Fisheye for APS-C: What's that round thing?

It's time to rejoice, dSLR users. Well, particularly those who own dSLRs with crop sensors (APS-C).

If you like those distorted convex images taken with a fisheye lens, but don't own one of those expensive full cams, here's some good news. Sigma has announced that it has created the first fisheye lens that isn't built for a 35mm-sized sensor. It will sport a 4.5mm focal length and a max aperture of F2.8.

So now you can capture oddball funny images with your humble Nikon D70 and the likes.

Price not available at press time.

Read more here

Note
A fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens which captures ultra-wide, hemispherical images. It is mainly used in action photography and for scientific purposes.

In remembrance: HP cameras

HP is exiting the camera manufacturing business?

We just knew it would happen. After all, HP abandoned the Asian market more than two years ago. And it has done it again. Only this time, it's worldwide.

The Palo Alto company explained that this is in line with its aim to realign resources toward its printer and printing services businesses. Obviously, for HP, selling printers is far more lucrative than hawking cameras.

However, this doesn't mean the Palo Alto firm will no longer have its fingers in the digicam pie. It still wants to. In fact, HP is currently looking around for an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner to design, source and distribute digital cameras under the HP brand.

Having second thoughts, HP?

Samsung introduces 128GB memory card

No, your eyes are fine, and no, it's not a typo on our part.

The current reigning king of flash memory pushes the envelope for NAND flash a little further with a 64Gb (gigabit) memory chip. Put 16 of them together and it amounts to 128GB (gigabyte) which is enough to put some hard drives to shame.

Samsung claims the mega memory card is capable of storing 32,000 MP3 files.

Built with a new manufacturing process that Samsung dubs the self-aligned double patterning technology (SaDPT), we are sure it's pretty heavy stuff, seeing that Samsung has applied for 30 patents in connection with the new 64Gb flash device.

But don't expect this drugged-up memory card before Christmas--Samsung is expecting production to commence only in 2009.

Via Dcviews

A cat head for a camera

Apparently the Sanrio empire, growing bolder by the day, no longer feels the need to use more subtle imagery in its universal brainwashing campaign. ("Subtle," of course, is a relative term whenever Hello Kitty is involved.)

Unlike more restrained uses of the ubiquitous HK logo, its newest camera inverts the entire relationship between function and branding: The gadget is part of the cat, not the other way around. Yes, the feline head pictured here is the actual camera, a much more extreme design from that of other models we've seen, including one just a month ago.

The 5-megapixel camera with a 2-inch LCD isn't anything to brag about for its specs, but that's obviously not the point. At this rate, we fear it won't be long before a fleet of Hello Kitty dirigibles darkens the sky.

Via Crave CNET

Canon camcorder in orbit

As any Star Trek fan would say, space is the final frontier. So when watch companies clamor to slap chronographs onto astronauts' wrists just to proclaim their timepieces' indestructibility, we hardly batted an eyelid.

But when a camcorder manufacturer starts trumpeting the use of its product in space, we stood up and took notice. After all, we rarely hear about consumer electronics making the orbital round. While we are pretty sure that some iPods had been smuggled past the stratosphere in a spacesuit, Apple hasn't been telling us about it.

In a press release, Canon announced that the XH G1 HD is now floating somewhere in the space between earth and the moon. Carried aloft aboard the space shuttle Discovery, the now weightless Canon camcorder will be used to conduct HDTV image capture testing for a joint US-Japan project onboard the International Space Station.

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