We got a few minutes today to check out the latest build on Notion Ink’s Adam prototype that we first saw back at CES. Like we heard a week or so ago, there will indeed be two versions of the Adam — one which will be 12.9 mm thick and boast the Pixel Qi 3Qi e-paper screen, and another, thinner, non-Pixel Qi screen. The thinner, lighter version will measure in at 11.6 mm thick. As far as we know, the only difference in the two Tegra-powered Adams will be the display, and we also hear they are shooting for a third quarter of 2010 launch. The prototype on hand at MWC was not working, so one of the Adam’s developers was kind enough to shoot a demo video of a working unit for us (and its Flash support) — which is after the break.

Continue reading Notion Ink Adam hands-on (with video) at MWC 2010

You know that Condé Nast tablet / digital magazine demo we saw recently (non-ironically paging through a copy of Wired)? Well now Time Inc. has gotten in on the same game, showing off its version of a digimag running a touch-friendly issue of Sports Illustrated. The company not only buzzed everyone with the charming walkthough video — a floating hand paging through SI on a sleek, black tablet (embedded after the break) — but also had a live, functioning variation of the product up and running on a touchscreen HP laptop. The gist of the project seems to be that the publisher will be able to offer this digitized version of its magazines in some sort of agnostic format, one that would be accessible to PCs and phantom Apple tablets alike. Peter Kafka over at All Things D says that he had a chance to play with the demo and it was, “quite a bit of fun.” While it’s clear that both Time and Condé Nast are taking parallel routes to online publishing (the former is purely in concept mode, the latter is working with Adobe on digital versions of its titles as we speak), one thing is painfully clear: both companies have shockingly similar ideas about what the future of magazine publishing looks like. We hope Apple has been informed.

Continue reading Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split

Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Toujours là pour nous apprendre des astuces de la vie de tout les jours, Lifehacker vous apprend aussi a créer un objectif macro efficace pour l’APN de votre téléphone portable en utilisant une ancienne lentille de lecteur DVD. Le résultat est tout de même assez étonnant.

Source: Lentille macro pour APN de téléphone portable avec lecteur DVD via Lifehacker

You’ve always got your cellphone handy, but it’s not really ready to take a close-up shot. With parts recycled from an old DVD player or drive, you can craft a makeshift macro lens for your tiny camera.

It turns out that the little lens inside DVD players is just about the perfect size and magnification to turn the tiny lenses of cellphone cameras into a macro tool. All you need is a drive to hack apart, a piece of stiff posterboard or plastic to mount the lens in, and a little bit of poster tack or painter’s tape to hold the lens mount in place over your cellphone’s camera lens.

The result? Your cameraphone now has a significantly more intense gaze. Check out the photo to the right for an example of what the dvd-macro-lens is capable of and visit the link below for additional pictures and information.

Selon Gizmodo la Crunchpad (le Tablet PC réalisé grâce au blog TechCrunch) devrait sortir en novembre de cette année.

Source: Crunchpad en Novembre via Gizmodo

Que se passe-t-il lorsqu’un leakeur professionnel devient à son tour victime d’un leak concernant ses petites affaires?

Il devient complètement dingue, apparemment:

Le Straits Times de Singapour indique que la tablette web Crunchpad de Michael Arrington sortira en novembre, citant les designers de l’objet. Est-ce vrai Mickael?

Une chose est sure, il s’énerve [...]

Les premières images du Tablet PC réalisé par Techcrunch avec l’aide de ses lecteurs viennent de sortir et si le prix est assez bas cela pourrait très bien être une réussite.

Source: Images du Tablet PC de CrunchGear

Leaks are always hardest when they hit at home. Now we know how Apple feels. The party responsible for the leak has been penalized severely (whipped with wet spaghetti), so believe us when we say this kind of thing won’t ever happen again. Anyway, so long as the cat’s out of the bag, we may as well give you a few more pics. What you see is a prototype, equipped with an Intel Atom processor and a 12″ capacitative touchscreen. Looks a little different than it did last time, doesn’t it?

Doubters, feel free to eat your hats at this point. It’s real and it’s spectacular. We’ve got more pictures than the other guys, and we’ll have video and more specs as soon as we can.

As for more details, they’re in flux or double-top-secret at the moment, but you can expect a full disclosure during the next week, along with video of the new text input and all that other good stuff. Look at this wonderful little thing. Who wouldn’t want one in their home?

Brando propose désormais un lecteur de disques durs USB avec des enceintes et un hub intégré.

Source: Brando lecteur disque dur USB via JournalduGeek

Brando continue et signe un nouveau gadget qui va simplifier pas mal la vie de nombreux geeks. Voici donc son nouvel accessoire USB qui regroupe un lecteur de disques durs (SATA 2,5″ et SATA 3,5″, une enceinte avec une puissance de 3W, le bouton de contrôle de volume et une carte son USB intégrée, un micro, un hub USB de deux ports, le tout dans 134×117×56mm pour 285g. Comptez 59$ ICI.

Voilà un test de l’appareil photo Casio Exilim FC 100 le premier compact à proposé un mode de capture Vidéo en Slow motion (ralenti). Une option qui pourrait bien se démocratiser d’ici peu à d’autres appareils vu les nouvelles possibilités qu’elle offre. En espérant que la définition de ces vidéos s’améliore.

Source: Test Appareil Photo Casio Exilim FC 100 via CrunchGear

I use a DSLR and I love it, and while I appreciate what point-and-shoots do, I’ve never really wanted one. This is partly due to the superior picture-taking ability of a DSLR, but mostly it’s other cameras’ unimaginative feature lists. The latest cameras boast huge numbers of features which I would never use (smile shutter? more megapixels on a tiny sensor?), and stubbornly refuse to include any that I would.

Imagine my delight, then, upon finding a camera which not only fulfills my expectations of a point-and-shoot, but also takes steps toward being a such a useful imaging device that any photographer or cinematographer would be proud to own one. At the risk of sounding dramatic, the Casio Exilim EX-FC100 is such a camera. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the after the personal computer and the smartphone, the EX-FC100 is the most versatile piece of electronics I’ve ever used.

Now, I don’t want to imply by my fawning opening that this is a perfect camera. But it has its priorities in the right places, and it has some of the features I have been expecting (in vain) for years. If you need a demonstration of this, check out our first slow-mo reel and then the second one, which should be publishing concurrently with this review.

It’s the sensor, stupid

What the EX-FC100 does, in a nutshell, is use the sensor in more ways than the two that are on every camera, to wit, taking pictures at one of several sizes and making 30fps video. Few cameras offer significantly more than these functions, even if they garnish them with face detection and the like. There are no limitations on a camera’s sensor which prevent it from doing other things, are there? So why haven’t companies like Sony and Panasonic put out something that uses it more creatively? Search me. So it’s up to the old man in the business, Casio, to break the mold. The EX-F1 that came out last year was a breakthrough to be sure, but its megazoom form factor and high price made it a difficult camera to recommend. No more with the EX-FC100 and its slightly smaller brother, the FS10 (which I will now refer to collectively as “Exilims” or “Casios” since I don’t like writing model numbers). So the features aren’t new, exactly, so much as they’ve been democratized.

Now is a good time to note that the two cameras are mostly identical, except that the FS10 has a smaller 3x zoom instead of 5x, while being significantly slimmer and having a slightly higher max shutter speed. They both offer all the features I’m about to talk about. The pictures are of the EX-FC100.

High-speed, slow motion

By now you must know about the Exilim’s high-speed photography option. If so, skip to the end of this paragraph. If not, it’s like this: the Exilim can shoot normal 30fps 720p video, which looks perfectly decent. But you can also shoot up to 1000fps, reducing action to a tiny fraction (<4%) of its normal speed. It does this by only taking the information from a small part of the CMOS sensor — the smaller the area, the faster it can pull the information off to make a frame before starting over. So at 1000fps, you’re working with a 224×64 resolution, which to be honest is almost useless. Fortunately shooting at that speed is equally useless: it renders a finger snapping into a 30-second clip that is unbelievably boring. Luckily you can also choose 420fps at 224×168or 210fps at 480×360, which are more relatable levels of slow-motion. Click on the image at right for a better idea of these sizes. And here’s a still from the normal HD mode at 1280×720.

Now this feature is just cool. It’s fun as hell to use, and it adds a new layer to the world as you begin to think about “what would that look like at a tenth of its normal speed?” It sounds kind of corny, but the fact is that it opens up a whole new world to people like you and me — a world that was until recently only accessible through hundred thousand dollar cameras or strobe photography setups. That is worth a pat on the back all by itself. But it’s not just fun, it’s also easy. If you’re in high-speed mode, you can shoot a video just like that, and even snip it in camera so your SD card isn’t filled with 2 minutes of video covering the five seconds before the cat did that thing. Of course, you’ll need a ton of light, so most of these movies will be outside or at least in the daylight — this is a significant and technically insurmountable limitation but one worth mentioning.

It’s also got a great mode which allows you to shoot 30fps video and then with a button press, switch to 210fps instantly, creating a kind of time-slowing effect in the video. Very cool, and very fun to use.

Wait, is this a video camera you’re reviewing

But this thing also takes pictures, right? Yes, and they’re, well, decent. I’m used to DSLR performance, so nothing is ever sharp enough for me, but the Casio took decent pictures in various lighting situations. Let’s be honest: if you’re buying a point and shoot, it’s not about image quality. Casio probably falls in the middle of the pack here, with a pretty fair amount of noise and only so-so sharpness when you look closely. Contrast and color look good, metering was fast and accurate, and focus was usually right on, though not particularly quick. I put a couple up on my Flickr here. They haven’t been adjusted in any way.

What makes the Exilim stand apart is the picture modes. Now, these aren’t your momma’s picture modes. Although there are options to do sepiatone, and “outdoor” or “action” modes, those useless things are on every camera and aren’t what I’m talking about. Using the sensor once again to create extraordinary imaging techniques, the Exilim lets you do two important things: take 30fps rapid-fire pictures and slow the action down to a crawl in order to get the best shot. When you press the “slow” button, the action on the LCD slows down to a speed of your choosing, using images it is constantly caching. You hit the shutter on the one that looks the best. I didn’t use it that much, but it’s a great option for catching your kid hitting his first ball or something.

The 30fps function is more versatile. Hit the high-speed button, and now you can hold down the shutter and it will take pictures, one every 30th of a second, for as long as you hold the shutter or until its cache is full. You can then browse through them and pick the best one, or save them all. I love this. One use I also found for it was instant panoramas. On top of Whistler mountain, I pulled the Exilim out, focused, hit the shutter and whipped the viewfinder over the landscape in front of me in an arc. The satisfying rush of clicks let me know it was working, and when I checked, lo and behold, there were about 15 pictures, ready to be stitched together — if it did that in camera too, it’d be even cooler, but unfortunately that’s not in its power. This one has been resized from enormous, of course, but you can see that it worked (I used Hugin). I actually only used every other shot for the pano.

One more thing it allows is motion-detecting trigger shots. Set up a camera to take pictures when something moves in or out of the frame, essentially. Great for catching raccoons at night, or your spouse with their hand in the cookie jar. It works, it’s easy, and its applications are only as limited as your imagination. Bird watchers would love it.

Size only kind of matters

These last two functions require that the camera take pictures in a smaller six-megapixel size instead of the full nine. Nertz, you say! What’s the point? Well, first consider that six megapixels is plenty. It’s higher-rez than any screens you’ll be seeing the picture on, and it’ll print out just fine. Next, consider this: would you rather have a six-megapixel shot of the moment your kid hits a home run (plus 20 other shots before and after), or a 15-megapixel one a second too late?

The extra imaging modes in this camera make possible the most important part of using a camera: getting the shot you want. Any damn point-and-shoot can take a good picture of a controlled situation: a group of people in a bar, a pretty landmark, a funny mess the kids made, that sort of thing. Elsewhere, they’re garbage. The Exilim allows you to get a perfect shot now where before it took a DSLR, a huge amount of luck, or both. This is extremely important and it makes me likely to recommend this camera over pretty much every other one on the market.

The other shoe

So I said at the beginning that this wouldn’t just be a love-fest for the Exilim. Well, I meant that when I wrote it, but it kind of turned out to sound like breathless fanboyism anyway, didn’t it? So what sucks about this thing?

Well, it’s not the easiest to use. Its menus and things are pretty standard, but changing multiple settings is annoying because it pulls you out of the menu whenever you change anything. The display modes seem to be “no information,” “too much information,” and “waaay too much information.” Its mess of buttons is confusing at first and unlikely to be mastered by someone who isn’t geared towards this kind of thing. Although having two separate buttons for picture and video is excellent for making this camera ready to capture anything at any time, it makes for some counter-intuitive actions, like focusing with the photo button before taking a movie with the movie button (which does not focus).

There could also be a lot more documentation. I figured most everything out after a while, but the manual and quick start guide were completely inadequate.

It’s not exactly small and light, either, (the slimmer FC-10 is better in this respect), and although it’s excellently constructed, the very nature of the extending lens and multitude of dials and buttons makes it feel quite breakable. It survived just fine on a trip up the mountain, however, and a little incidental snow didn’t faze it either (sorry Casio).

Image quality could be better for plain stills, but as I said before, I think it’s more important to have an okay picture of the perfect moment rather than vice versa. But yeah, for grain and sharpness it’s no threat to an equivalently-priced Nikon or Canon point-and-shoot. You’ll get a lot of noise in the dark areas if it’s had to bump the ISO a bit.

The biggest problem, actually, is the quality of the high-speed video. I’m not going to mince words here: at 1000fps it’s unwatchable. The video is not only tiny, but mercilessly compressed, leading to about as much image artifacting as image proper. My advice is to stay far away from it unless it’s really necessary. At 420fps it’s only barely acceptable; 210 is actually fine, but you really can’t be expecting HD quality out of anything but the regular HD mode. 420 and 210 should serve excellently for all your purposes, although 420 is still pretty artifact-y. I should note that it is a miracle that you can shoot in these modes in the first place, however, so don’t take this criticism too hard. It’s like someone gives you a gold bar, and you take it in and find out it’s only 14K. Darn!

I didn’t notice any in-camera reference to the green-screen mode Mr. Kashio used to general disappointment at CES. I wouldn’t have wanted to use it anyway, to be honest. I’m actually more surprised and disappointed to find that there’s no time-lapse feature. What with the other options to manipulate time in this camera, it seems natural that you should be able to set it to take one picture every second, minute, hour, or whatever. What the hell, Casio?

Basically though it’s amazing

There are definitely some features I’m missing here, but this review has already gone on way too long (*house music rising*). This is mainly because the EX-FC100 is such a good camera. I don’t want to come off sounding like a shill for Casio, but I have to be honest here. This is easily the most versatile camera on the market, and $350 is a price I’d pay myself for these capabilities. This camera carries the highest recommendation I can give (until its successor comes out), not only to regular picture takers who want a camera that does cool stuff, but also to serious photographers with DSLRs that want to have a pocket camera but don’t want to give up the ability to get that perfect shot. The EX-FC100 and FS10 are technical marvels as well as being great fun, and should be on the top of anybody’s list who is planning on buying a digital camera.

Update: Corrected the model name. Also, if you think $350 is too little to pay for it, Buy.com has it for an amazing ten thousand dollars.

Marre d’utiliser votre clavier et votre souris pour surfez sur vos sites favoris. Voici un exemple d’écran géant tactile très bien pensé. De quoi se croire dans Minority Report et s’amuser pendant des heures à redimensioner ses fenêtres

Source: Sebz’ Mess