high-res

While most 27-inch monitors you'll find at your local Best Buy sport the perfectly capable resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels, there's a growing contingent of monitor enthusiasts, like myself, who understand the real reason for the existence of 27-inch displays.

If you've never seen a 27-inch monitor running at 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution, then you've yet to be touched by a particularly affecting higher power.

Also referred to as "extreme definition" or "XD," this branch of higher-tier monitors will melt your face and not look back. However, as much as the impressive resolution benefits all aspects of computing, it is in games that it provides a particular advantage.… Read more

Imagine being able to navigate our own biological tissue much in the way Google Earth allows us to zoom in on our own backyards. Only instead of mailboxes and fences, you could spot, say, rogue cancer cells.

Researchers out of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands may be making such a future possible by stitching together molecular- and cellular-level images of biological tissues into truly gigantic composite images.

One such landscape -- of a zebrafish embryo -- consists of 26,000 images, is 281 gigapixels, and boasts a resolution of 16 million pixels per inch.

The researchers explain their … Read more

My Sketch makes your photos into hand-sketched artistic drawings in only a few easy steps. Upon launch you get the option to take a new photo or choose one from your iPhone photo library. Once selected, My Sketch immediately has you crop the image to your liking, either in portrait or landscape layouts. The next step is to choose a style, and My Sketch offers 20 different types of sketch styles, from long-line sketches to pastel styles. It takes a couple of moments, but once the high-res sketch is finished, you have a chance to apply some finishing touches with … Read more

While microscopes might be affixed to cell phones, they don't usually look like them. But it seems the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Germany got the designer bug when they developed this one.

In this case, though, form is actually following function. The microscope is flat because it has been entirely rethought, with several tiny lenses to simultaneously scan one image instead of one that scans and then groups together many images.

"Our ultrathin microscope consists of not just one but a multitude of tiny imaging channels, with lots of tiny lenses arrayed alongside one another" Dr. Frank Wipperman, who managed the team, said in a news release. "Each channel records a tiny segment of the object at the same size for a 1:1 image."… Read more

The Guardian Eyewitness is a free app for viewing striking, memorable photographs--with a new one added each day--from The Guardian newspaper.

Each Guardian Eyewitness photograph also appears in the center spread of the print edition of The Guardian (and on its Web site), and the images come from all over the world--from a refugee clinic in Darfur to a panda pen in China to a gang shootout in Rio de Janeiro. According to the developers behind the app (and we're inclined to agree), each photo "isn't just another news photograph," but rather a complex, visually extraordinary … Read more