cameras

The biggest origami news of 2007 has nothing to do with Microsoft or ultramobile PCs.

Instead, thanks to centuries-old telescope technology reapplied to camera lenses by engineers at UC San Diego, the origami lens takes the cake.

At just one-seventh the thickness as a traditional lens, the origami system could significantly raise the resolution bar for camera phones. It might also make today's slimmest ultracompact cams seem like anvils.

The system borrows the folded optical system found in Cassegrain telescopes, but uses a single, diamond-cut optical crystal instead of a series of mirrors. The origami system bounces light through … Read more

Kids these days don't know how good they've got it. When I was a kid, you were lucky to get one megapixel in your camera, and that megapixel would be written to a single 3.5-inch floppy disk. We didn't have MP3 players or pocket camcorders or any of those fancy things. The only moving pictures we had were on our CRT monitors. And don't get me started on the regular ritual of taking the mouse ball out of your beige mouse and picking lint out of the rollers.

Today, kids have their Facebooks and Myspaces … Read more

It doesn't exactly qualify as a comeback, but film is far from dead. Retro Thing says Sweden's Ikonoskop is planning to introduce the first new Super 8 movie camera design the world has seen in more than 20 years.

Like its earlier 16mm sibling, the A-Cam DS8 will have interchangeable lenses and a parallel viewfinder. It also weighs a manageable 3.3 pounds, including lens, battery and up to 100 feet of film. The camera uses 16mm-wide film to capture Super 8 frames in a hybrid format, reportedly making it far more stable than the old Kodak Super … Read more

Panasonic has a handful of new Lumix cameras on the way for spring, and they're coming in all shapes and sizes. They all have Leica lenses and Panasonic's Mega Optical Image Stabilization, but beyond those features, they vary wildly, from inexpensive point-and-shoots to hefty, high-zoom cameras.

The company claims that the Lumix DMC-FX30 is the slimmest wide-angle lens camera on the market, and at less than 0.9 inch thick it might be right. The 7-megapixel FX30 has a 28mm-to-100mm-equivalent lens with optical image stabilization, so users can take nice, wide photos. The FX30 ships in February and … Read more

Casio announced two new digital cameras today. They're quite different in price, resolution, and features, but both cameras share the same characteristics as every other Casio Exilim we've seen so far: they're small and slim.

The EX-Z75 is a follow-up to the company's budget-priced Casio Exilim EX-Z70. The 7-megapixel shooter is essentially identical to the Z70, except for its slightly larger 2.6-inch LCD screen. The Z75 has the same sensor, 3X lens, digital image stabilization, and 34 scene settings. The $230 camera might be worth a look when it hits stores in March, but you … Read more

So you think you've got megapixels? Try one of Hasselblad's cameras on for size. A year after releasing the world's first 39-megapixel camera, Hasselblad has introduced a "more affordable" model at 31 megapixels and a shooting rate of 1.2 seconds per image, as well as a bevy of other features. But affordability is a relative term: The H3D-31 goes for $24,995, according to Pocket-lint. Which means we may be hanging onto our Kodak Instamatic a bit longer.

Samsung has announced two new digital cameras for this spring, the L74 Wide and the NV11. Their names are mundane, but they sport some interesting features.

The Samsung L74 Wide is a 7-megapixel digital camera with a lens that fits its name. It has a 28mm-equivalent wide-angle lens with a zoom factor of 3.6x for getting both wide and close-up shots. It was built with the traveler in mind, offering a Tour Guide feature that provides information about 4,500 regions in 30 countries. Also notable is its 450MB of internal memory, the most we've seen on a … Read more

If there's one technology that continues to remind us of the bad old days of dial-up modems, it's Webcams. The grainy transmissions often look only slightly better than night-vision camera images of a decade ago--especially if you try their useless digital zooms. But riding to the rescue is Hanwha's "Digital Cowboy" (with a name like this, it has to be Japanese). Its new offering, the DC-NCP130, is essentially a 1.3-megapixel telephoto Webcam with a removable 7x optical zoom that connects to your computer's USB port, according to CNET Asia. The camera is going … Read more

Awhile back we ran an item on a pair of camera binoculars that generated a fair amount of interest. In particular, some eagle-eyed readers noticed discrepancies in the specs from Gadget Universe, which led to confusion over its claims that the device had a 5-megapixel camera. Now, the Discovery Channel Store has a similar gadget that also lists a 5-megapixel camera combined with a pair of high-performance binoculars.

There are some resemblances in the designs of the two devices, but we're not sure if they come from the same manufacturer. (How many variations can there be in camera-binocular combos, … Read more