lens

This week Tamron announced a new ultrawide-angle zoom lens, the SP AF 10-24mm Di II LD f3.5-4.5, for use with Canon and Nikon APS-C sensor-size dSLRs. Versions for Pentax and Sony will be announced in the future.

The lens has a 35mm-equivalent focal length of 16mm to 37mm. It offers a wider focal length range, and a faster aperture than Tamron's current SP AF 11-18mm Di II f4.5-5.6 lens. A flower shaped lens hood is included with it. The lens has a close focusing distance of 9.4 inches, a 77mm filter size, is 3.… Read more

If you're a Canon shooter and always wished Canon made a do-everything 18-200mm lens like others make, well, it finally arrived.

Canon on Tuesday announced its latest EF-S lens, the 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 IS. It offers an incredibly wide focal length range, with a 35mm equivalent range of 29-320mm. The lens features Canon's built-in optical image stabilization system, with a claimed 4-stop effect. With a minimum focusing distance of 18 inches, you will get pretty close for a big lens. Its focal-length versatility makes it ideal for traveling, and for anytime you don't want to carry … Read more

Cooliris for Firefox (formerly PicLens) is an add-on for Firefox that makes viewing images much more elegant and fun. Once installed, you can simply perform a search for images at a Cooliris-enabled site--like Google, Flikr, or Amazon--to bring up a full-screen 3D wall of results. Grab the bar at the bottom to watch your wall of results scroll by smoothly on your screen. When you find an image or movie you like, click on it to get a larger view. Cooliris also lets you search from within the interface by category or by site with its Discovery tools.

For more … Read more

On the show today: Justin calls in from bed, the Spanish Olympic basketball team is a bunch of racists, some chicks are using wide contact lenses to achieve "Anime eyes," fake porn inspectors, and putting Lojack in your PS3.

Sorry--today's post just won't be as long as Justin wants. It's just not gonna happen. We don't understand how he finds the time to do it anyway, so we're not gonna try and do it ourselves.

With Justin's trip to the "doctor," it leaves Wilson and I to fend for ourselves … Read more

Cross-platform, cross-browser, and proud of it, browser plug-in PicLens is to Web surfing as an IMAX screen is to a 13-inch laptop monitor. In theory, it takes the images it finds on a Web site, expands them to super-extra-large size, and then lets you surf through them in a classy scaling interface that we think we last saw in Iron Man. Or maybe it was The Dark Knight.

Installing it places a button on the Toolbar. When you're on a PicLens-enabled Web site, click the PicLens button to activate the PicLens interface. Your screen will go black, and all … Read more

The fun browser add-on PicLens has incorporated YouTube and Amazon.com into the short but hopefully soon-to-grow list of supported Web sites. Compatible with Firefox on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, and Safari, PicLens recreates your surfing experience with a futuristic graphical display.

As Rafe talked about in February, PicLens highlights the image content of a site and allows you to whip back and forth using mouse gestures instead of conventional static browsing. If you're familiar with how it works with an image site like Flickr, the YouTube interface is identical. The PicLens plug-in will install a grid button … Read more

Online storage provider Dropio has a cool new feature for its users today, allowing them to tap into Twitter to post updates every time they add files to one of their storage folders. Dropio's architecture is based around folders (called "drops") so after plugging in your Twitter log-in to any specific drop it will broadcast changes every time files are added or removed.

What makes this feature particularly useful is that you can assign it to specific drops but not all of them at once, meaning if you want to keep some files and uploads private you … Read more

One of the blessings of an SLR can also be a curse: having to choose which lenses to carry, which means finding the right balance between weight and bulk, and having the focal lengths you need.

The Nikon AF-S DX VR 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 G IF ED lens offers Nikon shooters a satisfying single-lens solution. It is compatible with all Nikon DX digital SLRs including the D300, D60, and D40.

Read the full review here.

Got a photo gallery you want to spice up? Check out TiltViewer. Like CoolIris' PicLens, it takes your photos and places them on a dynamic 3D wall that can be zoomed around with your mouse. Clicking any thumbnail will scale it up as big as your browser window is, and you can flip any shot to view the metadata--complete with customizable links that go towards that photo's sale page, or to download links.

The big difference between the PicLens and TiltViewer is that the latter doesn't require the viewer to have any sort of browser plug-in installed to … Read more