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The FinePix F610 is the latest incarnation of Fuji’s line of flat, square compact cameras, which manages to combine a minimalist stainless steel look with excellent performance. When you switch it off, the lens retracts completely and there are no protruding parts, so it’s easy to carry in a pocket without worrying about breaking it.
Despite its position as one of the lowest-cost digital SLRs on the market, the Sigma SD10 has some of the most innovative technology. Together with its SD9 predecessor, released in 2002 but still available, these are the only reasonably high-resolution users of the Foveon X3 sensor – although Polaroid offers a 2mp version on a consumer camera.
Primatte Chromakey is one of two compositing aids for still images we’re testing this month. Like Cinematte, it’s a Photoshop plug-in, and it works on the same principle of removing a single-coloured backdrop from a studio-shot photograph, leaving a natural-looking cutout that can be added to a new background ...
Most digital cameras are rather boxy in shape, so Sony’s higher end cameras are a little different. The DSC-F828 – like its predecessor, the 5-megapixel DSC-F717 – is L-shaped, thanks to its massive lens barrel to one side at the front. The two sections of the unit are joined by a hefty hinge that lets the lens rotate on a perpendicular axis to the body ...
Cinematte is a blue or green screen cutout plug-in for Photoshop that creates natural-looking composites for superimposition over any new background image, or a pure white background. You just need to photograph your subject in front of a standard blue or green screen ...
Last summer, Sony announced a new eight million-pixel sensor for compact cameras, and we’re now seeing a rash of new models all hitting the market together. Sony was first, naturally, with the excellent semi-pro DSC-F828 that arrived late last year. It was followed by 8mp announcements from Canon, Minolta, Olympus. Nikon joined the queue with the CoolPix 8700 ...
To the uninitiated, the FlashTrax is an iPod for still images. At its heart is a hard drive running a basic OS viewable through a 3.5-inch colour LCD screen. Photographers can view, manipulate, and delete their images with a minimum of fuss. Rather than just allowing you to view your pictures on the move, the FlashTrax can take them from your camera’s media card.
The Perfection 4870 Photo is Epson’s attempt to combine the versatility of an A4 flatbed scanner with the ability to scan small format films at adequate resolutions for print. It comes a few months after Microtek’s £155 ScanMaker 6100, which had similar ambitions but fell sadly short on the film side. Can Epson do better?
The Super CoolScan 5000 ED is Nikon’s new top-end film scanner. It usurps the Super CoolScan 4000 ED, introduced in 2001, as the best scanner in its class.
There’s nothing especially innovative about Nikon’s Coolpix 3700, but for a simple, well-designed point-&-shoot, it’s a decent package. Its long, narrow shape means that the camera fits easily into a pocket, and its silver-metallic case has ...
RealViz is best known for its professional-quality tools for integrating 3D elements into movies. However, its Stitcher software is a high-grade still-imaging tool for creating panoramas from multiple images. Results can be output as a super-wide print, or put onto a Web page or CD to form immersive QuickTime VR MOV, Shockwave, or ...
The WP-20 Wireless Print Server is a small silver box that connects to the i990 via a USB port, and then allows everyone on your network to use the printer via ethernet or Wi-Fi networks. The WP-20 works with most recent Canon photo inkjets, though some models ...
With the power and ease of digital photography winning over even the most ardent film fans, it’s more important than ever that the rest of the process – printing the images you want – produces results as good as the darkroom. Since our last round-up of photo-inkjet printers at the end of 2003, we’ve seen ...
Director MX 2004 is finally shipping, and the upgrade to the premier multimedia-authoring tool boasts some improvements that you’ll notice at first glance. The ability to dock Movie in a Window (MIAW) tools alongside the other Director palettes is great, and the Windows version features some interface enhancements.
For many digital creatives, asset management software stopped being useful when Photoshop 7 introduced the File Browser. However, there’s much more to this application than mere thumbnail browsing.
Studio Artist isn’t well known in the UK, but it’s an impressive piece of graphics software. The developers, Synthetik Software, refer to it as a ‘graphics synthesizer’, making comparisons with the way that music synthesizers work. But for people with a design background, it’s probably better to compare it to the artistic cloning tools in graphics programs like Painter.
With the DVC-30, Panasonic has done a good job of cramming the DVX100’s main features into a smaller case – and adding a few of its own. However, it hasn’t achieved scaling the body size down to that of a consumer-camcorder – a feat achieved by ...
TourWeaver, from Shanghai-based EasyPano, lets you link several immersive spherical images via hotspots to form a guided tour – for instance you could create a tour of your house with hotspots on the doors to take you to the next room. You can link to still images, movies, sound files, and to URLs ...
The Scanjet 4670 is a scanner that you can pick up, carry around, and scan any surface within the range of your USB cable. Why risk the wrath of animal lovers by getting a fur coat to scan (and have to cram it into your conventional flatbed) when you can just scan your dog?
JVC Pro’s DR-DV5000E is a FireWire hard-drive container (with removable 40GB hard drive) and controller that you can add to your shoulder-mounted JVC Pro DV camcorder, and use alongside or instead of tape. Users of the GY-DV5000E camcorder can just bolt it on between the back of the camcorder and the battery, though it can be attached to the DV500, DV550, or DV700 through an adaptor plate.
