Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Looking for something that will allow you to have totally portable images for use anywhere?  Check out the new Pico Projector PK-101.  You attach this tiny device (it is smaller and lighter than a mobile phone even!) to either your smart phone (and yes, it works with iPhones too) or media player, and it throws an image onto a nearby screen or white surface.  Pretty cool.  Continued after the break.

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So, you’ve found and purchased the camera that is just perfect for you. (If you haven’t, check out The Gadgetell guide to finding a camera)  You’ve been been playing with it, experimenting with it, and taking a ton of shots. Now what?  Well, there are quite a few options if you want your work seen or even sold.

There are lots of places on the ‘net that allow you to post your photography work.  Of course, there is the well known flickr, which seems to be used by everybody and their brother to post everything from little Johnny’s 4th birthday party to girls showing off their ass-ets, to some photos that really do have photographic merit.  But, if you are looking to have your work seen and critiqued by other photographers, you may want to look into some other sites as well. 

Read about all the options you have to get your work seen and even get paid for your photos after the break. 

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I just unboxed and installed Adobe Photoshop CS4, so I’m ready to offer some first impressions on the PC version.

Speed

Photoshop CS4 seems a lot faster than previous versions.  There are many things that frustrated me in CS3 that no longer are present.  In CS3, it was kind of clunky when you wanted to drag a window outside of the main Photoshop window, but in CS4 it’s quick and fluid like you would expect. 

Another performance boost that I noticed is the menu system.  The menus in Photoshop are huge, due to the insane amount of filters and features they provide, so it’s easy to see why the menu system could be a bit sluggish.  Right away, I noticed that the menus load immediately, and the application launches a lot quicker. 

Keep reading for more on the new CS4.

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Pricing and Fade-Resistance Figured Out

Kodak recently introduced two inkjet printers to their All-in-One lineup: ESP7 and ESP9.  The announcement came nearly six months after they released the ESP5.

As a draw-in, Kodak claims these printers give us the lowest ink prices in the industry.  This is just like every printer they have ever put out, even going back to the first ones in 2004.  Even in 2007, when Kodak put out its first inkjet, they were singing the same song.

Is Kodak bringing printing costs down or not?  Keep reading to see what I found out.

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Photographers have been messing around with 3D photography for years.  It just hasn’t been a nice and easy, already developed for them, consumer-friendly, point and shoot 3D camera they were using to take the photos.  Some photographers were rigging up their own cameras to get the effect, some doing it in post-processing.  Some, used much less user-friendly four lens cameras that did exist out there, just not with the best picture quality.

Fujifilm is hoping to remedy all of that with their development of their 3D camera.  The way it accomplishes the 3D effect is to use two lenses and two sensors.  The lenses are about 6 to 7-cm apart, which is the width between the average person’s eyes.  These lenses and sensors take different pictures from different angles simultaneously.  Then, it combines the different pictures to create one image that is displayed on the camera’s 2.8-inch, 230,000 pixel LCD screen. 

Read more about 3D cameras after the break.

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Sections: Gadgets / Other, Household, Lifestyle, Miscellaneous, Imaging, Digital Cameras, Peripherals, Displays, Printers / Scanners, Web, Websites

Just imagine watching Monday Night Football with the players looking like they are running right at you.  Talk about experiencing the excitement of the game without actually being there.  Or fighting the bad guys in your favorite video game (and you thought the Wii made the fighting seem realistic).

Scientists have finally broken the barrier that had prevented this type of technology by creating the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.  Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the University’s of Arizona’s Optical Sciences department, said, “This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology.“  Although there is still work to be done, scientists are still very optimistic they are getting much closer to this becoming a reality in the next five to ten years.

Find out much more about holographic TV after the break!

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Often us photographers think we did a pretty good job with optimizing our different picture files, but then when a text editor is used we are able to see that they still contain a ton of data that can actually be removed.  Yep, there are different programs out there that can be used to extract this information from the different GIFs, PNGs, or JPEGs, and still allow the photo look great, but many of these programs require a pretty specific knowledge to use them.  Unless the user knows what they are doing when it comes to command-line tools, they are pretty much out of luck. Until now.

Two members from the Yahoo exceptional performance team, Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, took what they knew of these tools and built a single application called Smush.it that does all the optimizations for you in just one place.  Completely cloud-based, it allows you to upload images, give the image a URL, or use it as a Firefox extension.  The program shows you how many bytes you’ll save, and then gives you the images as .zip file for you to replace them on your site.

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Sections: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Accessories, Digital Cameras, Peripherals, Displays, Storage, Web, Downloads, Web Apps, Web Browsers, Websites

Compact, rugged, and with a price tag that won’t break the bank, the newest model of outdoor ready compact cameras by Olympus has a clever little feature that they invite users to tap into. Yeah, ok…so I’m sure by now you’ve figured out it has something to do with tapping, right? Well, correct you are.

Usually, one does NOT want to bump, bang, or ever tap their camera any more than necessary. In the case of the Stylus 1050 SW however, Olympus invites their users to “tap into worry-free fun”.  It means just what is sounds like. The camera uses an innovative tap interface where it registers taps on not only the screen area like some other touch screen cameras do; but also anywhere on the camera body. It uses an accelerometer so that it can read taps on different surfaces to control different functions just by tapping the appropriate area. Certain taps on the right side of the camera do one thing…taps on the left another. You can even calibrate the tap sensitivity to your liking. According to Olympus, it offers benefits in adverse conditions as well.

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Developed by the Canadian company Idee, the TinEye search engine is a fantastic new breakthrough in the realm of search engines that allows users to search for their photographs anywhere on the Internet.  Users are able to actually search for a picture by uploading it, and then having the program run a pixel by pixel search across the ‘Net. All found instances of the image are flagged, regardless of whether it has been cropped, merged or digitally altered in any way.

Leila Boujnane, CEO of TinEye, has the following to say about their program.

“TinEye does for images what Google does for text. We are not limited by words, Google can only find an image if a particular search word is in proximity to it. We have the ability on a large scale to tell somebody where one of their images has appeared and how it’s being used.“

The program is also not limited by the quality of the input image according to Boujnane.  She states that “anything you would consider a preview image or low resolution image would work. I can take a photograph of a picture in the Louvre with my mobile and upload it to TinEye and it would dump me on the page of that Wikipedia page related to that painting.“

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Sections: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Web

Pixlr, a program from Sweden that some compare to Photoshop Express, is a web-based photo editing software that really holds it’s weight.  When you click on the Pixlr.com link, you will immediately be brought to the site and invited to “jump right in” and begin using the software. Flash based, it is actually really rather simple to use for anyone even vaguely familiar with photo editing.

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Sections: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Accessories, Web, Web Apps, Websites