Underexposed

This cross section shows two rings of light-sensitive semiconductor material in the fiber. The eight thicker parts are electrodes to carry signals.

(Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

And you thought it was a problem when folks went into the locker room toting cell phones with cameras.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.

"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.

MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area.

The technology uses fibers less than a millimeter in diameter, stretched into thin form from a thicker cylinder. Within the fibers are two cylindrical shells of semiconductor material, each connected to the outside world with four built-in metal electrodes.

A new tremor on Thursday traversed a photography world already shaken up by the arrival of digital technology as Phase One, a Copenhagen-based company that caters to professional photographers, announced a plan to acquire some high-end photography assets from Eastman Kodak.

To nobody's surprise, Kodak wound down its 35mm Kodachrome film product on Monday. In the rarefied realm of medium-format photography, where film sizes are much larger, and the demand for quality is much higher, the change to the digital era has been equally jarring.

Phase One, though, was digital from the outset, and it's become a force for consolidation in the digital medium-format photography market. The company announced its plan to acquire technology and hire employees from Kodak's Leaf medium-format brand just months after taking control of Japanese medium-format camera maker Mamiya.

Leaf sells medium-format cameras, digital-sensor camera backs, and Leaf Capture photography software. The latter two products, but not necessarily the first, will live on under Phase One management.

(Credit: Leaf)

The vast majority of cameras sold today are either all-in-one compact models or higher-end single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras with interchangeable lenses and larger, better image sensor chips. Medium-format cameras are another step up the ladder, costing tens of thousands of dollars for digital models, employing even larger sensors with more megapixels, catering to professionals almost exclusively, and offering not just interchangeable lenses but also sometimes interchangeable viewfinders and "backs," too, where image sensors or film packs are mounted.

Once the Leaf deal closes in about two weeks, Phase One Chief Executive Henrik O. Hakonsson said in an interview, Phase One will continue to develop and sell Leaf's digital backs and photography software through a new Israel-based company, Leaf Imaging. The new company will sell products that use Phase One's image sensor chip technology but that maintain Leaf's user interface approach, he said.

"We do not believe you can box everything together and serve all the pro photographers' needs," Hakonsson said. "One main thing we can get from Leaf is the ability to serve this market through a broader range of solutions than our own current design and engineering is able to offer. Another is, we need to be able to have more critical mass" in designing and manufacturing high-end image sensors.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

The changes illustrate just how complicated the digital transformation is for the high-end photography market, populated by the likes of high-priced photographers who shoot Vogue fashion ads and close-ups of jewelry and watches.

Back in the film era, it wasn't much more expensive to produce larger frames of film for these more demanding photographers than the 35mm film size used by mainstream folks. But in the digital era, with the constraints of processor manufacturing, it's vastly more expensive to produce larger image sensors than small ones. Phase One's top-end camera, the 60-megapixel P65+, costs about $40,000.

That economic reality is behind much of the medium-format market turmoil. Phase One, though, has grown each of the last seven years. "I don't think there's a simple recipe. I think it's equal parts hard work, good thinking, and a little bit of luck," Hakonsson said.

Phase One faces plenty of challenges, though--notably Canon's 21-megapixel, $7,000 1Ds Mark III and Nikon's newer $8,000 D3X. These models benefit from those companies' deep engineering, manufacturing, and marketing experience and from their broad customer bases. Both those companies are aiming their cameras at studio photographers with medium-format expertise.

Will Leaf's camera survive?
Leaf offers both Aptus-branded digital backs and AFi-branded digital cameras. While Phase One has rights to sell both those lines, it has committed so far only to sell the digital backs, Hakonsson said.

That means that Phase One's move will likely reassure Leaf digital-back customers, but those using the AFi camera still face an uncertain future. The Leaf AFi was developed in partnership with two other medium-format brands, Franke and Heidecke's Rollei and Jenoptik's Sinar, which sell their own versions of the camera, but Phase One declined to join that partnership earlier.

That camera partnership's future already is under a dark cloud. Franke and Heidecke, which manufactures the camera system for the trio, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year.

Phase One will conduct a "thorough investigation of the product concept," Hakonsson said, "but there is no guarantee that Leaf or Phase One will support the system. We do have product rights to it and are able to do it, but it has to come down to a business decision whether it makes sense to revive the system."

The allies behind the system have made some progress since its inception, but Phase One remains concerned about issues with optics, durability, and service, Hakonsson said.

Digital-back business
Digital backs, on the other hand, are a better business for the company. They can be used with a range of medium-format cameras and with other more exotic models, such as large-format cameras and view cameras--the kind with the collapsing bellows most people associate with 19th-century photography but that still are in use.

In this segment of the market, where photographers are more set in their ways, older camera designs can last a long time. Just selling backs means the image sensor component of the camera can be changed relatively often to keep up with technology, but the rest of the system, which changes more slowly, can be used for longer.

"Six years ago, Contax discontinued production, but we've never sold as many Contax digital backs as we do today," Hakonsson said.

The other major power in the medium-format realm is Hasselblad, whose recent designs such as the H3D-II have favored integrated camera designs rather than interchangeable backs. That integration move deprived Phase One of a lot of potential digital back business and provided motivation for the Mamiya and Leaf deals.

Phase One has about 100 employees of its own and another 150 through Mamiya. The Leaf group is in the process of hiring about 25 employees who lost their Kodak jobs, he said.

Phase One has primarily used Kodak's image sensors, but its more recent models, including the high-scoring P65+, are built by Canadian manufacturer Dalsa. "For maybe the last 18 months, Dalsa has been ahead," he said.

Updated 5:01 p.m. PDT with further details on Phase One competition.

The camera in Apple's upcoming iPhone 3G S sports not just video, but also some new features besides the usual not-so-useful bump in megapixels.

The phone, available next week in the United States and some other countries, comes with a 3-megapixel camera compared to the current iPhone 3G's 2 megapixels. It can shoot video at 30 frames per second at VGA (640x480) resolution, matching competing phones and addressing a shortcoming of the current phones.

Videos can be edited on the iPhone 3G S by trimming the sequence of still images taken from the video.

(Credit: Apple)

But the iPhone 3G S can do more than just shoot video, said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, at the company's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference here. People can share videos through e-mail, MMS, Apple's MobileMe service, and YouTube.

And taking advantage of the iPhone's relatively powerful hardware, people can "scrub" through a video--that is, click and drag to fast-forward and rewind--as they watch to jump to the spot they want. Likewise, they can trim videos to pare back to the desired portion. The scrubbing and trimming uses an interface that displays the video as a filmstrip sequence of still frames.

The iPhone 3G S also includes still camera upgrades for the photography crowd--and it should be noted that the iPhone rivals SLRs for activity on Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, outpacing all mobile phones and all but one actual camera.

First is autofocus. Mobile phones' tiny image sensors often mean everything is in focus whether you want it to be or not, but the iPhone 3G S will let come with autofocus to try to ensure that the right part of the image is sharp. A feature called "tap to focus" lets people tap on the screen image to focus the camera on a particular part of the image--foreground or background, for example.

Yahoo's Flickr site puts the iPhone head and shoulders above other mobile phones for popularity on the photo-sharing site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Coming along with autofocus is an automacro mode, too, for close-up shots, Schiller said.

Apple also said the new phone has better low-light performance--a common bugaboo not merely for mobile phone cameras but for regular point-and-shoot models as well.

The iPhone 3G S will cost $199 for a 16GB model and $299 for a 32GB model, Apple said. Other features include better battery life and faster performance.

Medium-format digital cameras, which have larger sensors and higher price tags than even high-end SLRs, didn't fare so well in earlier tests of sensor quality by measurement firm DxO Labs, but Phase One's newly tested top-end technology has risen to the top of the DxOMark Sensor test.

Phase One now rules the DxOMark Sensor roost.

(Credit: DxO Labs)

Phase One's 60-megapixel P65+ camera scored 89.1 on the test, edging out the Nikon D3X, which scored 88, according to data released Thursday. In addition, the 51.7-megapixel Hasselblad H3DII 50, an older model than Phase One's, scored 78.2. Click here to compare the two models and Nikon's D3X.

The DxOMark sensor test measures a camera sensor's dynamic range, color depth, and low-light performance. DxO Labs cautions that differences of less than 5 points aren't really distinguishable, and of course many other factors including price, lens quality, autofocus, and resolution factor into overall camera quality.

The P65+ features the best color performance yet, but DxO Labs said its comparatively good performance in low-light conditions helped it carry the day.

The camera industry and photographers, having just gotten accustomed to the arrival of video in point-and-shoot cameras, just now are beginning to grapple with its arrival in the more serious SLR realm.

Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon's professional products marketing division and a 26-year veteran at the Japanese company, is in the thick of it. Nikon was the first to market with a single-lens reflex camera equipped with video, the D90, but Canon offers video in two SLRs: the high-end EOS 5D Mark II, with a large sensor the size of a full frame of 35mm film, and the Rebel T1i, a more affordable, mainstream model.

Chuck Westfall

(Credit: Canon USA)

These cameras combine high-definition video--1900x1080 pixels at 30 frames per second in the case of the 5D Mark II--with SLRs' advantages when shooting in dim conditions and with a broad variety of lenses. But even though today's video SLR features offers hold some appeal to enthusiasts and professionals, they're something of an awkward afterthought. SLRs and those who use them that haven't yet had much time to adapt.

Welcome to the world of digital photography, where change is incessant. In an interview with CNET News, Westfall talked about not just video, but also OLED displays, the arrival of rival full-frame SLRs from Sony and Nikon, changing flash card and file format standards, wireless networking, and more.

Question: The age of the video SLR has begun. A lot of people in the high-end camera market are set in their ways, and video is a radical difference for a lot of them. How does that change the camera design, the marketing, and everything you have to do to sell a camera? ... Read more

Phase One, a Copenhagen-based maker of professional-grade digital camera technology, has invested in and assumed some control over Japanese camera maker Mamiya.

(Credit: Phase One)

Phase One and Mamiya already had a partnership for one medium-format camera through a partnership begun in 2006, but now the alliance is much tighter, with Phase One in the driver's seat for some key areas, Phase One said Wednesday.

"Phase One is making a significant financial investment in Mamiya Digital Imaging, thus becoming a major shareholder in the company behind the Mamiya brand of medium-format cameras and lenses," Phase One said in a statement. "To ensure clarity of brand positioning and minimize product overlap, in close cooperation with Mamiya top management, Phase One will take on strategic leadership for the companies' research and development, marketing, and distribution management."

Medium-format cameras feature a sensor that's much larger and therefore more expensive to manufacture than those even in high-end $8,000 SLRs from Canon and Nikon, but that offer more megapixels for large, high-quality printing demands.

Toshio Midorikawa, president of Mamiya Digital Imaging, argued that the companies bring complementary abilities: "Together, Phase One and Mamiya Digital Imaging own all competencies required for developing superior, innovative medium-format camera systems. Our combined expertise comprises digitalization, camera fine mechanics, optics design and production, and broad ranges of software and firmware capabilities," he said. "And as a result of our close collaboration, new products are just around the corner. We plan to introduce both new leaf shutter lenses and even more super lightweight focal plane shutter lenses in 2009. We aim to offer the world's widest range of medium format lenses for Mamiya and Phase One camera platforms."

Medium-format cameras are used chiefly by professional studio photographers; Phase One's P65+ image sensor back offers 60 megapixel resolution on a sensor measuring 53.9mm by 40.4mm, much larger than the 36x24mm sensors in high-end conventional SLRs from Canon, Nikon, and Sony. Phase One and Mamiya competitors include Hasselblad, Sinar and Leaf.

Photo Finder finds contacts photos and suggests names for them when it thinks it knows the correct identity.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Start-up Face.com announced a Facebook application on Tuesday called Photo Finder that can identify your contacts' faces--and your own--on the social-networking site.

The software analyzes photos among your contacts, suggesting tags for faces it recognizes and monitoring new uploads for more. The software presents an array of your contacts' photos, letting you accept or reject suggested names for the people the application has identified.

In my not-so-extensive testing, I found that the face recognition technology really does make it easier to discover photos of people you know. It surfaced dozens of untagged pictures among my network of contacts, all with the correct name suggested.

We have 100 invitations for the application, which is in alpha testing. Click here if you want one--first come, first served.

Since those photographed were generally shown in their own photo galleries, it wouldn't have been tough for to find them on my own, but the application was more useful in uncovering unknown images when dealing with people posted on others' photo galleries. I didn't try it long enough to see how well it spotted photos of me showing up in others' photos, which strikes me as one use case in which people would be particularly interested.

Face recognition in photos can be a powerful tool because it means computers can know people's identities. That photo metadata is information that computers can process, for example, when supplying search results. Apple built face recognition into its newest version of iPhoto, and Google has the technology in its Picasa Web Albums site for photo sharing.

Not integrated with Facebook
One key point, though: the identification tags that Photo Finder supplies are visible only through the application. They aren't integrated with Facebook's tag system, so the implications and actions you take through Photo Finder are limited only to that application.

Photo Finder presents photos with suggested tags at the top and known tags at the bottom for each contact.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"Tags in Photo Finder will not persist in Facebook's main photo application. Tags assigned in Photo Finder can be rejected by the tagee, if they also use Photo Finder," the company said.

Face.com leaves privacy matters of Photo Finder up to Facebook itself. "Photo Finder has nothing to do with privacy. It scans photos that have already been shared with you. We respect the privacy settings set up by Facebook, so you don't have to manage privacy in two different places," the company said.

But in practice, Photo Finder does reveal just how publicly you're sharing your photos, and widespread use of the technology will make it easier for others to find images of specific people among their network of contacts.

When I told one contact of mine I'd just tagged her in a bunch of photos a computer just found, she wrote back to me, "I'll admit it freaks me out a bit. There has always been something about Facebook or social networking that sits on the hairy edge of a bad idea. This doesn't seem to help the cause. (It) does cause me to think again about what I post. I am probably not a poster child of best judgment."

Promising but clunky
Overall, I found the technology promising but a bit clunky. It might have worked better, if I only used Facebook to keep track of a handful of close friends and family members, but instead, Photo Finder presented me with 38 pages of friends for me to sift through to identify. It spotlighted one facet of the conundrum of personal vs. professional use of social-networking sites: I have a lot of professional contacts whose smiling-with-friends in-the-restaurant and holding-the-cute-baby photos I don't really care about.

Because you can set up watch lists for friends you care about, notifying you of future uploads of photos of people you do care about, keeping on top of new additions likely would be easier to manage. And, of course, you can cut to the chase by typing in the names of specific people you care about. They have to have their permissions set to allow you to tag their photos, though, for the application to work.

What about making money out of the technology? The Israeli-based start-up is cagey for now.

"At the moment, the focus is on launching the technology and making sure that it scales well at (the) Web level," the company said in a statement. But Face.com does have aspirations beyond a Facebook application.

"Face.com is the company behind this technology. That's a pretty premium domain, and likely, it will be the host for other uses of their facial-recognition software," the company said. Face.com is "starting with Photo Finder, a facial-recognition and discovery app for Facebook. This facial recognition is highly accurate, efficient, and built for the Web; it's able to scan through millions of photos and correctly identify faces at high speed, with a high level of accuracy."

MotionDSP, the company that offered a novel approach to improving photos and video through its now-discontinued FixMyMovie Web site, plans to release a promised version of its software for personal computers.

MotionDSP's vReveal software can extract higher quality from videos by drawing on the data in multiple frames showing the same scene.

(Credit: MotionDSP)

The $49.99 software program, called vReveal, analyzes a video's adjacent frames and combines the data to create a higher-quality version. This can bring out details in dim areas, correct camera shake, and remove noise and blocky compression artifacts, the company said. The software also can rotate videos, increase video resolution, and extract still images.

In addition, the company said the software can employ the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology from graphics chipmaker Nvidia, enabling PCs with appropriate video cards to accelerate the processing-intensive task. The technology doesn't work with all Nvidia graphics processing units, but it works on systems without a compatible video card, the company said.

"It can run up to five times faster when you have a CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU in your system," said vReveal product manager Mike Sonders. "This multiframe analysis is incredibly hardware intensive."

CUDA offloads some processing to an Nvidia graphics chip, but software must be specially adapted to take advantage of the extra horsepower.

DxO Labs added scores for three Sony SLRs to its site for image sensor tests. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: DxO Labs)

Three midrange Sony SLRs now are included in DxO Labs' measurements of image sensor performance, and the Alpha A700 proves to be reasonably competitive.

Sony's A700, which costs about $1,100 with an 18-70mm lens, has a score of 66.3 on the test, which calculates how well the sensor handles color, a range brightness and darkness, and low-light shooting. That puts it behind the top-scoring camera with a comparably sized sensor, the Nikon D90, almost ties it with the Pentax K10D and Nikon D300, and gives it a a few points' lead over Canon's 40D and 50D.

Meanwhile, the A200 scores 62.9 and the A300 an even 64, according to the DxOMark Sensor test results that were updated Tuesday. A five-point difference makes a difference of about 1/3 stop in exposure, DxO says, meaning that a higher-scoring camera can attain the same raw image quality as a rival even though the higher-scoring camera is using a faster exposure or higher ISO.

DxO Labs, a French company, makes a business of measuring camera image quality, developing technology for image-processing hardware and software, and selling software to convert the raw files produced by higher-end cameras into less flexible but more convenient formats such as JPEG. The DxOMark score measures sensor performance based on the raw file, a foundation for overall image quality but only a facet of a camera's overall performance.