digital-imaging

Kodak patent auction drags on past deadline

Eastman Kodak failed to announce a winner for its patent bid yesterday, saying that the process is still "ongoing."

Kodak, which was supposed to announce the winners by 2 p.m. PT yesterday, said just minutes before the deadline that it was extending the time for its announcement. The company said that its creditors were onboard with the move, and indicated that all participants were still bound by a "court order on confidentiality."

"Kodak and its creditors have agreed to extend the timeline for announcing the outcome of the patent auction in light of continuing … Read more

Bids come in low for Kodak's digital-imaging patents

Opening bids for Kodak's digital-imaging patent portfolio from two competing investor groups backed separately by Google and Apple came in far below the $2.6 billion that the troubled company says it is worth.

The photography pioneer received bids from the two groups in the $150 million and $250 million range, people familiar with the auction process told The Wall Street Journal.

Kodak representatives declined to comment on the reported bid range, citing a court confidentiality order.

"The auction process, including information about bids and the identity of bidders, is confidential pursuant to an order of the Bankruptcy … Read more

Adobe revs Photoshop's engine (hands-on)

There's so much big news surrounding Photoshop CS6 that I'm not sure where to start. This is Adobe's first-ever public beta of its most important product (expected to ship sometime in the first half of this year). It's the first Adobe product to incorporate the company's new DRM architecture. It's the first version of Photoshop to take video seriously and to make it into the Standard Edition of the product rather than the extra-pricey Extended version. It's the first version to integrate the company's GPU-accelerating Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE). And for the first time in more than 20 years, Photoshop goes dark.

The beta, which is actually the Extended version of the product, is downloadable from Adobe Labs or Download.com, though at a hefty 1.8GB, it's not for the bandwith-constrained. While you can't run it simultaneously with previous versions, like every Adobe update it installs completely separately so that you can keep predecessors.

Dear Adobe: while that's very convenient, I still want the option to actually update from the previous version. I am tired of the cruft Creative Suite leaves behind every time a new version comes out; on my previous system, I had random directories left over from at least three generations of CS. Given that your new subscription model is designed to drive users to more-frequent updates, you'd better deal with better ways to clean up behind yourself.… Read more

Apple barred from pursuing patent claims against Kodak

A judge told Apple today that it could not restart patent-infringement litigation against Eastman Kodak over a patent that may be sold during the troubled photography company's bankruptcy proceedings.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper, who is overseeing Kodak's Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, denied Apple's request to file a complaint with the International Trade Commission and attempt to unfreeze a patent lawsuit pending between the companies. Gropper said it would be inappropriate to allow Apple to continue pursuing claims against Kodak while the company is reorganizing.

The patent, which covers technology that allows consumers to preview digital … Read more

Kodak aims to block Apple's renewed patent suit

Kodak has fired back at Apple in their ongoing courtroom battle, with the troubled photography company asking a judge to block Apple from reigniting legal proceedings on patents.

This latest tiff began last month when Apple requested permission from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan to file a patent infringement complaint against Kodak with the International Trade Commission, as well as a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Manhattan.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Kodak wants the patent dispute to be resolved as quickly as possible but believes that the renewed litigation should be put in … Read more

Organize your images with PixName

Anyone who uses a digital camera with any regularity knows that tools to help you manage and organize your images are a necessity, and that there are plenty of options to choose from. PixName is a tool that specializes in renaming images and organizing them by date. Although for the most part it performed as it was supposed to, it's neither the most powerful nor the easiest-to-use program of this sort that we've seen.

PixName's interface was not particularly intuitive or attractive, and we had to consult the Help file several times to figure out how to … Read more

Samsung DV300F DualView camera packs built-in Wi-Fi

Samsung's DualView cameras already had a cool and convenient front-facing LCD screen for easy self-portraits. For 2012, the newest DualView is getting a new upgrade: built-in Wi-Fi.

The addition of Wi-Fi to the DV300F will allow the camera to upload photos and videos to Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. Moreover, photos can also be wirelessly transferred to a home PC and to cloud storage services such as Microsoft SkyDrive.

The camera itself offers 16-megapixel resolution, 5x optical zoom, and a 25mm wide-angle lens. Beyond the dual LCD screens, the DV300F also includes some photo templates and on-board image manipulation … Read more

Fix up your photos with Digital Image Tool

The hassle of rotating, resizing, renaming, and otherwise adjusting digital images before sharing them online is sometimes enough to make us leave our images languishing on our memory cards. Fortunately, there are plenty of free programs that can simplify this process. Digital Image Tool is a sleek application that lets you make basic formatting changes to your images and looks good doing it.

The program's interface is done in attractive shades of gray, with an intuitive and contemporary layout. You can select batches of images to work with, and the program's major features--resize, watermark, tag images, and rename--are … Read more

Megacheap megazooms: 10 sub-$250 cameras with 10x or longer optical zoom

Ah, the lure of the long lens. Camera manufacturers have spent the past couple years waging a zoom war, trying to pack as much magnification into increasingly smaller camera bodies. A few of them, such as Nikon, Fujifilm, and Olympus, are offering both budget-friendly and high-end models of full-size megazooms, while just about all of the makers have a lower-cost compact megazoom in their lines.

It used to be impossible to find a 10x optical zoom camera for less than $200, but those days are officially in the past. Take the 10x zoom Kodak Z915 (pictured above), for example. It'… Read more