contacts in the mount has been increased from nine to 11. That, the companies predict, should increase support for new features and increase system functionality. What those features might be will be the subject of speculation until the first models deploying the technology are announced, but they could include an optical image stabilization system, high-speed focusing motor and support for video capture.

What the new MFTS cameras will cost is yet to be determined, but market sense would seem to dictate that pricing be below that for existing entry-level DSLRs.

How soon might we see a camera with this new technology? Possibly very soon, according to one reporter. Leonard Goh, writing today for Cnet Asia, observed: "Our sources told us Panasonic may be launching a new DSLR during Photokina in September, and we wonder if the new format will take center stage then. We'll find out next month."

Some of us are old enough to remember the old advertising campaign by the Telephone Company that popularized the catchphrase "reach out and touch someone." With a little modification the tagline might serve as the motto of a new consortium announced yesterday by a group of imaging industry heavyweights. Instead of "reach out and touch someone," however, the new battle cry will be "reach out and touch something."

The new TransferJet Consortium has been formed to promote a proximity wireless technology that enables the rapid transfer of high resolution video, music and images between electronic devices. With the technology, when two compliant devices touch each other, files can be transferred between them without the need for an access point. For example, touching a TV with a digital camera would allow photos in the camera to be instantaneously displayed on the TV.

The list of founding members of the consortium is an impressive one. It includes Sony, Canon, Kodak, Hitachi, Kenwood, Panasonic, Nikon, Olympus, Pioneer, Samsung, Seiko Epson, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba.

According to a statement from the consortium, it will be developing specifications and guidelines to ensure the interoperability between products incorporating the technology, as well as establish licensing schemes and administer the use of the technology's logo.

How long it will take the technology to make it to the mainstream is anyone's guess, but its developer, Sony, demonstrated prototype TransferJet devices at CES earlier this year.

Touch-screen devices are all the rage these days. Their convenience and cachet have seduced digital device makers of every denomination, including bytecam houses like Sony and Panasonic. But a tech breakthrough by Capella Microsystems may give them something that will still be present after the lapdogs of fashion move on to the next trend. That something is longer battery life. The Santa Clara, Calif.based fabless semiconductor company announced yesterday that it has produced an industry first--a proximity and ambient-light sensor chip. The chip can be used for a number of applications like deactivating the display on a touch-screen phone when it's placed near an ear for talking. In the photographic world, it can be used to automatically turn a camera's LCD on or off depending on whether or not its operator is looking through the unit's viewfinder. By shaving the time that a display is active, the chip can extend the battery life of a device. “In the past, proximity and ambient light sensors had never been combined in a single chip because of the cost and space required for plastic filters," Capella President Cheng-chung Shih explained in a statement. "Our patent-pending Filtron technology allows us to overcome this obstacle by building the optical filters into the chip as part of the integrated circuit fabrication process.”

High Dynamic Range photography--the fusing of several images of a scene to improve its tonal subtlties--has been primarily the realm of protogs and Adobe Photoshop merlins, but the technique seems to be slowly reaching the point where any shutterbug with an experimental bent can explore the process without breaking their piggybanks purchasing a heavyweight editing program like Photoshop or HDR software like Photomatix. That's because there's an open source application called Enfuse that will perform the task for free. Granted, in its raw form the software is command-line driven. Former DOS users know what that means. Non-DOS users, take my word for it, you don't want to know what it means. But, as is often the case with open source programs, a few enterprising individuals have concocted graphic interfaces for the application to make it more palatable to Generation GUI.

Enfuse seems to stack up well against its commercial compettiion. In fact, users like professional photographer and blogger Larry Lohrman actually prefer it to market leader Photomatix. In an item published Monday in his Photography for Real Estate blog, the lensslinger acknowledged using Photomatix, but added, "The thing I like about Enfuse is you can get to almost the same place faster." While obtaining an HDR image with Photomatix is a two step process, he noted, Enfuse, which uses a technology called Exposure Fusion, can do it one step.

Improving the dynamic range of digital cameras is something bytecam makers have been focusing on lately. When you combine that with their obsession with including more and more editing features in their cameras, don't be surprised if something like Enfuse ends up in a camera one of these days allowing HDR photos to be made on the fly by anyone.

Digital photography has done more than change how we take pictures, it has changed how we present our photographs to others. Take the slideshow, for example. With film, a would-be slideshow meister was shackled to a projector, projection screen and maybe a tape recorder or turntable. Now, with some inexpensive software, you can create rich slideshows with music, attractive transitions and pan and zoom effects, and show them on an HD TV or Webcast them on the Internet. Even with digital manipulation, though, slideshows remain trapped in two dimensions. No doubt that will change in the future--as Microsoft is demonstrating at its Photosynth site.

Photosynth combines two technologies--Seadragon and Photo Tourism. Seadragon permits the smooth viewing of visual information over a network. Photo Tourism allows collections of images to be connected intuitively and to be accessed in a three-dimensional way. The result can be visually arresting--and the possibilities mind boggling. As Microsoft Live Labs founder and director Gary Flake told freelance journalist Jeffrey MacIntyre last week, people are collecting more and more digital media about themselves. A technology like Photosynth can allow families to "lifecast" their photo albums. "Imagine if you could watch your kids grow up in your own house, just from your photo collection," he said.

The patent peepers at Photography Bay have uncovered another intriguing notion with wide-ranging implications for the world of digital photography. They have eyeballed a patent filing by Canon for using a photographer's iris to watermark his or her images. According to the patent application, the proposed imaging apparatus "makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer for the purpose of personal authentication and writing this photographer information to the image of a subject without affecting processing, and in a manner transparent to operation, at the time of photography."

Rather than acquire the necessary biological information each time a shot is taken, the application explains, the Canon system provides a means for registering that information once, storing it aboard the camera and embedding it in each image shot with the camera. The iris data is batch written to collections of images, according to Photography Bay. "The purpose of the collective tagging...is to refrain from hampering the camera’s speed (frames per second) while shooting," it elucidates.

As concern about unauthorized use of digital images grows, we can expect more schemes like Canon's to protect a photographer's intellectual property from pic nickers.

Sigma Corporation captured some prestige ink yesterday when Ian Austen wrote a short item in the Circuits section of the New York Times on the company's DP1 compact digital camera. Austen, though, seemed to be distracted by what the byteshooter didn't have by what it does have. Sure, the absence of an optical viewfinder and even a meager 3x zoom in a $799 camera may be irritating omissions to some shutterbugs, but they will be minor irritants if the Foveon processor at the heart of the unit delivers as promised. That point appears to have been missed by Austen, who seems to be more impressed by megapixel count than the cutting edge technology at the core of the camera. Maybe I've just been Gilderized by Foveon, but the DP1 could be the most exciting digital camera released this year.

Two advantages that non-SLR digital cameras had over early DSLR snappers were the ability to see what was being shot through their LCDs and the capability to shoot moving pictures in the form of video. The latest generation of DSLR's with their "live view" features have knocked off the shoot-through-the-LCD advantage. Now a new patent filed with the U.S. Patent Office by Hroshi Terada, of Japan, promises to terminate the moving-picture advanatage, as well. According to Photogrpahy Bay, the patent addresses a major barrier to shooting video with a DSLR: getting the camera's auto-focusing system to work with both still and moving image capture.

In the abstract for his patent, Terada maintains that he has designed a digital SLR camera that "has a still image shooting mode and a moving image shooting mode, and performs different focusing operations between the still image shooting mode and the moving image shooting mode. According to present invention, the range of focusing tolerance or the driving speed of a focusing optical system can vary between the still image shooting mode and the moving image shooting mode such as to set the range of focusing tolerance wider or the driving speed of the focusing optical system slower in the moving image shooting mode."

Notes the author of the Photography Bay item: "Given that all of the major DSLR players feature some form of live view in at least part of their camera lines, I expect that a manufacturer will release a DSLR with a movie mode in the near future, perhaps this year. Personally, I expect this to be a consumer-grade DSLR, which would fit the market for such a feature. Additionally, I can see how this feature would be useful among photojournalists in today’s web-intensive media world."

Geotagging promises to be a hot technology for photographers this year. The idea of attaching geographical coordinates to photos and connecting them to online maps is starting to reach the mainstream imagination as is evidenced by a story moved this weekend by Associated Press writer Anick Jesdanun.

"Devices that already support geotagging include some GPS-enabled camera phones from Sprint Nextel Corp. and a newly unveiled gadget from Pharos Science & Applications Inc.," Jesdanun writes. "High-end cameras from Nikon Corp. and Ricoh Co. can directly connect to GPS devices, while the upcoming PhotoFinder from ATP Electronics Inc. will write GPS information directly on a camera's memory card."

"And photo-sharing services like SmugMug [see photo above], Google Inc.'s Picasa and Panoramio and Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr let you manually add photos to a map," the reporter adds. "Zoom in to New York's Central Park, for instance, to find individual photos taken at Strawberry Fields and other landmarks."