I've been having quite a bit of fun with a crappy low res camera that I affectionately call the "CrapCam." I now have an extra one and am raffling it off. More details here ».

The Luminous Landscape has a field test of the new Epson R-D1. A bizarre cooperation between Seiko Epson and Cosina Voigtlander, at $3000 for 6 megapixels and almost no bells & whistles whatsoever, I personally find it hard to imagine they're going sell even half of the rumoured 10,000 product run. But, even though it doesn't make any sense at all, I want one. I just can't help it. Somebody slap me.

The Gigapxl project is a briliant marriage of film and technology.  The resulting images contain more detail that the naked eye can behold:

It would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxlâ„¢ exposure.

It is encouraging to see how the boundaries of "digital" photography are being pushed.  Be sure to visit the image gallery.    

I'm interested to hear tales of digital camera malfunction
and the subsequent repair.   I ask for your indulgence as I relate my
own rather lengthy experience with broken cameras and the battles to get them
fixed.

My first digicam was a Nikon CoolPix 950 I bought because I was off to spend a
year teaching English in Japan.
Before this, I wasn't very interested in photography but having the camera and
lots of cool Japanese stuff to shoot got me excited.  It's fair to say I
was a little upset when the 950 got bumped off a bench and into a koi pond in Sydney.  After
draining the battery compartment, I took the camera to a repair shop. I wasn't surprised
when told all its circuit boards were fried and I'd be better off
buying a new camera.  This wasn't an immediate option and I was going back to Japan anyways; it’d be better to get a new camera there.  A week into the Australian
tour (the camera went swimming on the second day) I was repacking my bag, came
across the 950, and decided to switch it on.  It worked.  It worked
perfectly.

Feeling good about the indestructible nature of Nikon products and photography
in general, I bought a CoolPix 5700 in Japan before coming back to Canada.
I enjoyed the camera very much until the day the LCD came up with "lens
error" in unfriendly letters.  A little research told me that this
was not such an uncommon error and I'd need to send it in for service.
Because the camera was bought in Japan,
Nikon Canada would not honour the warranty.  I didn't want to send the camera all the
way back to Japan for service so I waited the six weeks and paid the $250 to get a working
camera.  The camera did work when I got it back, but the zoom was about
three times louder than it was before repair.  This was annoying, but I
could live with it.

I happily took photographs with the 5700 for quite some time.  That is until I was shooting in some sand
hills and happened to get a good blast of airborne sand into the zoom
mechanism.   I decided that the gritty grinding sound as the lens retracted wasn't a good thing and I should send the camera in for
repair.  As luck would have it, the 950 finally died a few days
later.  I knew that getting the 950 repaired would be more expensive that
what it was worth, but it had some sentimental value attached so I sent it in with the
5700.  This time the repair for the 5700 would
be $300 and another $200 for the 950.   Another six week wait and I got the call
to pick up my camera. After a significant bank balance reduction I was
taking pictures in the alley behind the camera store.  This is when I
noticed the top LCD wasn't working.  It was fine before the 'repair', so
back to the service depot it went.

At this point I was mad, but at least I'd be getting the 950 back soon and
could resume my digital photo-pursuits with that.  The next day I got a
call reporting that Nikon service found water damage in the flash circuit (of
course they did) and could not repair the 950.  Nikon offered to replace
it with a refurbished 4500, but the price on this was not much different that what
a new unit would have run.   I was getting frustrated and called
Nikon service directly to complain.  After several discussions and
e-mails, Nikon agreed to replace the 5700 with an 8700 free of charge and give
me a good rate on a refurbished D70 body.  This was acceptable.

I still had to wait couple of weeks before the D70 arrived.  I was giddy with anticipation
when it arrived, but I didn't have an opportunity for a couple of days to
really get out and shoot anything.  It was finally the weekend and I had
big plans for an extended photo-jaunt.  I loaded up a compact flash and
turned on the D70 and the green 'write' light just flashed constantly.  I tried three
other cards with the same result.  I wasn't even getting an 'E' on the
display when the camera had no card in it.  After trying the paperclip
activated emergency reset button a few times I grudgingly came to the
realization that the camera was screwed.  I wasn't happy, not at all, and
there was still no sign of the 8700 that Nikon promised.

I have to credit Nikon that they did make things right in a prompt
manner.  I got a new D70 body directly by courier shortly after and they
threw the 8700 in with the same package - both work great so far.  Through this ordeal I was told
that Nikon's service depot was going through growing pains.  They've been
selling a lot more digital cameras and haven't made any considerable expansions
to their service department.  The retailer I was dealing with switched
from sending their repairs to the Vancouver depot to the Toronto one because of quality issues.  It seems as though Nikon Canada at least
should do some expanding.

I apologize for the long winded post. I'd be interested to hear what experiences
folks have had getting their cameras fixed.

-Mike Scullen
Sublimate

Along with everybody's great advice, I went along and got myself a Nikon Coolscan V. It arrived today after ordering from B  and H photo and I set it up, rolled a bit of film in it to test it out, and was semi-shocked after witnessing the results.

I like it - big, sharp, images. What's scaring me is the level of dust on the image. I've done this with two rolls of different developed film I have - I've even blowed them off with a bit of compressed air at a distance.

Maybe I should wipe them with a silk cloth?

They look fine from my naked eye, but I know I can't trust that very well. It was then that I remember you all mentioning ICE. I find it, select it to go on, and guess what I find?

Big, blotchy, pitch black images with mid tones and highlights the only recognizable thing of the picture. What happened? How can I change this? I've scrambled through the book and the manual inside the program. It doesn't seem like I can change anything else than normal and fine ICE.

I have some samples and I've placed them up on my site. I've seen notraces.com and was told that he uses the same scanner as I, but I don't see how he achieves it. Dustless and without any errors of that sort whatsoever.

To see the pics, go here.

The first image is with ICE on and the second is without.

The other strange thing is that everything seems fine in the preview pane, even in the enlarged preview - I don't see any dust or hair until scanning it. Maybe, and I doubt this, it's my developer? I go to Samy's, but I really do doubt they would leave my film in such bad shape.

An interesting article in the NY Times on digital preservation:  Even Digital Memories Can Fade

"To save a digital file for, let's say, a hundred years is going to
take a lot of work," said Peter Hite, president of Media Management
Services, a consulting firm in Houston. "Whereas to take a traditional
photograph and just put it in a shoe box doesn't take any work."
Already, half of all photographs are taken by digital cameras, with
most of the shots never leaving a personal computer's hard drive.

So
dire and complex is the challenge of digital preservation in general
that the Library of Congress has spent the last several years forming
committees and issuing reports on the state of the nation's
preparedness for digital preservation.

NoelC has posted a thorough piece on the apparently flawed RAW -> JPEG algorithm in the Canon EOS digital cameras:

I looked at the exposure histograms for each of the color channels in an image I shot - which by the way had a luminance histogram on the camera that didn't touch the right side. Sure enough, in the images with the fuzzy/texture-lacking bright red objects, the red histogram had data climbing the right side of the image. Yet not in all cases. Some images with fuzzy reds had red channel data close to the right side, but not touching.

In looking at the channels in the images that weren't overexposed, one thing became clear: As the reds get pretty bright (upper-quarter of the histogram), they start to lose definition. This says the Canon demosaic/color generation algorithms may just have a small quirk - a characteristic that bright red objects lose definition.

All right, I thought, what if a different conversion algorithm were employed. Would the results be the same? I tried shooting a raw photo of red flowers and converting it in Adobe Camera Raw. What would happen? Amazingly, with some negative exposure compensation the reds came out vibrant, sharp, and full of texture.

Consider these images, the first is from the embedded JPEG Canon put in the Raw file, and the second is from the conversion through Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop CS):

Check out the original post with photos and other users' experiences at dslreports.com

(Cross posted from my blog)

plan on buying a d70 or 300d for the holidays? nikon and canon are offering some nice rebates (good in the uk also).

Nikon and Canon US have announced Fall 2004 rebates for its digital
SLRs with savings of up to $500. The Nikon offer applies to the D70
body, the D70 kit with an 18-70mm DX Nikkor lens ($100) and a D1X body
which qualifies for a $500 rebate, among other items. The Nikon offer
ends December 31. Canon's offer is extended until January 31 and
includes a $100 rebate on the EOS Digital Rebel, plus a deal whereby if
you buy any two different items you get double the rebate amount, and
three times the amount if you buy three different items. Nikon UK is
also offering consumers a voucher booklet worth £300 for money off D70
accessories and Canon UK is enticing consumers by offering £100
cashback when purchasing the EOS 300D plus a 256MB CompactFlash card
when registering for Canon's iMAGE GATEWAY.

(from dpreview.com)

I've been in an absolute buying frenzy lately for my photography classes and I've come across the need to purchase a dedicated film scanner - the price for them to scan it to CD is complately incomparable (i.e. higher) than if I bought a film scanner. I know Justin Oulette suggests the Nikon Coolscan IV, and the prices for the Coolscan V don't seem so bad either.

What do you guys suggest? My budget isn't sky high and I'm hoping to keep costs to a mininum.

Thanks!

Ryan

Due to the great response to yesterday's post about camera makes and models, I've created a new wiki site called Camerapedia.org!

This will be a great place to collect links and information about all different kinds of cameras. Since anyone can add and update information on the site, we can shape this into whatever we want it to be.

I will also use the data on Camerapedia.org to help create new Photoblogs.org features, so I'm very excited about the possibilities here.

Right now we need to migrate the information from the current List of Camera Makes and Models to the new Camerapedia.org site. If any of you would like to help with this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Brandon