Photography

The new top-end model from medium-format camera maker Hasselblad is now on the market, and it's not cheap: the 200-megapixel H4D-200MS will set you back 32,000 euros, or about $45,000.

The camera actually uses a sensor with a mere 50 megapixels, but with Hasselblad's multishot technology combines six shots into one. That means moving subjects such as fashion models need not apply. But a lot of this very high-end photography involves static subjects such as jewelry, watches, cars, and paintings for reproduction.

Hasselblad announced the H4D-200MS last September at the Photokina show. At the time, the … Read more

Google has improved the quality of WebP, an image format it promises will speed up the Web--if the company can just convince people to use it instead of JPEG.

WebP, unveiled last year, is a still-image variation of the company's open-source, royalty-free WebM video technology. Google's sales pitch: with its newer compression technology, Web pages will load faster and less network bandwidth is necessary compared to using JPEGs.

Now the company argues that it's improved quality of WebP images through more elaborate encoding software. It can, for example, concentrate its data on the complicated parts of … Read more

If you miss your Android apps when using your PC, a start-up called BlueStacks says it has the answer.

Today, the company announced first-round funding of $7.6 million from Ignition Ventures, Radar Partners, Helion Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz for its virtualization technology that provides a foundation for Google's mobile operating system atop Windows. It's got partnerships with Citrix for distribution to interested businesses and with assorted as-yet unnamed PC makers for consumers.

"The idea is very simple," said Chief Executive and co-founder Rosen Sharma, who previously was McAfee's chief technology officer. It … Read more

First came the halo effect of computer purchases: iPod or iPhone buyers deciding they'd like a Mac. Now I'm wondering whether there will be a similar trend among programmers.

I started pondering the idea after hearing from MacPhun, the developers of FX Photo Studio, a $1 iOS app that just made the jump to a Mac OS X app that costs $20 for the regular version and $40 for the pro version. If MacPhun is willing to take the leap, perhaps others are?

I see the move as an interesting possibility because of a few factors:

• The Mac … Read more

Sigma has announced it'll ship its SD1 camera in June for $9,700, a price that suggests it's aiming its new flagship SLR almost exclusively at professional photographers.

The Japanese company unveiled the Sigma SD1 last year at the Photokina trade show. The camera embodies the company's aspirations to rise beyond its present role as a maker of third-party lenses into a camera rival to powerhouses such as Nikon and Canon.

The SD1 pricing, though, indicates that Sigma is trying to leapfrog Canon's top-end, $7,500 1Ds Mark III and Nikon's competing $5,900 D3x … Read more

Lexar Media has overhauled its 2007-era dual-slot professional flash card reader to support fast new cards and the higher-speed USB 3.0 interface that have arrived in the last four years.

Like its predecessor, the new reader handles CompactFlash (CF) and Secure Digital (SD) memory cards. Unlike its predecessor, it can handle SDXC, a newer member of the SD card lineage that provides for larger capacities, and SD's UHS-1 higher-speed interface.

Things didn't change on the CF side of the shop; the older model supported the present high-speed standard for CompactFlash, called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access). CompactFlash … Read more

Adobe plans to update its Lightroom software and Camera Raw plug-in for Photoshop next week to address a "potentially severe bug" involving JPEG files.

The problem could affect people saving JPEG images taken with cameras that store large amounts of private camera information in the file's metadata--textual information such as captions, keywords, and titles that can accompany the actual photo.

"To date we've only found one camera that generates these large blocks of private data, the HP PhotoSmart R607," said Lightroom program manager Tom Hogarty in a blog post today. He added:

This bug … Read more

With an update released today, Apple's photo applications now can handle raw images from Nikon's new mainstream SLR and some new high-end compact cameras.

The Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.7 means iPhoto, Aperture, and Mac OS X can handle the unprocessed images from Nikon's D5100, Fujifilm's FinePix X100, Olympus' E-PL2 and XZ-1, and Samsung's GX-1S. For those who don't install the update, Apple rolls the support into later versions of Mac OS X.

Raw photos enable more flexibility for editing, for example letting photographers adjust exposure and white balance. The flexibility comes … Read more

Adobe Systems has lowered a barrier to using its Digital Negative (DNG) format, releasing an early version of software that makes it possible to see image thumbnails in 64-bit Windows.

DNG is an attempt to simplify the profusion of raw image formats that higher-end cameras can provide and to make it easier to add metadata such as captions and keywords to those image files. Although shooting raw is becoming an established part of the photo industry, Windows on its own can't show the images in Windows Explorer, file-management dialog boxes, or Photo Gallery software. Thus, camera makers have been … Read more