formats

COLOGNE, Germany -- Leica may not have the mass-manufacturing clout of Samsung or the retail footprint of Canon or the electronics know-how of Sony. But the German camera maker has got one thing in spades: a brand.

And nowhere is that brand more obvious than at Photokina, the camera show that takes place every two years here in Germany, Leica's home turf. Canon and Nikon had bigger crowds, but the Leica had the better ratio of booth visitors to customers as it introduced a new top-end rangefinder camera with new electronic abilities, a lower-end rangefinder that's not quite … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany -- Pining for camera with a hand-stitched Italian leather grip and jeweled control dials? You're in luck.

The digital photography revolution exiled Hasselblad's medium-format cameras to an expensive niche inhabited almost solely by professionals. But today, the company announced Lunar, the first camera in an effort that Chief Executive Larry Hansen hopes will bring the storied photography brand back to a wider -- if not mainstream -- market.

Through a partnership with Sony, Hasselblad unveiled its 24-megapixel mirrorless interchangeable-lens model built on the bones and brains of Sony's high-end NEX-7. It's due to ship … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany -- Phase One and Mamiya Leaf, the medium-format camera maker it controls, announced its new 645DF+ medium-format camera with new mechanics and improved focusing abilities.

The companies also announced at the Photokina camera show here the new Schneider Kreuznach 28 LS f/4.5 Aspherical, a very wide-angle 28mm leaf-shutter lens built by Schneider Kreuznach for the Mamiya Leaf-Phase One cameras. The camera and the lens are priced the same; each costs $5,990 or 4,290 euros, and each will ship in October.

Compared with the earlier 645DF, all moving parts of the 645DF+ have been completely … Read more

Office Convert PDF to JPG JPEG TIFF Free is the freeware version of a program for converting your PDF files into a number or image formats to fit your needs.

The functional interface is simple and easy to understand, with buttons that even novice users will recognize. Our tests took less than a minute to complete for each conversion. There were no complicated or confusing steps and there weren't any errors. Office Convert PDF to JPG JPEG TIFF Free offers four different output file types: JPEG, BMP, GIF, and TIF. There isn't much to the features and functions … Read more

Hasselblad, which so far has survived the culling of the medium-format herd, announced a new high-end camera, the H5D.

Members of the H5D series will come in 40-, 50- and 60-megapixel models, and Hasselblad will show them off next week at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany.

As before, it'll also have a 50-megapixel Multi-Shot version that can take 200-megapixel images of stationary subjects using Hasselblad's sensor-shifting multiple exposure technique. The new line will start shipping in December, the company said.

The new model generally resembles Hasselblad's earlier H4D but adds a number of new features, … Read more

Flv Crunch is one of many free tools available for converting various video and audio files to multiple formats. The application has a pretty standard user interface, giving you access to the basic conversion operations without any customization options, but you won't really miss them, as Flv Crunch does a very good job in a short time frame.

If you are a novice user, you may want to access the built-in Help file, but intermediate and advanced level users will intuitively know where to click and what action to take in order to improve the video conversion. What we … Read more

The Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter is a software application for converting your MP4 videos to AVI format.

This is a very basic and simple-looking video converter. The program is light on features, because it has one main purpose, which is converting videos to AVI format. The conversion process time varies from one job to another. You should expect it to take about twice as much time as the length of the video being converted if it's longer than a few minutes.

Even if you're not very familiar with computers, it should be pretty easy to start … Read more

Creating a DVD, especially if you want custom title menus and other such personalization, isn't always an easy feat. AVStoDVD doesn't exactly make this task easier -- it's certainly not the most intuitive program we've used -- but it does provide plenty of options for the technically competent. If you're looking for a tidy wizard-style program that will walk you through each step and keep all the jargon under wraps, AVStoDVD is probably not the best choice. If you have some familiarity with digital video already, it may be just the thing.

AVStoDVD's interface … Read more

There are file converters for all kinds of different files, whether you're converting between different video, audio, or image formats. This might be the first time, however, that we've encountered a program that does all of the above. FormatFactory is an ambitious program that's capable of converting images, videos, and audio files between a number of different formats. Unfortunately, it's not exactly capable of delivering everything it promises.

FormatFactory has a straightforward, intuitive interface; a menu on the left lets users select video, audio, picture, or ROM Device\DVD\CD\ISO. The Advanced menu option even … Read more