Retailers Corroborate iMac Refresh Rumor For Next Week [Apple]
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
The Geometry of Living
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/277852343/
Well it’s official, cubes-that-turn-into-things is officially a trend. Maybe designers are inspired by last years Transformers movie, or the Borg on Star Trek, but these squared squares just keep on coming. The latest is by designer Naho Matsuno called “Cube 6.” Made from birch plywood and maple, this cube unfolds into six tiny stools that are perfect for those impromptu games of musical chairs with Danny Devito, Tom Cruise, Kylie Minogue, Gandhi, Toulouse-Lautrec and my attention span(all short things…get it?). Matsuno showed this project at the Salone Satellite at the Milan furniture fair.
Designer: Naho Matsuno [ Via: Dezeen ]
Friday, April 25, 2008
Casio Exilim EX-F1 Slow-Mo Super Cam Full Review (Verdict: Totally Unique, Shockingly Powerful) [Digital Cameras]
You've already seen the slow-mo tomato blending, and you've seen the slow-mo DIY backyard Discovery Channel. You get it, it can do slow-mo. But there are other features that stand to be demo'd on video, so take a look:
Let's recap exactly what talents the camera has that have not, in any meaningful combination, been seen before in a consumer-level camera:
• Slow-mo video shooting at 300, 600 and 1200 frames per second
• Fast-slow-fast shooting from 30fps to 300 and back to 30 — I call this the "she walked in the room" mode, because it's what they do in cheesy 80s movies to indicate the protagonist's love interest
• High-speed 6-megapixel shots at 60fps
• Strobe shooting of stills at 7 frames per second with standard flash; 60fps with LED flash
• Full-resolution still shooting while capturing HD video
• Fly-in and fly-out auto modes, which capture still shots at 60fps when the subject enter or exit the frame
Let's recap exactly what talents the camera has that have not, in any meaningful combination, been seen before in a consumer-level camera:EX-F1 as Camcorder
As a camcorder, it covers a lot of bases. In HD mode, it can shoot 60 "fields" at 1920x1080—that's code for 1080i—and 30 "frames" at 1280x720, all the while letting you take a total of 20 6-megapixel still shots. Since David Pogue's review ran, Casio published firmware 1.02 that fixes a major complaint: When shooting video, you now can actively use the 12x optical zoom lens.
We've covered the slow-motion camera already quite a bit, but let me be clear: it shoots 300, 600 or 1200 fps and encodes them on the fly to an H.264 file at 30 frames per second. So 1 second of shooting equals 10 seconds of footage. This causes some challenges, like long periods of lag between action, but there's a very easy in-camera editing tool that deletes all unneeded footage. You can't use the zoom in high-speed mode, but trust me, there's no time to zoom when you're shooting like that.
As you saw in the video above, there's also a mode for going from standard-def 30fps to slow-mo 300fps and then back again, what I call the "she walked into the room" mode. It's pretty cool, and probably more useful than just standard slow-mo.
Auto-focus is decent for still shooting, but I sometimes found for slow-mo video that it was simpler just to go manual. If you start recording slow-mo video out of focus, there's very little hope that it will focus during your shot.
One other frustration I experienced was that videos occasionally came out garbled or unreadable. I hope the 1.02 firmware update has a fix for that—I can only assume it's a known and fixable problem, albeit an annoying one.
EX-F1 as Still Camera
To be clear, this camera is the anti-DSLR. It's as digital as you can get, so you have to expect some photographic shortcomings. But the tradeoffs are reasonable, with still options that are not available anywhere else.
You can shoot full-resolution 6-megapixel stills at up to 60fps, to ensure that you get a decent pic of a fast-moving subject. I preferred to use something more like 7fps or 15fps with pets and kids, since they're not that fast, and you have no idea how annoying it can be to flip through 60 or more identical-looking shots. 
CCD CMOS in the camera is especially noisy! . ISO 16 00 is a rainbow of nastiness, and should only be used as a last resort: 
Update: Some of you asked about memory capacity, and even though I was shooting with an 8GB SDHC card, the hard limit is 4GB of video. For stills, the buffer can hold 60 shots. Here's the details, from Casio:
So ultimately there's just this small issue of the $1000 price tag: Is it worth it? My answer is this: if you're looking for a great video camera that also takes decent stills, then yes, it's worth it. But if you're looking for the perfect still camera, it's a far cry. But you might miss it when you go on safari, or to a baseball game, or when you're lighting off fireworks, or when your pets are doing goofy shit, or when... Okay, maybe it is worth it, no matter what your purposes. [Product Page]
The limit would be 4GB of [video] recording. So at 1080i you are looking at about 40 minutes. Now if you had a 8GB card you could [stop and] then take another 40 minute video, but the file system hits 4GB and has to stop recording. [For stills] you can take 60 shots before the buffer is full. So you can do 60fps for 1 second or 30 fps for 2 seconds, 20 fps for 3 seconds, etc.
NVIDIA VP joins the smack-talk fun, says the Intel CPU is "dead"
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/277891585/
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Alright, we're loving this new hyper-aggressive, sorta-nasty version of NVIDIA. Not only has CEO Jen Hsun-Huang promised to "open a can of whoop-ass" on Intel, the company has been touting its new sub-$45 integrated platform as far superior to Celeron-based systems, and now we've got VP of Content Relations Roy Taylor sending out emails saying that "a war has started" and pronouncing the Intel CPU "dead." Roy says Intel is "panicking" because CPUs have "run out of steam," and that they "no longer make anything run faster." According to Roy -- whose nickname is "Big Pipe," no joke -- the only thing that needs to get faster is the GPU, and NVIDIA's going to make it happen. That's some brash talk, all around -- let's hope NVIDIA's ready when Intel brings Nehalem out to play. Check out the whole email at the read link.[Via TGDaily]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
NVIDIA pushing up GeForce 9900 to outgun Radeon HD 4800?
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/277983311/
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
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