Source: Digital Photography Review

Metadata is defined as “data about data.”  It’s computerese for both a dictionary of definitions about data, as well as the definition of data itself.  The term is more commonly used in large data installations called data marts and data warehouses, and is very important in data mining.

In everyday language, a metadata defines both the database and its elements, or a spreadsheet and its columns, and how these relate to another spreadsheet with different columns, and to another and to another.  And a data warehouse is a large repository of related data, of which a subset is called a data mart.  And data mining is the process of getting specific information from the mountain of data.

At this point, it’s all technospeak.  In real terms, this is the problem of anyone with a digital camera.  The source of the problem is the ease of taking pictures.  With this ease of use, comes lots of pictures.  With lots of pictures, it sometimes takes a lot of effort and time collating the information:  Where was the picture taken? What is the subject or topic or occasion? How was the picture taken?  What camera, lens, lighting and film settings were used?

A regular guy who’s trigger happy with his single camera would soon find out that he’s deep into this kind of problem.  We multiply this complexity by the number of manufacturers of digital photography devices and software and we now have the beginnings of chaos: every bit of information has to be sorted, collated and tagged manually.

Last year, the Metadata Working Group was formed to address this issue.  The Metadata Working Group is an alliance composed of Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony and aims to standardize metadata embedded in digital pictures.  If you have a photo stored in your computer, check out its properties and the list you see is the metadata as defined by the camera manufacturer. If you edited the picture, the list contents now varies.  Some properties changed, and some items have disappeared or been replaced.

To this end, the Metadata Working Group has just released a guideline which suggests methods to increase interoperability and storage of shooting settings and other associated data in digital images. It also aims at standardizing the availability of metadata across all applications and devices, making it easier for users to create, organize and share their pictures.

What this means is that if the JPEG or RAW file followed the rules of storing information, you can run this through a software (which also follows the guidelines for metadata) and organizes the pictures for you.  Right now, no such software exists.  You have to organize your pictures manually.  And as any photographer knows, after a certain point, manually organizing pictures takes more time than taking pictures.  And the more information you deem is important, the longer it would take to organize.

The members of the group represent big names in different related industries.  And it would be to everyone’s advantage to make a standard metadata accepted by all the other manufacturers.

Source:  Imaging Resource

Sanho Corporation recently released a 500GB photo backup with a fast 2GB/s write speed.  The Sanho HyperDrive COLORSPACE UDMA, among other things, features fast backup speeds due to its use of UDMA, a picture viewer, RAW file reader, and can read any of 14 different types of memory cards.

If you have a camera with upwards of 8MP, the file size of the pictures becomes a concern.  Common sense would dictate the use of multiple memory cards.  Or a laptop for easy storage and ready access.  The HyperDrive can serve as a primary picture storage backup, an interim storage till you get to access a computer or as a secondary picture storage.  The 500GB hard disk is not a laughing matter, considering it is coupled with UDMA speeds of 40MB/s for retrieval and storage of pictures.

It has also made sure that the photographer would have no reason not to use it with the memory card reader.  It can read practically all types of flash memory cards available on the market today.

The viewing software can also read all current RAW files from different camera manufacturers for viewing on the 3.2-inch screen.  As an added bonus, the camera orients the picture to portrait (tall) or landscape (wide) depending on how it’s held.

I’m still stuck at its 500GB hard disk.  This is the largest hard disk capacity on any photo storage device.  Other HyperDrive models have mp3 players, this one does away with that.  The files it is designed to store are more than 10-times larger compared to regular mp3 song files.

With a much improved lithium ion battery pack the unit is capable of storing 250GB between recharging.

It allows incremental backup from the memory card, copying only those files which have not yet been saved to the HyperDrive.  It also has a CRC checking which verifies on file copy.  The hard-disk is S.M.A.R.T enabled, which detects possible errors on the disk prior to disk failure, and informs the user to backup immediately.  Built-in data recovery tools allow the recovery of pictures due to formatting or deletion, as well as recovery for lost or corrupted files from the memory card.

The inclusion of data recovery tools for memory cards is significant and would help a lot of photographers.  It’s not everyday that you don’t have to worry about not having the right tool for undeleting or unformatting a memory card.  In some ways the security features alone are well worth the price of the unit.

Suggested retail price starts at $339 for the 80GB model up to $599 for 500GB.

Source: GSMArena.com

For a while, there I thought that camera manufacturers were the only ones interested in higher megapixel ratings.  Now, it seems that even cell phone cameras are in on the race for higher megapixel capabilities.

The newly released Samsung M8800 cell phone has an 8-megapixel camera built-in among other features.  With the range of features that it has, the list looks more like an enumeration for a camera more than for a phone.  As expected, it is auto-focus with two LED flash and with two video settings:  WVGA (720×480) and VGA (640×480) @30fps video recording.  Additionally, it has a face recognition software with smile and blink detection.  It also has a shake reduction software.  It can shot at an ISO 1600 rating.  For video playback it also has DiVx video.

Yes, it’s being marketed as a phone first, camera second.  However, note that it has a geo-tagging capability for the pictures.  That means that the picture file will contain information of where in the world it was taken.  This is due to the built-in software and the GPS receiver.  At the moment, most camera makers are still in the planning stage of implementing geo-tagging in their cameras.

The camera has no WiFi capability, but it uses a micro-SD for data storage.

It would do well to remember that Samsung also markets a whole line of electronic products which include electronic cameras.

The mega-pixel race for cell phone cameras is escalating fast as there are 10-megapixel cameras coming out soon.

As an aside, breaking news will most probably be increasingly through first-hand eyewitness video from camera phones, as the London tube bombing several years ago has shown.  The videos from the tube were by regular commuters waiting for their train, and capturing the videos using camera phones.

The Samsung M8800 is set to be sold in France by mid-October, 2008 and starting at 550 euros (about US$800).

Every time Leica releases a new model it becomes an instant classic.  This time it released a new model which was so unexpected that it created a class of its own.

The Leica S2 is a 37-megapixel camera in a body the size of a 35mm DSLR.  It has a 30×45mm CCD sensor, which is about 56% larger than a full-frame DSLR sensor.  It’s a weather-sealed body, with dual-shutter capability and saves to raw, JPEG and DNG.  It has a 3-inch LCD  at the back with a control display at the top of the camera.

And what’s more is that there are nine lenses designed specifically for the S2 which were also announced at the same time.  This indicates that Leica is intent to make this camera the start of a whole new series.

However, contrary to what this looks like, the S2 is not a regular DSLR, but what Leica calls a “middle-format” which is a new platform.  Leica noted that photographers who use medium format cameras also have a second camera, usually a Nikon or a Canon SLR for field work.  And the S2 was designed for that market of professional photographers (with the expected price tag to boot).  It has a sensor the size of medium-format film, in the body of an SLR.  A relatively medium-sized SLR.

Traditionally, large printing was done with transparencies shot with medium-format cameras.  The film size is larger than those for a 35mm SLR.  You can blow up both films, but the optimum blow up size for a 35mm film is considerably smaller than those for a medium-format camera. With the migration to digital format, the analogy is that of more megapixels for larger prints.  If you have a 3-megapixel picture, it’s optimum size would be that of half-A4 size.  When printing a 3MP picture to the size of an A4 page, the resulting print would be showing artifacts and blurs.  You would have been better off with a 5MP or an 8MP file for A4 size printing.

(Another way of looking at it is if you used an 800×600 jpeg file as a desktop background on your 1280×960 screen. Same thing happens, you’ll be getting blurs and artifacts.)

In terms of printing area, a 37MP would be more than enough for printing on a big poster, showing details even when you have your nose up close to it.

My take on it is that the S2’s only compromise is the use of CCD instead of CMOS.  Then again, it would have taken them a little bit more research and development, and a larger budget if they had used CMOS sensors.  On the other hand, the use of CCD means that the this is still slightly slower than DSLRs with CMOS sensors.  Come to think of it, at 37MP, it doesn’t make sense to have CMOS sensors because of the sheer size of the resulting file.  The bottle-neck would just move from the sensor translation to the file saving part of the software.

At a rumored price close to $30,000, the Leica S2 will be available Summer of 2009.

Official website:  Leica.com

Source:  Cameratown.com

Tamron recently announced the development of their newest high power zoom lens in the AF18-270mm Di II VC Ultra High Power Zoom lens.

Tamron of Japan is a third-party manufacturer of lenses for SLR cameras.  One of their most famous innovations came in 1992 with the introduction of a 28-200mm f3.8-5.6 zoom lens which was barely 4 inches in length.  This at a time when zoom lenses were typically at least 6 inches in length.  Effectively, this development made zoom lenses very practical for regular use.

Further development along the years have been to push the envelop towards higher ranges.  With the new model 18-270mm zoom, it is the first effective 15x lens for SLRs.  It is the lens with the longest zoom range specifically designed for digital SLRs with sensors smaller than 24mm x 16mm.

For all of that, it is still the same approximate size as older Tamron models. It’s light, and easy to manipulate when zooming.  There have been several manufacturer’s which have released zoom lenses which approximate it’s size.  But none have gotten close to the performance of being extraordinarily sharp through out it’s zoom range.  For the most part, lenses from other manufacturers with comparable zoom ranges are almost twice the length and weight of Tamron models.

Among it’s features, it has built-in electronics with its Vibration Compensation (VC) which minimizes handheld camera shakes.  This is a great help for handheld photography considering that shake is more noticeable when the lens is zoomed to the max.  A regular user wouldn’t notice that he’s zoomed to the point where handheld shake is evident in the picture.  The mechanism is really a great help.  In terms of philosophy, Canon and Nikon zoom lenses also have the image stabilization mechanism in the lenses rather than in the camera.

The AF18-270mm Di II VC Ultra High Power Zoom lens will be available for Canon and Nikon cameras.

Official Website:  Press Release

Sources:

Cameratown.com

Digital Photography Review

Casio is, like most Japanese multi-national companies, almost a conglomerate with a whole lot of product lines.  It started out with calculators and watches (thing G-Shock) and now is putting it’s strength into cameras.  In the same way that it put a GPS into a wristwatch and sold at an affordable price, this time the innovation is almost on that scale, and relatively less pricey.  A $700+ 10 megapixel camera with full HD capability, high speed burst speed on stills, and slow motion capture on video.

With the release of the newest model of its Exilim series of cameras, the Casio Exilim Pro Ex-FH20, it’s showing innovation in unexpected ways.  Among other things, this camera is fast.  It has a burst mode of 40 frames per second on 7 megapixels.  It is so fast, it can take a picture even BEFORE you press the shutter button. It stores the images in the camera and you can choose which pictures to save.  This means that even if you missed the picture you can still recover it.

It is so fast, it can capture video at 30fps for full HD quality 1280×720; 210fps at 480×360; 420fps at 224×168; and 1000fps at 224×56.  That is faster than a speeding bullet.  We’re no longer talking about catching a drop of water in the air, but of seeing a bullet pass through a balloon before the balloon bursts.  Well almost.  But you get the drift.

Usually when a camera comes along boasting something extraordinary, most other features would pale in comparison.  Except that this camera also has a 20x optical zoom, equivalent to 26mm to 520mm on a standard SLR.  Casio is serious about this camera.  It uses a CMOS sensor which allows it to capture images faster.  And to round it off, it also has a high-speed anti-shake function, as well as a high-speed night scene setting (a natural result of the anti-shake setting).

Priced at £399 in the UK, it should weigh in at around $700 to $750 in the United States.

Official website:  Casio Press Release

Source:  Digital Photography Review

The lines have blurred between high-end digital photography and Full HD video.  One of the first DSLR camera manufacturers to go into Full HD video was Nikon.  Now it’s Canon’s turn. With the release of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II there is a lot of pressure for every other camera manufacturer to follow suit.

An interesting sidelight of this development is that traditional digital video cameras have been based on the mini-DV format.  One limitation of the mini-DV cameras was that not all the pro model cameras had interchangeable lenses.  Except for Canon.  The top-end Canon pro model mini-DV video camera had an adapter which allows EOS lenses to be fitted to the video camera.  This extended the quality of the video beyond the standard camera lens.

With Nikon leading the way with the release of a full HD video capable camera, Canon is trying to catch up. This is an evolutionary step for DSLR cameras.  Capable of capturing at 1920×1080, it can save the file to Quicktime MOV format.  At 30fps and 1080p HD, it can store up to 12 mins of video.  Maximum file size is 4GB.  More than enough for saving and editing purposes.

One thing missing from the EOS 5D Mark II is a built-in flash.  Though it has the necessary software for controlling flash and white balance compensation for the use of flash.  And it has a relatively low 3.9fps burst mode.

By all means this is not a shabby camera.  This may not be Canon’s top of the line, but it definitely ranks higher than other camera manufacturer’s top of the line model. It’s important to note the direction these two camera makers are going.  The hefty $2,700 price tag (body only) is relatively  cheap considering that it is a full-featured HD video camera.  Now if only CompactFlash disks were able to catch up with faster and larger capacity flash drives then this would be a well-defined niche with the other major players coming in with their own full-HD video DSLR camera models.

Official Website:  Canon Press Release

Digital cameras nowadays are feeling the pinch of available storage media.  The numbers are large:  a 5MP JPEG picture shot with a Kodak could be 700KB in size; a 7MP JPEG picture captured with a Sony could be as large as 2.5MB; a 15MP JPEG shot with a Canon EOS could be as large as 7MB.

Unlike hard disks which have seen falling prices as they push towards the single hard disk terabyte capacity, flash memory used by cameras and other small electronic devices are still expensive when you consider the cost/MB.  Another problem with flash memory is the write speed of larger capacity drives.  And the larger the capacity, the slower the flash drive write speed.

That expectation has changed though with the release of the SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash Series 32GB flash drive.  This drive also boasts of a 50% speed increase (which means that the write cycle time is half that of current flash disks of the same capacity).

As a backgrounder, flash drives have no moving part. This makes it more robust than hard disks, which are based on a spinning disk and a read/write head on an arm. One reason, however, why flash drives are slower is because of the software which evens out the writing among the drive sectors.  This mean that as the flash drive is used, all the sectors have approximately the same number of accrued write cycles.  The software on the drive keeps track of the number of times a sector has been written to.  It decides which sector to use based on a least-used algorithm.  A side-effect of this is that when a flash drive starts having bad sectors (after a sector has been written to more than 100,000 times), all the other sectors will go bad very quickly afterwards.

The SanDisk announcement is very significant for camera makers and, to a lesser extent, to computer manufacturers.  The larger capacity flash drives can containg more and larger files of the large megapixel variety.  Additionally, the cameras can now cycle faster and be ready to shoot in a shorter time.  This also paves the way for longer use by video cameras.  This is specially true for HD cameras which use flash drives.

For now, SanDisk has the niche all to itself.  They invented the flash memory, and they are deserving of leaving the competition far behind.

In an understated bid at a crack at the top of the DSLR market, Sony has unveiled it’s top-of-the-line (alpha) DSLR-A900. Boasting a top of the heap 35mm full frame 24.6MP CMOS, the A900 is one step up from the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III with 21.1 MP full-frame CMOS sensor.

The reason I say it’s understated is because Sony advertises this as designed to “meet the demands of serious enthusiasts.” I wonder why Sony would have the most sensitive full-frame CMOS sensor in a camera and not go loud in the drum-beating. The only reasons I can see in that marketing strategy is if they are already working on the next big thing. Or if they know something’s coming up from Canon or Nikon.

Among other things that this camera lacks is a built-in flash. The specs on the Sony page clearly says so. Seems this is going to be more common in high-end DSLRs, as rumor has it that the next two cameras Canon is set to release also don’t have any built-in flash. I can understand that as it would be a balancing act with regards the power requirements on the battery: with more power needed for the capture, processing, and saving to file, the flash would be a relatively big drain on available resources.

And it also doesn’t have an in-camera sensor cleaning system. This is practically a standard feature in other cameras of its class. And no Live View nor a video mode.

Other standard features clearly signal this is more of a pro-user camera rather than for an advanced enthusiast. With the on-chip dual noise reduction, dual BIONZ image processing engines, 5 fps burst shooting speed, shutter speed of 1/8000 to 30 seconds plus bulb mode, 3-inch LCD, and HD output (through HDMI).

The camera will be in stores in November at a hefty $3,000 (approx.) price tag, clearly this is a pro-user trying hard to pass itself off as a hobbyist-camera.

It would be interesting to see what Sony would do for an encore.