The Compact Flash Association announced a new high-performance memory card format, called XQD. Based on the PCI Express specification, the new cards will measure 38.5×29.8×3.8mm at launch, which is slightly larger than SD cards (32x24x2.1mm) and tangibly more compact than CF cards (43x36x5 mm).

The XQD cards should allow write speeds of 125MB/s at launch, but they have a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 5Gbps (that’s 625MB/s), so there’s plenty of room for improvement in the future. Read more »

Yesterday, Nikon announced the newest addition to its lineup of dedicated flash units for digital cameras. The SB-910 Speedlight comes to succeed its former flagship, the SB-900, bringing a new simplified UI (similar to that of the SB-700), improved thermal cut-off (where the flash will charge slower, rather than turn off altogether, when a certain temperature is reached) and AF assist for multi-point AF.

The SB-910 also recharges quicker than its predecessor (3s on alkaline batteries and 2.5s on NiMH batteries). Read more »

Photographer Markus Thompson came across a Canon EOS 1000D off the end of a wharf in Deep Bay, BC while he was scuba diving. Apparently, the camera was lying there for over a year now, since August 2010 to be precise. However, upon closer inspection, Thompson discovered that the SD card inside was still in working condition.

The SD card in question had pictures of a family vacation of some fire fighter in British Columbia and so Thompson decided to put social networking to test and find the owner to return him his images. For this he turned to Google+. Read more »

Cameraphone buffs listen up. If you’re eager to snap some quirky hipster photos with your iPhone’s 5MP or 8MP sharpshooter and happen to have $249 bucks lying around this just might interest you.

PhotoJojo offers a three lens dial case for your iPhone 4 or 4S that gives you three cool shooting modes – Wide Angle, Fisheye and Telephoto. It has three coated glass lenses and it’s made out of aircraft-grade aluminum case. Read more »

Three years after the Nikon D700 was launched, it seems Nikon is finally going to launch a successor. What you see below is supposedly the upcoming Nikon D800, leaked by the folks at Nikon Rumors.

According to the purported specifications, the D800 will have a 36 megapixel sensor. That is 7,360 x 4,912 and thrice the resolution of the D700′s 12.1 megapixel sensor. This comes across as a rather strange move as I thought we had finally gone past the megapixel craze and were concentrating more on the low-light performance, something high resolution sensors are not very good at (unless they are appropriately large in physical size). Read more »

Panasonic has announced two new cameras, the LUMIX DMC-GX1, which is their latest Micro Four Thirds camera and the LUMIX DMC-3D1, which is a point and shoot 3D camera.

The LUMIX DMC-GX1 features a 16.01 megapixel Live MOS sensor and Venus Engine and is capable of shooting at ISO 12,800. It uses a contrast auto-focus system, which is more accurate than a phase difference system. The auto-focus system is also really fast and is claimed to focus in just 0.09 second. Read more »

Just when Canon’s parade was starting, here comes RED with the rain. The new SCARLET has just been announced and it costs nearly half of what the C300 does while at the same time managing to record 4K resolution 30fps RAW footage and 5K still images.

The size advantage of C300 has also been taken care of by the SCARLET. Although RED does not mention the actual dimensions on their site, hands-on pictures make it clear that the SCARLET is more or less the same size as the C300 and designed for hand-held usage like its big brother RED EPIC. Read more »

More news from Canon. Continuing their assault on the professional video camera segment, Canon has showcased an upcoming and yet to be named EOS Movie DSLR.

The highlight of this camera is its full frame 35-mm sensor that can record 4K resolution videos at 24 fps in Motion-JPEG format. It was shown off with a new EF 50 lens and the gigantic Cine 24 lens you see above that even dwarfs the already large camera. Read more »

Canon has been making professional still cameras for a long time now but it is yet to enter the world of professional video camera, dominated by the likes of Arri and RED. But that’s history now with the announcement of the $20,000 Canon C300, Canon’s first professional video camera announced today at an event in the mecca of movies, Hollywood.

The two main features of the C300 according to Canon are the high video quality and the compact size of the camera. At 5.2 (w) x 7.0 (h) x 6.7 (d) inches, the C300 is one of the smallest professional video cameras around, making it possible to be used in tight spaces giving the director more room to be creative. Read more »

Recently bought the original GoPro HD Hero? Kept the receipt, did you? The HD Hero2 has now launched and boy does it bring some nice upgrades.

For starters, the new HD Hero2 boasts improved lens, which GoPro says, is two times sharper than that of the original HD Hero. And that’s just the start. Read more »

Lytro is the world’s first light field camera. Light field is the amount of light travelling in every direction through every point in space. Light field contains a lot more information than traditional light captured by regular cameras, especially pertaining to the placement of objects emitting that light and their distance from the camera.

Traditional cameras capture light and color but light field cameras also captures vector direction of the rays of light. This extra bit of information, combined with the special light field sensor and the powerful software, let’s the camera know the position of the objects in the frame, which is what lets it perform its magic trick, focus selectively on objects AFTER they are captured by the camera. Read more »

With the hype circling around Siri there hasn’t been much talk of the new iPhone’s 8 MP camera and especially the bumped up 1080p video recording.

Let’s get down to it – an enthusiast decided to pit the iPhone 4S against the immensely popular among film makers Canon 5d MkII. The discipline of choice was video recording and the result is pretty damn interesting. Read more »

Canon has just raised the stakes in the DSLR game with the announcement of their new flagship EOS-1D X camera, the ‘X’ part being the Roman numeral for 10 since it is their tenth generation EOS camera. This new monster DSLR comes with a full-frame 18 megapixel sensor. Canon has opted for a lower resolution sensor in favor of larger individual pixel size, which is now the largest on any Canon camera.

Other impressive stuff includes a new 61-point auto focus system, 252 zone metering, 12fps shooting in RAW (14fps in JPEG), ISO 204,800 and HD video recording. Read more »

Adobe’s 2011 MAX event wowed the crowd with their developmental “unblur” feature.

Adobe software already sports some pretty impressive algorthim-based photo manipulation magic. First they gave us Content-aware scale, then Content-aware fill and now Unblur to sharpen shots that at the time, looked like you’d taken them whilst on a rollercoaster. Read more »

It seems Nikon has finally decided to join the mirrorless interchangeable lens bandwagon with the announcement of the Nikon V1 and J1 models. Both models feature a new CX-size 10.1 megapixel sensor with a 2.7x crop factor, 1080/30p video recording, 1200-fps slow motion capture mode, 3-inch LCD and an ISO range of 100-3200.

The J1 comes with a built-in flash, auto-noise reduction for videos, 73-point AF system, which Nikon claims is the fastest in the world, dual-core EXPEED processing engine and the ability to record videos for up to 29 minutes. Read more »