Photography

A start-up called Lytro hopes to revolutionize photography by selling a camera later this year that lets people focus their images after the fact.

The technique used is called light-field photography, and it's been an active area of research for years in the optics realm. With it, lens and image sensor technology doesn't focus on a particular subject, but instead gathers light information from different directions; processing after the fact means different aspects of the scene can be recreated.

Lytro has been working on the technology for years--I interviewed Chief Executive Ren Ng three years ago when his … Read more

A videographer who's brought the distinctive look of high dynamic range (HDR) photography to video has released an iPhone app that tackles the technology.

Flare debuted today for $1.99 on the Apple App Store. It uses an image-processing algorithm to try to perform HDR duties such as bringing out details otherwise lost in the murk of shadowy areas. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't match up to the HDR video that developer Alaric Cole produced with two Canon 5D Mark II SLR cameras and a beam splitter as part of Soviet Montage Productions. It is, after all, just a single lowly mobile phone image sensor.

"The algorithm is an adaptation of what I wrote for the original Soviet Montage clip," Cole said. "I'm definitely not claiming this is anything like what we did with two 5D's, but I have spent over 1700 hours on this project, so it is doing something ;)"

The app comes with an slider to adjust the strength of the effect. For a gander at what it does on its default settings, check out this video of Flare for the iPhone my colleague Josh Lowensohn shot this morning on his iPhone 4 in the glamorous CNET offices. (Guess who has the Andy Warhol-Marilyn Monroe print?) To see it at a punchier maxed-out setting, here's another video. (Guess who has the space invaders on the office door?) … Read more

Motivated by a very public accidental deletion of a Flickr user's account, and its very protracted restoration, Yahoo's photo-sharing site has added an option to easily reverse an account termination.

"We've now instituted a 90-day delay in deleting the content, including the photos, metadata, comments, and all the bits of an account, after it's deleted," Flickr said in a blog post yesterday.

The new procedure guards against the kind of embarrassment caused by the case of Mirco Wilhelm's Flickr account. Wilhelm had reported another Flickr user for violation of the site's policies, … Read more

The new top-end model from medium-format camera maker Hasselblad is now on the market, and it's not cheap: the 200-megapixel H4D-200MS will set you back 32,000 euros, or about $45,000.

The camera actually uses a sensor with a mere 50 megapixels, but with Hasselblad's multishot technology combines six shots into one. That means moving subjects such as fashion models need not apply. But a lot of this very high-end photography involves static subjects such as jewelry, watches, cars, and paintings for reproduction.

Hasselblad announced the H4D-200MS last September at the Photokina show. At the time, the … Read more

Google has improved the quality of WebP, an image format it promises will speed up the Web--if the company can just convince people to use it instead of JPEG.

WebP, unveiled last year, is a still-image variation of the company's open-source, royalty-free WebM video technology. Google's sales pitch: with its newer compression technology, Web pages will load faster and less network bandwidth is necessary compared to using JPEGs.

Now the company argues that it's improved quality of WebP images through more elaborate encoding software. It can, for example, concentrate its data on the complicated parts of … Read more

If you miss your Android apps when using your PC, a start-up called BlueStacks says it has the answer.

Today, the company announced first-round funding of $7.6 million from Ignition Ventures, Radar Partners, Helion Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz for its virtualization technology that provides a foundation for Google's mobile operating system atop Windows. It's got partnerships with Citrix for distribution to interested businesses and with assorted as-yet unnamed PC makers for consumers.

"The idea is very simple," said Chief Executive and co-founder Rosen Sharma, who previously was McAfee's chief technology officer. It … Read more

First came the halo effect of computer purchases: iPod or iPhone buyers deciding they'd like a Mac. Now I'm wondering whether there will be a similar trend among programmers.

I started pondering the idea after hearing from MacPhun, the developers of FX Photo Studio, a $1 iOS app that just made the jump to a Mac OS X app that costs $20 for the regular version and $40 for the pro version. If MacPhun is willing to take the leap, perhaps others are?

I see the move as an interesting possibility because of a few factors:

• The Mac … Read more

Sigma has announced it'll ship its SD1 camera in June for $9,700, a price that suggests it's aiming its new flagship SLR almost exclusively at professional photographers.

The Japanese company unveiled the Sigma SD1 last year at the Photokina trade show. The camera embodies the company's aspirations to rise beyond its present role as a maker of third-party lenses into a camera rival to powerhouses such as Nikon and Canon.

The SD1 pricing, though, indicates that Sigma is trying to leapfrog Canon's top-end, $7,500 1Ds Mark III and Nikon's competing $5,900 D3x … Read more

Lexar Media has overhauled its 2007-era dual-slot professional flash card reader to support fast new cards and the higher-speed USB 3.0 interface that have arrived in the last four years.

Like its predecessor, the new reader handles CompactFlash (CF) and Secure Digital (SD) memory cards. Unlike its predecessor, it can handle SDXC, a newer member of the SD card lineage that provides for larger capacities, and SD's UHS-1 higher-speed interface.

Things didn't change on the CF side of the shop; the older model supported the present high-speed standard for CompactFlash, called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access). CompactFlash … Read more