GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Fujifilm’s retro-fantastic X100 is probably the hottest-looking camera you’ll see this year. Announced at this year’s Photokina tradeshow, the magnesium-clad compact makes it look like Fujifilm took the wish-list of many photographers and made it real.

The first thing you’ll notice is the styling, which looks almost exactly like the rangefinder cameras of the past, right down to the flash being placed where the little bright-line illuminator window would go on, say, a Leica, and the giant viewfinder being placed over to the left (from the user’s point of view).

In fact, the whole camera is laid out like an old-style rangefinder. The shutter-speed is set by turning a dial on the top plate (as it the exposure compensation). The aperture is set by twisting a dial around the lens itself and the on-off switch is a collar a round the shutter-release. In fact, from the product-shots, it appears that the shutter-release is drilled and threaded for a manual cable-release.

Then we get to the lens. The 2 lens is a fixed 23mm, which equates to 35mm on a full-frame camera. This is the classic focal-length for a rangefinder, and coupled with the 12.3MP SLR-sized APS-C sensor, means that you’ll be able to throw backgrounds out of focus, as well as shoot in very low light (the maximum ISO of 6400 will help there, too).

But the real “holy shit” moment comes with the viewfinder. It works just like a normal optical viewfinder, but has a prism stuck in the middle. Light from the scene in front passes straight through to your eye, but off to the side is a tiny 1,440,000 dot LCD screen. When on, the panel can either superimpose camera-info onto the image or – get this – function as a super high-res optical finder. You can switch between modes with a hardware button (it’s the lever on the front) Here’s the picture:

To be clear, this means that you can use this like an old-style camera, with distraction-free framing but also with the parallax errors of a non-through-the-lens finder, or you can swap to see what you’d see in an SLR. I’m guessing that you’d also get the focus points shown, and maybe even an in-finder histogram?

The X100 will also shoot 720p video, and has a regular 460,000 dot screen on the back, along with the usual host of digicam buttons, and there is even a built-in 3-stop neutral density filter so you can cut out some light and still use the lens wide-open in bright sunlight.

I’m ridiculously excited by this camera. It’s coming out in March of next year, and, at $1000, I predict that Fujifilm won’t be able to make them fast enough. This, you probably already know, is the camera Leica should be making.

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Finepix X100 [Fujifilm]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

This is excellent: a stop-motion animated film using only two-dimensional light shapes generated by an iPad.

The film was made by design consultants Berg on behalf of Dentsu, a London-based creative communications agency. Dentsu asked: “What might a magical version of the future of media look like?” Berg responded with this film.

The first half of the video above describes the process used to produce it, which Jack Schultz from Berg compares to a virtual CAT scan. They create a software template that plots 3-D models and generate “stills” that replay on the moving iPad. Long-exposure photography does the rest.

The resulting animations are astonishingly versatile: they include abstract alphabetic and geometric figures, but also dancing robots, blocky automata, and diffuse molecular effects.

The filmmakers also make terrific use of their landscape; some of the light figures are photographed reflected on or seen through surface. The ghostly city lights and shadowy iPad “handlers” are also part of the film, and surprisingly moving.

Dentsu’s Beeker Northam writes that the project grew out of the meaning of each of the three words, “Making,” “Future,” and “Magic”:

• Making, with its emphasis on craftsmanship, understanding of materials and media, and collaboration;
• Future, meaning something not seen before, something new and unexpected (not so much sci-fi, as near-future);
• and Magic surprising, culturally powerful, unusual, capable of delighting.

This is the first of two collaborations between Berg and Dentsu. I don’t know what these film costs or how long they took to program and photograph, but I see tremendous potential here. Light is the new clay.

Making Future Magic: light painting with the iPad [Berg London]
Light Painting Video ‘Making Future Magic’ Is Made of 3-D and iPad Genius [Switched]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

You’re a photographer: Imagine being able not only to walk around your subject, but to whisk yourself away and shoot from anywhere you choose, however high your want, like James Cameron guiding his virtual cameras in Avatar. With Anthony Jacobs’ new autonomous camera-copter, you can.

The new rig is the sequel to the HD video-camera we saw swept into the skies of New York by a remote-controlled quadrocopter last year. Jacobs, the photographer and inveterate tinkerer behind that setup, is back, and this time he’s using GPS and lifting video-shooting DSLRs into the air. Jacobs is pitching this new platform at photojournalists, and here’s why:

Say you are on the ground at a natural disaster site (or perhaps BP’s heavies are trying to prevent you from grabbing your shot). You fire up the four-rotor copter and fly your camera into position. Hit a switch and the GPS-control kicks in. Combined with the inherent stability of a quadrocopter and its gyroscopes, the platform stays exactly where it is, even in wind.

The photographer can now drop the remote and concentrate on taking photos or video. A live video-feed is sent back from the camera to an 8-inch LCD-screen for composition, and a three-axis gimbal, controlled by another remote, allows the camera to be swung independently into position. This allows the photographer to capture shots otherwise impossible to get, or too dangerous to shoot by hand. It could also give amazing perspectives on sports games (although we guess it could all be brought down by an unlucky football).

And when you’re done, you just hit the “home” button and the camera will fly itself right back to you. But there’s more: Are you an indie-filmmaker looking to add some expensive looking boom-shots and fly-bys to your movie? Check this out:

With one person piloting and the other working the camera, this is a lot cheaper than renting a helicopter. For the photojournalist working alone, the whole thing packs into a single Pelican case, making it portable and tough enough to take anywhere. As Jacobs says in the email he sent me, “I believe this [...] would make a lot of readers drool!” He’s dead right.

Canon 5D Mark II Aerial Drone – Autonomous GPS Position Hold [Perpective Aerials. Thanks, Anthony!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Does your Twitter/Facebook/IM avatar suck? The answer is likely to be a resounding “probably”. You need a custom caricature, and being a proper geek, you should get it not from the dodgy street-artist with the portfolio of sample “work” downloaded from the internet, but over the actual internet.

That’s just what Dave Lanham, artist extraordinaire and designer at the Icon Factory (the people behind Twitterific and a lot more besides) is doing. Dave is holding FaceTime calls with his iPhone 4 and drawing the portrait of the person at the other end. The hi-resolution Retina display no doubt helps him to see deep into your soul.

The fun started when Dave broke his foot and was left lounging around the house. His friend Gio Gutierrez (right) volunteered for a portrait and then things just got bigger and bigger. Dave is charging $50 per portrait, which you can then use as your online personality (or print on a T-Shirt, we guess, if you are really narcissistic). The demand is likely to be huge, so even if you can’t get on his list, you should check out Dave’s website, which has time-lapse videos of his work being made.

FaceTime Portraits [Dave Lanham on Flickr]

@dlanham [Twitter]

Dave’s website home-page [Dave Lanham]

Picture credit Dave Lanham (Under Creative Commons)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The RetroN 3 Video Gaming System is a piece of hardware that gets almost everything right. The red (or black, thankfully) box houses chips capable of playing any NES, SNES or Genesis (Megadrive) games you may still have lying around. Simply slot the cart into the correct top-hole and you can play anything from Streets of Rage through Super Mario Anything to, erm, Top Gun: The Second Mission.

Output is via S-video or composite AV, and input is via a pair of wireless game-pads. But here’s the clincher, the feature that makes this probably the greatest retro-gaming rig we’ve seen: You don’t have to use the supplied controllers. The box has six extra sockets so you can hook up two each of your original joypads for all three consoles.

The box is quite reasonably priced, too, considering the amount of kit that you get, at just $70. Sure, it doesn’t have the old-school, chunky plastic good-looks of the originals, but so what? It’s retro-gaming heaven.

RetroN 3 Video Gaming System [Hyperkin via Oh Gizmo!]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

What does an AT-AT do when it’s not advancing over the icy wastes of Hoth or crushing trees and blasting stupid teddy-bears on the forest moon of Endor? Why, it chases dogs, sniffs fire-hydrants and drops dog-eggs on the sidewalk, just like any other four-legged pet, of course.

This fantastic video by Patrick Boivin, entitled AT-AT Day Afternoon, shows a day in the life of a pet AT-AT. It’s a little too full of schoolboy humor, but the Jabba gag is priceless. Best of all, it’s only a minute long, so you have no excuse not to quickly brighten your day. I wish my brother’s toy AT-AT had been this much fun, instead of just collecting dust and filling up the toy-box.

AT-AT Day Afternoon [YouTube via Geekologie]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews