Scott playing Left 4 Dead 2 on the Asus 3D laptop.
(Credit: Dan Ackerman/CNET)Earlier this week, Asus unveiled a 15-inch laptop with Nvidia's 3D Vision technology built in. The $1,699 Asus G51J 3D has a 120Hz LCD panel, an Intel Core i7 CPU, and a high-end Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M GPU, and comes bundled with a pair of Nvidia's active glasses and the USB-powered IR emitter required to make the glasses work.
We've just had a chance to take the system for a test drive, and came away largely impressed with the results, especially compared with Acer's Aspire 5738DG, a 3D laptop that uses a pair of passive polarized glasses and a special screen coating to create a 3D effect.
That Acer model was unfortunately underpowered for gaming, especially with the added overhead of running its 3D software in the background. The Asus G51J, on the other hand, with a high-end processor and video card, seemed well-suited for mid-to-high-end gaming. Of course, it lacked dual SLI video cards and the 1,366x768 15-inch display is no match for some of the nicer 17-inch 1080p displays we've seen.
The Asus G51J with Nvidia's 3D glasses and IR emitter.
(Credit: Dan Ackerman/CNET)While playing Left 4 Dead 2, the 3D effects appeared crisp and appealing, and didn't seem to distract from the speed of gameplay or the screen brightness. There appeared to be no real hardware burden in generating the 3D in terms of frame rate or graphics detail, either. On the other hand, the 15-inch screen is a little small as compared to a nice big gaming monitor, and that mitigated the overall immersion of the 3D effects.
The bigger problem is that 3D gaming is still a novelty. It's not actually needed to appreciate any game at this point, and it has an expensive and often clunky set-up for users to navigate through.
Many people haven't even seen 3D of the caliber that Nvidia is currently offering, and so they have no idea how smooth and crisp it is compared to the fuzzy double-vision experience of years past. What's particularly great about Asus' solution is that it's already integrated into a reasonably priced Core i7 gaming laptop, so the set-up and research into compatible hardware components is almost entirely eliminated.
This is an interesting trend to watch for in gaming laptops, and it should be included in more Core i7 laptops aimed at gamers, especially if Nvidia is serious about getting a larger adoption. We expect to see more 3D Vision capable laptops from major PC makers by early next year.
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Nikon USA)
Budget for a smaller turkey this Thanksgiving; you'll need to save your pennies if you want to upgrade to Nikon's latest pro dSLR when it ships at the end of November. With a few substantial changes that should appeal to nighttime shooters or the video-inclined pro, packed into the old D3 body, the slightly more expensive D3S seems like it'll be a decent successor.
Though it retains the same 12.1-megapixel resolution and 8.45-micron pixels of its predecessor, the D3S uses a new sensor. Combined with updated image-processing firmware, Nikon manages to eke out sensitivity of up to ISO 102,400 (Hi 3), for a whopping 10-stop sensitivity range. How much of that will be usable? Well, the D3's looked pretty good as high as ISO 12,800--formerly Hi 1 and the new top of the standard range--and given the tweaks it should at least gain another usable couple of stops, which is worthwhile in itself. I saw some prints from Hi 3 shots taken with a preproduction model, and they looked pretty serviceable for emergency shooting in the dark.
The other major enhancement is support for Nikon's 24fps, 720p video implementation, which allows for shooting with sensitivities up to ISO 6400, shutter and aperture adjustments in preview mode and selectable sound levels. Like most models it has a built in mono mic, though it has a minijack for stereo audio. Plus Nikon supplies some postprocessing for trimming video and extracting frames.
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Fujifilm)
Fujifilm's FinePix Real 3D W1 camera and system is hitting the U.S., the company announced Wednesday. Introduced globally over the summer, the FinePix Real 3D system appears to be the world's first 3D digital imaging system that captures 3D still photographs and movies, providing images that users can enjoy without special 3D glasses.
You can read a hands-on review here by CNET's Leonard Goh.
Also Wednesday, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia, declared the FinePix Real 3D camera "Nvidia 3D vision-ready" during the company's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif. Nvidia 3D Vision is a combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software that lets users view 3D pictures and movies in full HD on a PC, as well as automatically transforms hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D.
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Apple Aperture in action.
(Credit: Apple)LAS VEGAS--Apple on Monday added support in its software for raw image files from Nikon's top-end SLR, the $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X.
Apple's Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.5 also adds support for Epson's Epson R-D1x digital rangefinder camera, according to the Apple support page.
The software enables Aperture 2, iPhoto '08, and iPhoto '09 to interpret the cameras' raw files, proprietary formats that include more information than JPEGs. The update requires Mac OS X 10.4.11, Mac OS X 10.5.3, or later.
A full list of Apple's raw image support is available on Apple's support site.
Aperture's competitor, Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, also got D3X support Monday, which is eve of the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.
(Via Rob Galbraith.)
Nikon's D3X is now supported by Adobe Lightroom.
(Credit: Nikon)LAS VEGAS--Adobe Systems has released the final version of Lightroom 2.3, its photo-editing and cataloging software, along with its close relative, the Camera Raw 5.3 plug-in to let Photoshop CS4 edit raw images from higher-end cameras.
The new software (available as a download for Windows and Mac OS X) supports Nikon's top-end D3X, an $8,000, 24.5-megapixel machine whose owners likely will usually prefer raw files for their flexibility and quality advantages over JPEG. Also supported is Olympus' new midrange E-30.
The Lightroom 2.3 update also fixed a number of bugs and adds support for eight new languages: Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, and simplified and traditional Chinese. Adobe made the announcement Monday just as the Photo Marketing Show (PMA) was getting under way here.
The Camera Raw software works with Adobe's flagship CS4 version of Photoshop, but also with the consumer-oriented Photoshop Elements 7, Premiere Elements 7 for video editing, and Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac OS X.
Right now anaglyphic glasses (back row) are the only way to watch 3D at home. Dolby hopes to make passive and active glasses (front row) work in living rooms too.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET Networks)Everyone is raving about the "unblinkingly real" quality of watching the animated "Coraline" in 3D. That could turn to disappointment when it's time for the animated film to make its DVD and Blu-ray debut. But Dolby Labaratories, which made its name taking high-quality theater audio and compressing it for home use, thinks it has a solution.
Right now, when 3D films like "Journey to the Center of the Earth" come to disc a pair of anaglyphic paper glasses--the kind with blue/red or green/red lenses--is included with the case, which doesn't offer anything close to the experience of watching a film in 3D in the theater. It could explain why some 3D films, like "U2 3D" have yet to make it to disc at all.
Dolby's encoding technology would allow discs to work with TVs and Blu-ray players already available.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET Networks)As more 3D films start popping up in theaters, the quality of their appearance once you buy them on disc for home viewing is going to be an increasingly important question.
The barriers to re-creating a similar theater-quality experience are both technical and practical: some content makers believe there will have to be a whole new format to make 3D films feel the same way on the couch as they do in the theater. That would involve all new equipment, which means ditching your brand new Blu-ray player and buying yet another disc format. After all the marketing messages consumers have heard about Blu-ray in the last few years, the last thing they want to hear is that Blu-ray is suddenly obsolete.
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Nikon D3X
(Credit: Nikon USA)Adobe Systems on Friday issued near-final release candidate versions of Lightroom 2.3 and the Camera Raw 5.3 Photoshop plug-in, software that can support Nikon's new top-end, $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X camera and Olympus' mid-range, $1,299, 12.3-megapixel E-30.
According to the release notes, the new Lightroom version also fixes a few bugs: a memory leak that could crash the software while people were making local editing adjustments to photos, a processing error handling smaller sRAW photos from the Canon 5D Mark II, a slideshow glitch, and problems uploading and burning files to discs.
Lightroom is designed for editing, labeling, and cataloging photos--in particular, the flexible but non-standard raw files from higher-end cameras. Adobe Camera Raw is used to handle raw files in the more general-purpose Photoshop software, letting people convert them into JPEG, TIF, or other more portable formats.
... Read moreThe top two SLR makers have released relatively minor firmware revisions for three cameras, Nikon's higher-end full-frame D3 and D700 and Canon's prosumer-grade EOS 40D.
The fixes generally address rare and unusual problems. One notable fix for the D3 and D700 is for a problem which, as Nikon describes it, "in extremely rare cases, resulted in noticeable black dots in images captured with Long exp. NR (long exposure noise reduction) in the shooting menu set to On." Canon fixed a black-dot issue of its own with the EOS 5D Mark II earlier this month, but Nikon's issue sounds rarer.
Forthwith, the release notes:
... Read moreThere's something of a cottage industry on the Internet of making parodies through artful subtitles of Der Untergang, a movie about the last throes of the Third Reich. And now there's one that takes on Nikon's D3X, the company's new $8,000, 24.5-megapixel SLR.
The subtitles depict Adolf Hitler coming to terms with the arrival of Sony's Alpha A900. One amusing moment comes when a minion listening to Hitler's rant comforts a weeping colleague, "There, there, I hear he shoots only JPEG." (In case the humor is lost on you, that's a jab at pixel-peeping camera snobs such as myself who prefer to shoot raw images.)
According to The Online Photographer, where I spotted the video Tuesday, the parody is by Nikon D3 photographer Samuel Vert.
The Nikon D3X's body is identical to the D3.
(Credit: Nikon USA)Though almost everything you need to know about the new Nikon D3X leaked Friday, the 24.5-megapixel dSLR Nikon dubs its "extreme professional" model formally debuts today, November 30. What didn't leak was the price: $7,999.95. Start saving your pennies now.
There's quite a bit of speculation as to how similar the sensor in the D3X is to that in the Sony Alpha DSLR-A900; Nikon says it's "a Nikon designed sensor" that may (or may not) be manufactured by Sony, which usually means they're pretty similar. However, the A900's sensor has a pixel pitch of 5.9 microns, while Nikon's is surprisingly smaller--5.49 microns. So, they're pretty much different sensors, with different performance characteristics. The D3X's sensitivity range runs from ISO 100 to ISO 1600, with a Lo 1 of ISO 50 and Hi 1 and 2 of ISO 3200 and ISO 6400. The camera will also offer a 5:4 (8x10) crop mode at 20.4 megapixels, along with the same 10.5-megapixel DX crop mode as the D3, and support.
With all that extra data to process, it's no surprise that the D3X isn't quite the speed demon the D3 is for burst shooting, though 5 frames per second at full resolution is certainly zippy enough for most. (Nikon didn't provide info on the number of frames, however.)
The rest--body, AF system, viewfinder, and Expeed image processor--is all identical to the D3, and Nikon claims you should expect similar performance. It's also compatible with the D3's accessories.
Pitting the D3X against the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III when the Nikon becomes available in late December will certainly make my cold winter days a little more interesting.
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