Photography by Bas Bettenhaussen

Just Posted! Canon EOS 50D in-depth review. Canon’s EOS 50D is essentially a 40D body with a newly-developed 15 megapixel sensor, a 3.0 inch VGA screen and Canon’s updated imaging processor, the DIGIC 4. Canon claims the new sensor’s design (new manufacturing processes, redesigned photo diodes and micro lenses) means that despite the higher resolution image noise has improved. As you might imagine, we’ve had a closer look at this. Find out more after the link. Review now updated using the final version of Adobe Camera Raw 4.6.

Click here to read the full review 

Source: dpreview.com

Oh, don’t act so surprised. A refresh of Apple’s long-in-the-tooth MacBook Pro line was pretty much the only sure thing slated for today’s event, and Apple certainly delivered. As for looks, you probably know the score by now: chiclet keyboard, Air-inspired aluminum stylings, and a glossy screen that’s flush with a new iMac-like black bezel. What’s new is confirmation of a multi-touch glass trackpad. Apple’s also put in some effort on slimming down the computer, naturally, but much of the real excitement happens under the hood. There’s a new internal structure, that rumored “brick” of aluminum that helps Apple make the new Pro thin, strong and leaves room for the real goodies: the specs. Apple’s using NVIDIA’s new 9400M GPU + chipset 1-2 punch for integrated graphics, supplemented by 9600M GT switchable discreet graphics chip for heavy lifting, and pumping out those graphics over a Mini DisplayPort connector, if you’d like to supplement the LED backlit screen.

Courtesy of Endgadget

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Apple’s taking all that new MacBook Pro love and shrinking it down to size for the all-new MacBook. The laptop includes those same NVIDIA 9400M graphics and fancy glass trackpad of its big sibling, but does it with a 13.3-inch LED-backlit screen and typically friendly MacBook pricepoints. The base model weighs in at $1299 with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, while $1599 gets you 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD.

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Another rumor to tick off the list, Apple just announced the 24-inch Cinema Display. LED-backlit, check;DisplayPort, check; $899 list price, check; MagSafe adapter, check. In fact, it has a tri-pronged cable that also includes USB . Other specs include a native 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, built-in iSight camera / microphone, integrated stereo speakers and a 3-port USB hub. Can you wait ’til November?

Tonight, Apple announces new notebooks and maybe more…….. Let’s wait and see….

Rumored products are:

• new Macbook and MacBook Pro
• Led 24″ Cinema Display
• iWork ‘09

10:04AM Vista — the 4th reason Macs are doing well. Nasty, nasty burn to Microsoft.

10:04AM Ouch — “The next up is something we didn’t do — Vista.” Big laughs. “I think it’s fair to say Vista hasn’t lived up to everything Microsoft hoped it would — and this has given us a door in.”

10:03AM ”Third reason: compatibility. When people looked at macs in the past, they were concerned about switching — we fixed that with Boot Camp. We also work with third parties on productions like Fusion and Parallels.” Windows on an iMac “Frankly this sends a shiver up my spine.” Big laughs.

Shot these last Saturday, click on the images for a larger view! I tell ya these kids have talent!

From David Pogue’s Blog

I really like his approuch

Here are some items I discovered and find news worthy:
(the ones in red I like the most) 
 

“* You can hide all windows, revealing only what’s on the computer desktop, with one keystroke: hit the Windows key and “D” simultaneously in Windows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac laptops, Command+F3; Command is the key with the cloverleaf logo). That’s great when you want examine or delete something you’ve just downloaded to the desktop, for example. Press the keystroke again to return to what you were doing.

* You can enlarge the text on any Web page. In Windows, press Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for bigger or smaller fonts); on the Mac, it’s the Command key and plus or minus.

* You can also enlarge the entire Web page or document by pressing the Control key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse. On the Mac, this enlarges the entire screen image.

* The number of megapixels does not determine a camera’s picture quality; that’s a marketing myth. The sensor size is far more important. (Use Google to find it. For example, search for “sensor size Nikon D90.”)

* When someone sends you some shocking e-mail and suggests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first confirmed its truth at snopes.com, the Internet’s authority on e-mailed myths. This includes get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and–especially lately–nutty scare-tactic messages about our Presidential candidates.

* Forcing the camera’s flash to go off prevents silhouetted, too-dark faces when you’re outdoors.

* When you’re searching for something on the Web using, say, Google, put quotes around phrases that must be searched together. For example, if you put quotes around “electric curtains,” Google won’t waste your time finding one set of Web pages containing the word “electric” and another set containing the word “curtains.”

* You can use Google to do math for you. Just type the equation, like 23*7+15/3=, and hit Enter.

* Google is also a units-of-measurement and currency converter. Type “teaspoons in 1.3 gallons,” for example, or “euros in 17 dollars.” Click Search to see the answer.

* You generally can’t send someone more than a couple of full-size digital photos as an e-mail attachment; those files are too big, and they’ll bounce back to you. (Instead, use iPhoto or Picasa–photo-organizing programs that can automatically scale down photos in the process of e-mailing them.)

* Whatever technology you buy today will be obsolete soon, but you can avoid heartache by learning the cycles. New iPods come out every September. New digital cameras come out in February and October.

* You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type the remainder: “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. (In the Safari browser, you can even leave off the “.com” part.)

* On the iPhone, hit the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space, and a capitalized letter at the beginning of the next word.”

Nice Stuff David! 

David’s Tech Blog runs @ the New York Times 

I found an amazing piece of software, It totally rocks! Read this entry and check out their website!!!

Want to capture everything on your screen? 3d games bogging down ordinary screen capture software? Those days are over: welcome to iShowU HD. Built for speed. Built to “just work”… 

iShowU HD has been rebuilt from the ground up to provide blazing real-time performance with a brand new, easy-to-use interface. With professional features like drag-and-drop to Final Cut and multi-channel audio capture just a single click away, iShowU HD has all the power you’ll ever need at a price you can deal with.

I shot this one last week in Neuastenberg, Germany. It was early in the morning. I build a Pano of it using Photoshop. Other tweaks and settings in Lightroom 2.0.

Click on the photo for a bigger version! 

View Larger Map of Neuastenberg

Here some items I picked up from Photokina in Koln last week 

Design across media with Adobe Creative Suite 4

Adobe has lifted the lid on Creative Suite 4, the latest version of its huge design and production suite. Of most interest to photographers will of course be Photoshop CS4, which brings some interface changes (tabbed windows) as well as 64-bit Windows support and OpenGL support to use graphics cards to speed up operations (and provide nifty zoom and rotation tools) and a new non-modal approach to adjustment layers. We’ve been using Photoshop CS4 in Beta form since May and will bring you more extensive coverage of all the new features once Photokina is behind us.

Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 delivers tightly integrated software and services that measurably improve productivity and enable you to produce richly expressive work in print, web, interactive, video, audio, and mobile.
 

Pretec Releases 64GB and 100GB CF Card - Highest Capacity in the World

Yes I do!!!!

The acronym ‘UDMA’ - which stands for Ultra Direct Memory Access - has become the new watchword for high performance in compact flash memory cards. Several newly launched DSLR cameras support the UDMA protocol and UDMA memory cards rated at 266x, 300x and higher are now on sale.

UDMA - what’s it all about?

So just what is this exciting new UDMA technology? Actually, in IT terms, it’s pretty ancient and became prevalent over ten years ago as hard disk drive technology evolved. History is repeating itself as solid state flash memory devices play catch up with electro-mechanical disk storage technology. DMA is a process by which data can be moved from a storage device very efficiently, without labouring the host device’s processor. Ultra DMA is a set of definitions for faster and faster theoretical transfer rates ranging from Mode 0 (16.7 megabytes per second or MB/s) to Mode 5 (100 MB/s). You may have heard of ATA ratings for hard disk drives and these mirror UDMA Mode numbers, so UDMA 3 is the same as ATA 3 or even ATAPI 3.

But enough of the jargon - how fast is a UDMA card? Most card manufacturers, the one exception being SanDisk, rate their cards with ‘x’ numbers, 60x, 80x, 100x, 133x, etc. These numbers represent the theoreticaldata transfer speed performance compared to a standard CD music player, which plays data at a rate of 150 kilobytes (Kb) per second, or 0.15 MB/s. A 100x card is a hundred times faster than a CD music player and so is rated as being able to transfer 15MB/s. The very fastest Compact Flash cards currently available are rated at 300x, or 45MB/s.

High speed reality

So what does all this performance mean to photographers? In theory, if you can copy your photos off a card at 45MB/s, a 1GB card will only take 20-odd seconds to empty. However, typical previous generation 133x high speed cards tend to take about a minute and a half to unload using a USB card reader. That’s around five times slower despite a rating that is only just less than half as fast.

Rated card speed is just one factor that determines actual transfer rates. The speed of the host computer does affect transfer rates, or more notably the kind of system interface that the USB port is connected to internally. USB also erodes raw speed through protocol latency - basically it’s never 100% efficient. In our recent tests using a state of the art PC, we achieved just over 17MB/s with a 133x category card (SanDisk Extreme III), or about 113x.

We managed to achieve a transfer rate of 31.3MB/s with a 300x Lexar Professional UDMA card, or 209x, but only using a Lexar UDMA compatible card reader connected to a FireWire 800 port, itself connected to a high bandwidth PCI Express bus on the PC motherboard. The same card read using a standard USB 2.0 High Speed card reader only managed a 16.9MB/s transfer rate - slightly slower than the Extreme III card on the same reader. But in turn, the Extreme III card was notably slower when read using the UDMA reader compared to a standard USB reader. We also discovered wide variations in the speed that cards could be read via the USB ports of our test cameras.

Write performance

Reading a card is only one side of the coin. Write performance is important when the card is in the camera and being bombarded with shots produced continuously at high speed, as the latest cameras are capable of. In continuous shooting mode, images are first shunted into the camera’s internal memory, or buffer, before being dumped onto the card. The buffer to card interface can be critical to the sustainability of continuous shooting. Both the Sony Alpha A700 and Olympus E-3 we tested are UDMA-compatible, but it was the Canon EOS-40D that impressed the most, despite not being UDMA compatible. Instead, the Canon relies on a more efficient onboard JPEG compression and buffer management system. The 40D does eventually choke during a lengthy continuous JPEG shooting burst, and the shooting rate drops dramatically, but it’s capable of many more more high speed shots before this happens. Only when shooting for long stretches in RAW mode, over 15-16 continuous shots, do the UDMA DSLRs show better performance. (Source: Sandisk.com) 

Wow, great specs from a kick-butt camera!! I Allready love this Cam!!

Back in August 2005 Canon ‘defined a new DSLR category’ (their words) with the EOS 5D. Unlike any previous ‘full frame’ sensor camera, the 5D was the first with a compact body (i.e. not having an integral vertical grip) and has since then proved to be very popular, perhaps because if you wanted a full frame DSLR to use with your Canon lenses and you didn’t want the chunky EOS-1D style body then the EOS 5D has been your only choice. Three years on and two competitors have turned up in the shape of the Nikon D700 and Sony DSLR-A900, and Canon clearly believes it’s time for a refresh.

So here is the 5D Mark II, which punches high in terms of both resolution and features, headlining: 21 megapixels, 1080p video, 3.0″ VGA LCD, Live view, higher capacity battery. In other words, a camera that aims to leapfrog both its direct rivals, either in terms of resolution (in the case of the D700) or features (in the case of the DSLR-A900). Full detail below.

 

Key features / improvements

• 21 megapixel CMOS sensor (very similar to the sensor in the EOS-1Ds Mark III)
• Sensor dust reduction by vibration of filter
• ISO 100 - 6400 calibrated range, ISO 50 - 25600 expansion (1Ds Mark III & 5D max ISO 3200)
• Auto ISO (100 - 3200) in all modes except manual
• 3.9 frames per second continuous shooting
• DIGIC 4 processor, new menus / interface as per the EOS 50D
• Image processing features:
  • Highlight tone priority
  • Auto lighting optimizer (4 levels)
  • High ISO noise reduction (4 levels)
  • Lens peripheral illumination correction (vignetting correction)
• RAW and SRAW1 (10 MP) / SRAW2 (5 MP)
• RAW / JPEG selection made separately
• Permanent display of ISO on both top plate and viewfinder displays
• AF microadjustment (up to 20 lenses individually)
• Three custom modes on command dial, Creative Auto mode
• Image copyright metadata support
• 98% coverage viewfinder (0.71x magnification)
• 3.0″ 920,000 dot LCD monitor with ‘Clear View’ cover / coatings, 170° viewing angle
• Automatic LCD brightness adjustment (ambient light sensor)
• Live view with three mode auto-focus (including face detection)
• No mirror-flip for exposures in Live View if contrast detect AF selected
• Movie recording in live view (1080p H.264 up to 12 minutes, VGA H.264 up to 24 mins per clip)
• Two mode silent shooting (in live view)
• New jump options in play mode
• HDMI and standard composite (AV) video out
• Full audio support: built-in mic and speaker, mic-in socket, audio-out over AV (although not HDMI)
• IrPort (supports IR remote shutter release using optional RC1 / RC5 controllers)
• UDMA CompactFlash support
• New 1800 mAh battery with improved battery information / logging
• New optional WFT-E4 WiFi / LAN / USB vertical grip
• Water resistance: 10 mm rain in 3 minutes