News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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Sony and Panasonic will both unveil new digital SLR (single lens reflex) cameras next week, the companies said Wednesday.
Sony's camera, a new member of its "alpha" family of cameras, will be shown at a company event that is scheduled to take place in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Sony didn't offer any other information about the camera but it's likely to be the long-anticipated high-end camera in the alpha line-up. Earlier this year Sony said the camera will have a full-frame sensor -- an image sensor the same size as a 35mm film frame -- with a resolution of 24.6 megapixels and image stabilisation to reduce the effects of camera shake.
Two days later Panasonic will show the successor to the DMC-L10 at a Tokyo news conference. Panasonic said the new camera "offers unique features to set a new trend in digital SLR photography" but didn't reveal any information about the camera.
The DMC-L10 was launched in September last year at the Photokina camera show in Germany and was the second digital SLR to be presented by Panasonic. The new camera will become the third Lumix digital SLR and is likely to be a main feature of Panasonic's Photokina line-up.
Likewise, the new Sony alpha camera will be a key item on its Photokina booth.
Photokina begins in Cologne on Sept. 23.
The digital SLR is becoming increasingly competitive with long-time leaders Nikon and Canon facing stiff competition from newcomers including Panasonic, Sony, FujiFilm and Olympus. The most recent new digital SLR, Nikon's D90, was announced in August and brought a feature not present on other models: the ability to record high-definition video.
Aperture 2 adds more than 100 features, a streamlined user interface and a new image processing engine, according to Apple. New imaging tools have been added, to help photographers recover highlights, bring out colour vibrancy, manage local contrast definition, do soft-edged retouching and vignetting, and fine-tune RAW images. "The theme of this release is performance, simplicity and imaging," said Kirk Paulsen, Apple's senior director, application Product Marketing. Aperture 2 lets users post their image portfolios on .Mac web galleries, or to the iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV. Users can switch between the Viewer and Browser modes using a single key command; an all-in-one heads up display lets users toggle between library, metadata and adjustment controls using a single tabbed inspector. There's a new All Projects view that's been modelled after iPhoto's Events view. It provides a "poster" photo for every project and the ability to skim through the photos inside quickly. An integrated iPhoto browser helps you access directly any images and events you have stored in iPhoto.
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Automatic face recognition headlines an update to Google's Picasa application and Picasa Web Albums photo sharing site, allowing users to automatically tag and group photos together based on the people in them.
Jackie Dove | Sep 3, 2008
Sony this week introduced its first full-frame digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera, a 24.6-megapixel monster called the DSLR-α900 that will ship next month in Australia for $4,499 (body only).
Peter Cohen and David Braue | Sep 11, 2008
Panasonic has developed a digital still camera that straddles the boundary between compact point-and-shoot models and larger SLR (single lens reflex) cameras.
Martyn Williams | Sep 14, 2008
As I type these words, I am waiting for Apple's Developer Connection web site to ease up sufficiently for me to download the long-awaited Software Developer Kit for the iPhone (and iPod touch, just by the by). In a way, I hate developer-oriented announcements — "here's a really cool thing we're working on, and it's available now, and hoi polloi can have it in about six months". Actually, it's the six months I hate.
