digitizing

Less than two months after Casio announced the Exilim EX-Z77 and S880, the company has unveiled two new digital cameras. The Exilim EX-V8 offers a 7x zoom in an ultracompact shell; the EX-Z1080 features the highest ISO sensitivity we've seen yet on a Casio camera.

The Exilim EX-V8 replaces the EX-V7 as Casio's higher-zoom camera. The 8-megapixel V8 keeps its predecessor's 7x zoom, 38mm- to 226mm-equivalent, f/3.4 to 5.3 lens, giving it the highest zoom power of the current crop of Exilims. Like the V7, the V8 uses sensor-shift image stabilization to help reduce … Read more

If you've ever used Picnik (review) before, you have an idea of how far online photo editing has come. Similarly, there's Fotoflexer, a user-friendly photo editor that offers one-click tweaks, along with some advanced tools on par with desktop class photo editing software. The service has been around since late last year, and is launching version two this morning.

Like several other online photo editors, Fotoflexer integrates major services like Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, and Facebook to pull your photos down for editing. Short of MySpace (which doesn't have an open API), you can send your edited photos back to all of them if you've plugged in your login credentials. Once you've found a photo you want to "flex," the app will jump you out to a full-screen editing canvas, where you have quick tabbed controls for all the usual editing goodies like rotation, a cropping tool and a resizer. You'll also find some fun distortion effects similar to the liquefy tool in Photoshop (as seen in the screenshot below). This is probably the most enjoyable of the bunch, since it processes the effect in real-time.

The real claim to fame however, is Fotoflexer's Smart Cutout and Recolor effects, which can help you cut out various pieces of a photo, or recolor them to match the tone of your choice. The cutout is the more useful of the two, and lets you cut people or objects out from a shot without having to trace their outline. If you've ever used Photoshop's magnetic lasso or masking tool, you'll know full well how tedious a process this can be. Instead, you use a small paintbrush to "tag" objects you'd like to keep or remove. One click later, and the app will do its best to single out those parts of the photo. If it makes slight mistakes, you can then go back in and remove or replace bits and pieces manually.

Once you've got a cutout, you can add it into another photo, or bring another shot in to the workspace. Fotoflexer lets you have as many layers as you want, and you can move them up and down, or merge them by simply right-clicking. Again, it's probably one of the few Web apps for photo editing that offers contextual menus.

Despite its beauty, there are a few snags here and there. For one thing, even in full screen, the editor remains the same size, which looks and feels very odd if you're using a wide screen monitor. The feature is being added as early as this week according to the Fotoflexer team, although in the meantime, if you're working with a landscape shot, things feel a bit cramped. There's also a lack of some of the advanced editing controls on the quick color effects. For example, clicking the "stamp" button will do its best to make your shot black and white shot with an excess of contrast, however there's no slider or option to tweak it. You either like it or you don't. Luckily, if you know what you're doing, you can achieve similar effects by using the advanced options to recreate each effect manually.

All in all, Fotoflexer is a really well put together app that could make a solid piece of standalone software. The fact that it's free and runs in your browser makes it even better.

See also: Picnik, Pikifx, Phixr, Wiredness, Fauxto, Snipshot, and Pixenate.

… Read more

A few days before Apple started selling the iPhone, I decided I wasn't going to buy one, and I said… Read more

For decades, tech companies have been trying to create a digital pen that appeals to the masses. But after years of effort, the world isn't exactly overrun with high-tech quills.

A new crop of companies, however, say it's too soon to write off the idea.

This week, Irvine, Calif.-based Iogear announced plans for a digital pen that can work with standard paper. Last month, educational computer maker LeapFrog introduced the FlyFusion, its second go at the digital pen. And later this year, Silicon Valley start-up LiveScribe plans to introduce a $200 device that can not only take … Read more

Pentax very quietly announced two new cameras late yesterday. The first, an 8MP model called the Optio Z10, marks new territory for Pentax with a sliding lens cover that moves sideways and, like the sliding covers on Sony cameras, turns the camera on and off. Sony often gets credit for the sliding lens cover design in digital cameras, but many compact film cameras incorporated sliding lens covers years before Sony started using them in its digital cameras.

While those film cameras often had mechanical issues due to their extending zoom lenses, this Pentax has an internally zooming refraction lens. The … Read more

The rumors have been fierce--and some of them have been true--yet now Nikon has made it official. Their new weather-sealed, top-of-the-line dSLR, the 12.2MP D3, will have a full frame CMOS image sensor, which Nikon has dubbed the FX format. Well...OK, it's almost a full-frame sensor. It measures 36mm by 23.9mm; just 0.1mm vertically shy (does that make it vertically challenged?) of the technical full-frame spec, but we'll let that slide. I know that any Nikon owners with DX lenses must be reeling right about now, so it pays to mention that the D3 … Read more

Just in case the announcement of the pro-level D3 isn't enough for you, Nikon has also announced a big brother for its D200 called the D300. The D300 will sport a 12.3MP DX format (24x16mm) CMOS sensor, 3-inch 920,000-dot (307,000-pixel) LCD, and sensitivity of ISO 200 to ISO 3,200 with a Hi-1 mode that extends that to an equivalent to ISO 6,400 and a Lo-1 mode that extends down to ISO 100. Many of the D300's features are the same as the ones found in the D3. For example, the D300 has the … Read more

With Nikon's two new high-end SLRs announced today, it makes sense that the company would want to update its pro lenses to go along--and Nikon has delivered, with five new pro lenses covering a wide range of focal lengths. All of these new lenses include Nikon's new Nano Crystal Coating to minimize internal lens reflections, indicated by a badge with a prominent N on the lens, as well as Extra-Low Dispersion (ED) glass elements to cut down on chromatic aberration. Plus, all five lenses will hit stores this November, just in time for the new SLRs. Let's … Read more

Parents already have a way to monitor kids' phone calls and text messages, and soon they might have the means to track children wearing school uniforms.

An English manufacturer of uniforms is considering adding satellite tracking devices to its line of school clothing so that parents can locate their child's whereabouts at all times, according to an article from the Daily Telegraph in Australia. The manufacturer, Lancashire-based Trutex, believes there is a demand for such clothing. In a recent survey of its own, the company found that 59 percent of 800 parents surveyed were interested in buying uniforms with … Read more