3 D Camera

The 3-D Camera
This year the maker of the world's first digital camera, Fujifilm, introduced a 3-D digital camera: the FinePix Real 3D W1. The 10-megapixel FinePix has two lenses, set about as far apart as human eyes, which snap shots of an object from slightly different angles. Those images are then combined into one, creating the illusion of depth. Its 3-D images can be viewed — without clumsy 3-D glasses — on the camera's back LCD screen or displayed in a special digital photo frame.

Using an “Advanced 3D Mode,” the FinePix W1 digital camera also allows the user to adjust the settings to suit the scene being photographed. When using the “Individual Shutter 3D Shooting Mode,” the camera shifts to take the second shot after taking the first shot, and saves a single 3D image in the camera manually. This allows the user to edit the 3D images, which is particularly useful for landscape photography, or macro shots, where the 3D effect can be too strong. “Interval 3D Shooting” mode allows further flexibility, making it possible to take two shots from different viewpoints continuously while the photographer is moving, for example by train, airplane, or car…etc., to achieve 3D images of long-distance views.

The FinePix W1 also shoots conventional two-dimensional images. The "Advanced 2D Mode" lets users take two different shots simultaneously by pressing the shutter once. With "Tele/Wide Simultaneous Shooting," it’s possible to take a close-up photo of the subject and, at the same time, a photo with a wider span - just by changing the settings of the two lenses. With "2-Color Simultaneous Shooting" mode, users can take photos of the same scene with different color tonalities, like "Standard" or "Fujichrome," just by changing the processing signals on the two sensors.

Read more: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0910/09100101fujifilm3dshipping.asp
Check out the website: http://www.fujifilm.com/products/3d/camera/finepix_real3dw1/features/page_02.html

Gorillapod: wrap your camera on any tree or railing

A flexible tripod with over two dozen flexible joints that bend and rotate, allowing a camera to be mounted on almost any surface.

The Gorillapod lets you take your pocket camera to places it has never been before to get the shot you want. Hang your camera from the branch of a tree, wrap it round a railing, or leave it dangling from a door knob - the Gorillapod’s ball and socket type joints bend and twist almost 360 degrees so the legs can be contorted into a variety of different positions.

It’s the brainchild of inventor and visionary JoeBen Bevirt who first came up with idea in the late 1990s whilst at Stanford University. He took a course called Integrated Design for Marketing and Manufacturability and was part of a group of students given the task of coming up with a better tabletop tripod. He designed one with flexible legs and called it Gorillapod, but it stayed at the concept stage for years as after graduation he initially pursued other activities. Gorillapod came swinging back into his life in 2004. A friend had continually been pestering him to turn it into a product, and so he embarked on the project whilst learning about manufacturing in China. “I thought it shouldn’t be too hard, so I worked on a prototype and it turned out to be a fair bit more challenging. The first couple of manufacturers that I worked with gave up because the injection moulding tooling to make the socket joints was tricky, and it took more time and capital than I expected. But it turned out to be incredibly worth it.”

Major Improvements

For Gorillapod to become a marketable commodity many improvements had to be made on the original Stanford design. And even when they were completed there were still many more refinements that had to be attended to until Bevirt was happy with the results. He says that he has a “scrappy iterative approach” to inventing. “Basically you build lots of prototypes and you test them and do it again and again and again and figure out what works and what doesn’t work. You build lots of different concepts and compare and contrast them, and you take the good things from one and couple with another.” And what comes out at the other end is a viable product.

A patent was filed via his patent attorney and in 2005 Bevirt created a company called Joby as a vehicle for all the inventing he wants to do. Gorillapod was the first product, and it has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It is sold through national and international retailers as well as via the company website and has spawned further products using the same flexible Gorillapod idea; so now there are Gorillamobile stands for mobile devices and a Gorillatorch - a hands-free flashlight.

Stop Piracy at the source

IR light from behind the cinema screen prevents pirates from recording films at movie theatres

National Institute of Informatics, Japan in co-operation with Sharp, has developed a technique to render any recording unwatchable by flashing pulses of infra-red (IR) light from behind the cinema screen. The pulses pass through tiny holes in the screen originally designed to allow through sound, and cause interference to any video cameras held by members of the audience. The IR light, while invisible to human eyes, is also impossible to filter out without rendering the recording too blurry to watch. The team says best results are achieved at a speed of 10 pulses per second.

Films screened at cinemas are already digitally watermarked to prevent them from being copied digitally, but there has been no way of reliably stopping pirates from recording films using video cameras. The damage caused by bootleg film recordings is estimated at around 3 billion dollars a year, according to the American Film Institute.

Filming photons, one million times a second

Filming photons, one million times a second
European researchers have created a CMOS (semiconductor) camera capable of filming individual photons one million times a second. The breakthrough will impact on all the most advanced areas of science and makes Europe the world leader in the technology.

The scientists wanted to create the fastest, highest resolution CMOS (semiconductor) video camera, but to do that they needed to choose an ultra-fast photo detector. They also needed to choose between two competing timing mechanisms or stopwatches, Time to Analogue Convertors (TAC) and Time to Digital Convertors (TDC).

The timing mechanism is important. It can tell, to within a few tens of picoseconds, when the photon arrives at the detector. It creates stunning resolution in time.

Imaging technology has advanced rapidly over the last few years. But the demands of science have advanced even more rapidly. New scientific fields like proteomics - studying the different proteins that form the human body - pose a problem because they require cameras that are capable of recording data at photon-resolution, and extremely fast. That problem is now essentially solved thanks to the work of the Megaframe project, which developed a CMOS video camera that can capture 1024 individual photons at one million frames a second. It can record, to within 100 picoseconds, when the photon arrived at each detector. It is insanely fast.
Must Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news173957578.html

Filming photons, one million times a second

Filming photons, one million times a second

European researchers have created a CMOS (semiconductor) camera capable of filming individual photons one million times a second. The breakthrough will impact on all the most advanced areas of science and makes Europe the world leader in the technology.

The scientists wanted to create the fastest, highest resolution CMOS (semiconductor) video camera, but to do that they needed to choose an ultra-fast photo detector. They also needed to choose between two competing timing mechanisms or stopwatches, Time to Analogue Convertors (TAC) and Time to Digital Convertors (TDC).

The timing mechanism is important. It can tell, to within a few tens of picoseconds, when the photon arrives at the detector. It creates stunning resolution in time.

Imaging technology has advanced rapidly over the last few years. But the demands of science have advanced even more rapidly. New scientific fields like proteomics - studying the different proteins that form the human body - pose a problem because they require cameras that are capable of recording data at photon-resolution, and extremely fast. That problem is now essentially solved thanks to the work of the Megaframe project, which developed a CMOS video camera that can capture 1024 individual photons at one million frames a second. It can record, to within 100 picoseconds, when the photon arrived at each detector. It is insanely fast.

Must Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news173957578.html

Invisible flash- take pics in dark

Invisible Flash sheds new light on photography in the dark
As technology becomes available to help those wishing to avoid the annoying flash photography of the paparazzi get some payback, researchers Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus from New York University have developed a system for taking dazzle-free photos in poor lighting conditions which could result in celebs not even knowing they're being photographed. Named dark light flash photography by its creators, the system uses light waves beyond our visible range and special software and algorithms to produce photos comparable in quality to a long exposure shot.

Photos taken using the dark flash produce images that don't match the colors of our visual experience, producing a slightly green-tinted monochrome effect similar to something seen using night vision. So two images are recorded in quick succession (limited only by the camera's 3 frames/sec rate), one recording the dark flash spectrum and the other ambient light frequencies in the visible range.

Other methods and applications
In developing this system other solutions for non-invasive low light photography were examined, including heavy and expensive wide aperture lenses, anti-shake hardware that can help reduce image blur and numerous de-noising techniques.

Read more at: http://www.gizmag.com/dark-flash-photography-research/12422/