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digitization

2007 Canon PowerShot SD models hold a few surprises

Another year, another crop of snapshot cameras. This year, Canon's going a bit retro with its Elph design, bringing back the high-contrast black accents that appeared on the original film Elphs 10 years ago.

They've come a long way in that decade. This year's SD750 and SD1000 are 7-megapixel replacements for the the very popular 6-megapixel models, the SD630 and the SD600, respectively. Yes, that's right: The SD750 is the higher-end model of the two.

Despite disparate outsides, the two cameras are fundamentally the same. The major difference is a 2.5-inch LCD on the SD1000 … Read more

Canon's skyscraper cam

Cramming large lenses into ultracompact cameras isn't very new. Neither is a vertically oriented digital camera design--in fact, most of the earliest models looked more like camcorders than traditional film cameras. But most manufacturers have been folding their optical path sideways to fit 4x-plus lenses into tiny cameras. But when Canon went looking for more interiorl real estate to fit a 10x 39-to-390mm-equivalent lens into its new 7-megapixel ultracompact, it took a New York approach and went vertical.

The lens completely retracts back into the camera when powered off, and extends just about a half-inch past the camera body … Read more

News Roundup: Digg gets OpenID, Flickr downtime, 37signals Highrise teaser, Blinkx + Sproose partnership

Digg to adopt OpenID. Later this year, Digg will be adding OpenID to its site. OpenID, which we looked at back in September, creates a master password similar to what you get with Microsoft's Live ID, but it's not proprietary. ( TechCrunch)

Flickr outage reveals site's scale. Flickr wasn't working yesterday, but fear not--it's back up. The problem mixed up a large number of photos across the site, which quickly led to Yahoo shutting down the service for several hours. Interestingly enough, the outage revealed that at times, the site serves over a billion photos a day. ( … Read more

Sony's new Cyber-shot cameras partially revealed

An anonymous tipster has apparently tipped off Engadget to a catalog showing the British versions of Sony's new Cyber-shot cameras. Most of the catalog images indicate the information is confidential until February 27, which is when we'll have more details on the U.S models.

While you wait, here's what Engadget is reporting based on its catalog browsing: the new models are called the T20HDPR (camera/printer bundle), T100 (pictured), T20, H9, H7, G1, W200, and W90 Cyber-shots.

Engagdet says, "All the new cams bring Sony's Super SteadyShot image stabilization and HD output to the … Read more

Smile, say blub blub blub....

We said they were coming and here they are.

Fantasea, in addition to its many other underwater housings, is now offering them for the Nikon D-80 and the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. Both housings are each available for $1,099 from Fantasea and can withstand a depth of up to 200 feet under water.

For you Nikonians out there, the Fantasea FD-80 comes with a standard port (18-70mm zoom lens), but you can also buy interchangeable port accessories for different SLR lenses. Functions that work with the casing include: mode selection, menu, ISO, auto-focus mode, metering mode, exposure compensation, … Read more

Your photos cubed

eNecessities just redeemed itself in our book. Right after we panned the idea of its talking USB drive, the company has come up with a simple device that we could easily see using.

The "Desktop Digital Photo Cube" isn't for big-screen viewing, with displays only 1-inch square. But if you're on the road or just want a variety of photos without taking up a lot of desktop space, this is a handy item to have.

With sides a little over 2.5 inches square, the cube stores up to 30 photos and is powered through a … Read more

Nikon trips the light enthusiastic

This spring, Nikon's Coolpix P series of compact cameras--a steady, solid, mainstream family of midprice models--will be welcoming its geeky uncle Coolpix P5000 to live in the attic.

With the P5000, Nikon belatedly returns to the the market with an enthusiast-oriented compact. With features such as the full set of manual and semimanual exposure modes and a flash shoe, the black P5000 looks ready to take on the Canon PowerShot G7. And, in fact, it has many similar specs: a 10-megapixel sensor with maximum ISO 1,600 (ISO 3,200 at 5 megapixels), optical image stabilization, a 2.5-inch … Read more

Weekend Webware: Goodwidgets makes for snazzy photo sharing

You might have noticed on my Trillian Astra review earlier this week that I used a sliding image-gallery widget to showcase all of the screenshots. That sliding image widget came from the folks at Goodwidgets, a service that provides users with seven free widgets for photo sharing.

Once you've picked your favorite widget, you can upload photos from Flickr, Photobucket, 23 photo-sharing service, or your hard drive. From there, you have a few options to tweak, like color schemes and how big you want it. When you're done adding photos and getting it just the way you want … Read more

Lexar's first SDHC card

Lexar this morning announced its first Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) memory card. Part of the company's Professional line, the 4GB card carries a 133x speed rating, which Lexar translates into a minimum sustained write speed of 20MB per second. For those unfamiliar with the new SDHC standard, it was developed to let SD memory cards reach capacities larger than 2GB.

Of course, a new standard also means that SDHC cards aren't compatible with older readers or cameras that aren't SDHC compatible. Because of that fact, Lexar includes a small USB 2.0 SDHC reader with the … Read more