While digital SLR sales have spiked in the recent months, the most hotly contested, the mid-size sedan of the digital camera market are the compact digicams. And rightly so, what is the point of a camera if you don't have it handy at all times? Even if you had a digi SLR, these make great additions. Yes, we will all use our cell phone to take pictures in the future - but until then these offer nice lenses and crisp 5+ megapixel resolution. AnandTech looks at four of the most popular offerings, with the Canon SD400 taking top honors as usual.

Finally, an open source alternative for panoramic photostiching. If you lament the complete lack of wide angleness when you moved to the digital photography world. Here is what you can do, take a bunch of pictures, say 6 in a matrix of your scene - stitch them together and lo and behold you can beat any 16 mm fish eye! Ah yes, it is cross platform…



via the fantastic: downloadsquad.com

What is a good time to upgrade your digital camera? Unlike computers, there is no XP that drives you to upgrade your humble  486. While there is no point going to a 7 megapixel from a 6 megapixel (make sure you get at least twice .. if not 50% more to make different) ,  there are other reasons., newer digicams (esp. SLRs) have made huge improvements in shutter lag compared to top end models from two years ago.

Fear not, you don't need to drop 100s of dollars to edit pictures using PhotoShop. It is great, but not all of us need all those goodies.

So for the rest of us who need to look beyond Picasa, there is PhotoPlus 6, a FREE software to edit and manipulate images. Works pretty well, less kludgy than Gimp quite full featured even compared to some commercial offerings. PC Mag loved an older version of the program.

Either way you slice it or dice it, Photoshop is the mother of all things photo editing and manipulation. The gold standard! The new version, CS2 only makes things better.
Thanks to our very own Photoshop Weblog, we have tons of resources to learn about his fantastic Photoshop release.

Tim Grey's New Book: Photoshop CS2 Workflow: The Digital Photographer's Guide
MacWorld with Adobe's Photoshop Product Manager
MacWorld Review
PC World's Review.

The Nikon D50 with its low low price of less than $900 for the body with lens presents a viable Digital Camera for the rest of us. The 2,000 shot battery life, 0.2 second start up, and nice bright, colorful shots thanks to the generously sized sensor. The quicker performance, better battery life and a mire rugged feel put it ahead of Canon's offerings, though many like Canon's quality and the lower price for its older Digital Rebel - almost $600. There is no way you can go wrong at that price.



Only Six Megapixels you say? Look no further than this article. These pixels are not the same as those in $100 5-6 megapixel cameras at the local CVS. Registration required to read this story. Check news.com and iht.com tomorrow for registration less access.

If it strikes you as odd, that the $1000 6 Megapixel Nikon D70s takes far better pictures than your average $400 8 Megapixel Zoom Crazy Point & Shoot, it is time to learn about sensor sizes and the nuances of CCDs and CMOS photo sensors. In this case, size matters. SLRs like the Nikon D70, Digital Rebel and above have 23.7mm X 15.5 mm and larger sensors; a regular camera (Sony!) has a 8.8 by 6.6mm sensor which  cannot capture all of what is called Dynamic Range.

The dirty little secret of digital camera sensors is that they  capture only monochromatic light intensity, and  due to some technical wizardary (hack!) of putting colored glasses, can they guess what color might be relevant for that pixel. This interpolation, it is pretty messy - really - the good news is that larger sensors(SLRs) do a far better job of capturing the light intensity and thus color accuracy.

The geeks in the audience can compare this to the dying art of comparing different CPU architectures, megapixels can be thoughts of as Mhz - catchy but useless after a point. It is not how many pixels you have that matters, but what they do. So rest assured, all those camera phones, which have even tinier sensors will always play catch up on picture quality - hopefully, it matters.

The technology section of NYTimes has a comphrehensive  write up on all things digital photography from tips, surgical uses of digital photography, photo prints, and even the perils of being seduced by Super Zooms.

Here are the article index - registration is required, though news.com carrying the same stories here:

Making Large Prints and Enlargements
Pro camera choices
Photoblogs
Pogue's 10 tip to better pictures
Photography in Surgery and Buildings
Photography schools by Nikon & Canon
Making Prints - Retail & Home
Editing Pictures - Digital Darkroom
The Perils of Super Zoom - Go Wide!
Vacation Tips
Fantasy camp for Photographers
and finally the Goodness of RAW

Over at Slashdot, there is an interesting discussion about the OpenRAW team trying to create a RAW format repository. The repository will serve as a resource that has the definitions for all the current and past  RAW formats and will be hosted on the uber cool visionary site www.archive.org. Camera makers, including Nikon and Canon, who keep their RAW format specs close to heart may not be super excited.

Please join me in welcoming Eric Cheng to dpguru.com .. yes .. but we are soon going to be dpguru.com with a much cooler tag line!

Eric is the chief at wetpixel, the underwater photography site and has won many many awards. He also knows a great deal about taking pictures on land. Perhaps, he will share  best way to take pictures of fishes in fishtanks.

Apparently, many photolabs, including Wal-Mart in this instance will *not* give you any prints that look professional - for the fear that they might be infringing on someone's copyright!

The lower photo on the right was rejected by the photo lab because they thought it was done by a pro.

[via: Make:Blog]

iPhoto works, Picasa works . .in fact now they work really well. For those looking for more, there are a ton of options that we have covered in the past including IView Media, Adobe Album etc. Shoebox Pro offers another excellent alternative for Mac users. Killer feature? it manages photos if their native folders, no mysterious folder structure that you have to commit to and possibly corrupt during upgrade… just manage your file in plain ol' folder. On the PC side, ACDSee is really good about keeping it real and using the folder structure.

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Buffer, Burst Model, Focal Length, Pentaprism - if you  simply nod and smile when you hear these words  - with only a vague idea of what they mean- have quick browse at this guide on Digital SLR terms and stop being a photo n00b.

The dirty little secret of digital cameras sold today, is that many pictures don't even get downloaded into a computer. Many people just don't want to deal with all the CDs, cables, card and buggy software that comes with the digital camera and install it in their spyware ridden, noisy PCs. Wouldn't it be nice to just get those prints out of the camera without a PC? 

The manufacturers have heard your cries, and there are now a plethora of compact digital photo printers, you can use to churn out 4x6s day in and day out.  The H-P Photosmart 375 wins this round.

Our "favorite" small camera, the Flatfoto now sells as a 3 mega pixel version at $59.99 with a $20 mail in rebate, and another $50 off if you buy an epson product.. .so if you are already looking at getting an epson printer, you can get the Flatfoto for 10 bucks!

While people have had their fair share of issues, Radio Shack has a great return policy and 10 bucks.. thats less than the cost of a filter cover!