Is Canon following Adobe’s steps? Canon just released their “EOS Digital Solution Disk V28.1″ software suite. As usual, it…View Post
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Is Canon following Adobe’s steps?

 
Canon just released their “EOS Digital Solution Disk V28.1″ software suite. As usual, it…

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Inkonomics.

Think a $5 gal­lon of gas is crazy? Dri­vers in Nor­way are cur­rently pay­ing $9 a gal­lon, and Ger­mans pay just over $8.

That’s cheap com­pared with gold, which right now is at $1,700 per ounce.

Think gold is expen­sive? Con­sider this: If cars ran on print­ers’ ink instead of gaso­line, each trip to the gas sta­tion would cost $100,000. Accord­ing to PetaPixel, to fill an Olympic-sized swim­ming pool with ink would cost bil­lions of dollars.

My tiny office printer uses HP21 black ink car­tridges. The best deal (often on Ama­zon) goes for $12. Each car­tridge is 1.4 ounces.  Now, if you can remem­ber your high school con­ver­sions, 1 US gal = 128 US oz. That means at $12 per car­tridge, a gal­lon of the cheap­est ink in our office costs about $1,536 per gal­lon, and the cheap­est color car­tridge is about $3,364 per gal­lon.  Yikes!

From PetaPixel.

What about my fancy photo printer? A long time ago I learned a valu­able les­son: the cheaper the printer, the more expen­sive the inks. I have also learned that over time, the mar­ket lead­ers tend to be more sta­ble in their pric­ing of con­sum­ables, because they are bet­ter equipped to react dur­ing rough eco­nomic times.

Keep this in mind dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son when you see some “impos­si­bly good printer deals.”

Source: eduardoangel.com

Life after Photokina: Canon EOS 6D.

Since we arrived from Pho­tok­ina we have been bom­barded with ques­tions about the 6D. “Did you see it?” “Do you like it bet­ter than the 7D?” “Should I buy it?”

Here’s a very quick overview: The megapixel count on Canon’s EOS 6Dis vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal to the Mark III, but it is 50% cheaper and 20% lighter. The size is very sim­i­lar to the 60D, with­out the tilt­ing and swivel­ing screen, which in my opin­ion is one of the strongest sell­ing points of the 60D for video shoot­ers. It is great to see a DIGIC 5+ on this cam­era, which is approx­i­mately three times faster than DIGIC 5, and 17 times (yes, sev­en­teen times) faster than the DIGIC 4 found on the Mark II.

Handy com­par­i­son chart from DPReview.

By the way, if you are a pho­tog­ra­pher and you are not shoot­ing video yet, stop right now and read this “This is why pho­tog­ra­phers need to learn video right now.” After you fin­ish the arti­cle, sign up for any of our upcom­ing video work­shops (here and here).

The 6D matches Nikon’s D800 4.5fps. This is hard to explain but some­how the cam­era feels as light as the Rebel bod­ies with­out feel­ing cheap.

The mode dial lacks a third Cus­tom Mode but gains a “CA” (Cre­ative Auto) mode. When com­pared to the EOS 5D Mark II, the 6D offers some impor­tant advan­tages: a much higher max­i­mum ISO (51200 vs. 6400), a larger LCD screen (3.2-inch vs. 3), HDR, GPS, faster in startup/shutter lag/fps, and much lighter. While the Mark III does not suf­fer from alias­ing and moiré pat­tern, it is likely that the 6D will suf­fer from the same issues as the Canon 7D and the Mark II.

An app for both Android and iOS will allow users to remotely con­trol the cam­era, which also included GPS and Wi-Fi con­nec­tiv­ity which accord­ing to employ­ees at Canon’s Pho­tok­ina booth will be able to trans­fer a full RAW + JPEG in under three sec­onds. I defin­i­tively want to see that since pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences with other sys­tems have not been that great.

If this is true, I can see this cam­era, becom­ing a fan­tas­tic option for pho­tog­ra­phers want­ing wire­less teth­er­ing solu­tions with­out addi­tional adapters/transmitters. Check this great arti­cle explain­ing the EOS 6D’s inte­grated GPS sys­tem.

Finally, I believe that adding my work­horse 24-105mm f/4L USM zoom lens to the 6D kit is an excel­lent move from Canon’s part. What’s your take? Is the 6D a step-up from the EOS 7D, or a step down from the Mark III? Please share your com­ments below, and let us know if you are join­ing us next Mon­day Octo­ber 15th at 1pm EST on our “Pho­tok­ina Trends Hangout.”

Source: eduardoangel.com

Life after Photokina: Samsung’s Galaxy Camera.

News from Pho­tok­ina are like Fall leaves. They are every­where and it is hard to know where to start tak­ing care of them. Because of that, we are doing two things: a few blog posts high­light­ing the most inter­est­ing and influ­en­tial prod­ucts, and a paid Google Hang­out on Mon­day Octo­ber 15 at 1pm EST, where we will dis­cuss what we saw and learned, and how it will affect your busi­ness in 2013.

Pho­tok­ina is a huge show. There are nine giant exhi­bi­tion halls and most of them are two sto­ries high. Every cor­ner of these build­ings is filled with every­thing hav­ing to do with the photo indus­try.  Canon, Leica, Nikon, and Sony intro­duced full-frame 35mm-sized sen­sor cam­eras, rang­ing from com­pact (Sony) to low-cost DSLRs (Canon, Nikon) to high-end pro rangefind­ers (Leica). Almost every­body claimed sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tions in shut­ter lag and focus­ing speed, and many man­u­fac­tur­ers added some form of Wi-Fi con­nec­tiv­ity. If you think the iPhone 5 blurs the lines between cam­eras and smart­phones you haven’t seen Samsung’s Galaxy Cam­era, by far the most orig­i­nal prod­uct we saw at Photokina.

As we saw before with Nikon’s Coolpix S800c, Android is rapidly becom­ing the OS of choice for smart phones.

So far what has dis­tin­guished mobile phones from basic dig­i­tal cam­eras is the absence of inte­grated zoom lenses. Until now that is. Imag­ine an Android Tablet like Google’s Nexus 7 that is the size of a smart­phone (4.8 inches) with an HD Super Clear LCD touch­screen, a 1.4Ghz quad core proces­sor, and 8GB of inter­nal stor­age. Now add to it a 21x zoom lens that goes from 23-481mm (35mm equiv­a­lent), a 16MP BSI CMOS sen­sor, and an ISO of up to 3200. The 1/2.3 sen­sor is capa­ble of record­ing slow motion video at 120 frames per sec­ond and 720x480 res­o­lu­tion. The out­put qual­ity remains to be seen. While the Galaxy does not have a real phone, it comes fully equipped with 3G/4G wire­less sup­port­ing apps like Skype and Google Voice, which are rapidly replac­ing tra­di­tional services.

The device feels a bit bulkier than expected, but the fact that users can quickly open, edit, and share images might attract younger demo­graph­ics (also, its size makes play­ing games a com­fort­able expe­ri­ence). Very soon the ques­tion will not be whether to use cam­eras or smart­phones, but, rather, which new com­bi­na­tion of cam­era plus smart­phone to use.

You can add this one to my ”con­trar­ian” list, but I believe Sam­sung is the new Apple.


UPDATE 1004 AT&T the first U.S. car­rier to embrace Samsung’s Galaxy Camera.

Source: eduardoangel.com

Canon EOS M – Part II. Hands-on Review

Exactly one month ago we wrote about Canon’s brand-new mir­ror­less sys­tem. We cov­ered the new fea­tures and dis­cussed the rea­sons why we pre­ordered one here.

Since then we have had the great oppor­tu­nity to play with one of them and we want to share our impres­sions in this post.

The Good

• Lenses: We tested the kit lens, an ultra wide “pan­cake” EF-M 22mm ƒ2.0 and the image qual­ity is amaz­ing. We also tested the EF mount and shot stills and video with the EF 70–200 ƒ2.8 and the EF 24mm ƒ1.4. They both worked like a charm.

• Video: This is a con­tro­ver­sial topic. The movie files are recorded in MPEG-4 for­mat, using AVC.H.264 com­pres­sion and a vari­able bit rate. The qual­ity is very good, with only a very tutored eye being able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the M ver­sus the 60D footage. We only shot 1080p at 24 fps and our impres­sions are based on that test. Read this if you want to under­stand HD Video compression. Another great video fea­ture that got our atten­tion was that both Pro­gram and Man­ual shoot­ing modes are sup­ported in movie mode. So far, so good. The real issue (as you will read below) is the lack of fast and easy access to adjust exposure.

• Size: The main rea­son we wanted this cam­era was so that we could use it as a C (third) cam­era on our video shoots. Hav­ing such a tiny body with the same APS-C 18.0 Megapixel CMOS sen­sor we have on our EOS 7D (with the lat­est firmware update) and EOS 60D would allow us to put the cam­era in tight spaces, and it would make using a hand­held rig or a steady­cam a much more pleas­ant experience.

An Overview of What Should and/or Will Be Improved

In all fair­ness, the cam­era that we had was a pre­re­lease sam­ple. It was not a pro­duc­tion piece, which means that the hard­ware, as well as the firmware, will be mod­i­fied and improved.

• Touch­screen: Hav­ing a touch­screen is not only great, it makes absolute sense. The more we “flip” and “pinch” our smart­phones and tablets, the more sec­ond nature these “ges­tures” become. Have you seen the video of the five-year-old girl who thinks a mag­a­zine is a bro­ken iPad?

Click to keep reading

• Viewfinder: Many pho­tog­ra­phers com­plain on forums about the lack of a viewfinder. I have been shoot­ing pro­fes­sion­ally for more than 12 years and I didn’t miss it. We need to under­stand that this cam­era is about size and weight, while pack­ing a giant sen­sor and a pow­er­ful DIGIC 5 image proces­sor. You can’t have ALL the fea­tures and expect things to be small and light. Yes, shoot­ing in bright exte­ri­ors, espe­cially with video where focus is ultra crit­i­cal, might be a prob­lem. But that’s a com­pro­mise we need to make.

• RAW: We con­stantly test new gear for clients and to ful­fill our own needs and curios­ity. The first batch of images that we shot with the EOS M, which was a “won­der­ful” storm hit­ting New York, are use­less. The rea­son? We shot all the images in RAW only to later dis­cover that there’s no soft­ware (cur­rently avail­able) that can open the EOS M CR2 files. We mis­tak­enly assumed the files would share the same “recipe” as the 5D Mark III, or at least its younger brother, the EOS 60D. Nope. These new files will need new soft­ware. We tested Light­room 4, the lat­est ACR, DPP, and sev­eral oth­ers. Inter­est­ingly, Ligth­room can grab the JPEG pre­views within the CR2, but it can not import the data. Our own fault. The sam­ple images embed­ded in the video below were shot as Large JPEGs.

The Bad

• Bat­tery: We have a new bat­tery, and, of course, a new bat­tery charger.We can’t even keep track of how many we have and where they all are. We also had prob­lems with the bat­tery los­ing its charge overnight. At first we assumed that we left it on, but after a few days we con­firmed that that was not the prob­lem. We have seen this issue with other pre­pro­duc­tion sam­ples and they always get resolved when the “real” cam­era ships out. So, I wouldn’t worry about this part. But, why a new battery?!?!

• User Inter­face: It is very nice to be able to select dif­fer­ent set­tings with your fin­gers, but, unfor­tu­nately, the UI, as it is today, is not ideal for video shoot­ing. There are too many steps to access the most-used menus, and we truly felt “hand­i­capped” by not hav­ing a top dial and a quick dial to eas­ily con­trol shut­ter and aper­ture settings

• Con­tin­u­ous Auto Focus: Our biggest com­plaint so far, espe­cially when shoot­ing video. It lacks speed and it seems to have issues with extremely con­trasty sit­u­a­tions. We felt as frus­trated as shoot­ing with the Pow­er­Shot G1X when we tested the best and most cur­rent Pow­er­Shot mod­els (the arti­cles can be accessed here and here). At that time, we ended up pho­tograph­ing all our “food” images with the more respon­sive (and REALLY nice) Pow­er­Shot SD100. But that’s a dif­fer­ent topic for another day.

Con­clu­sion: You have until Octo­ber to change your mind. We will play it safe, and can­cel our pre­order, get a pro­duc­tion sam­ple when the cam­era is released, and depend­ing on the new firmware, we will buy one, or two.

Source: eduardoangel.com

Workshop: Inkjet Printing; Color Management and Calibration

Don’t miss out on my upcoming weekend workshop.

When: 2-Day Workshop: August 4, 2012  – August 5, 2012 @ 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM 

Where: International Center of Photography
           1114 Avenue of the Americas
           New York, NY 10036
           USA

View Full-Size Map

Cost: $540.00 | Members $515.00 Contact: 212.857.0001
education@icp.org

Course Descrip­tion:
Today‘s desk­top inkjet print­ers are capa­ble of pro­duc­ing color images of the high­est qual­ity. To max­i­mize this poten­tial, dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phers need a firm grasp of color man­age­ment and work­flow in the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment. In this work­shop, stu­dents learn effec­tive ways to man­age color issues when scan­ning and print­ing. Stu­dents explore dif­fer­ent tech­niques for pro­fil­ing mon­i­tors and print­ers, using both pro­fes­sional and ama­teur cal­i­bra­tion equip­ment, ulti­mately cre­at­ing pro­files for their own print­ers and papers. Upon com­ple­tion of this work­shop, stu­dents will have a firm under­stand­ing of how to imple­ment a color-managed dig­i­tal work­flow. pre­req­ui­site: Pho­to­shop II, Fine Art Dig­i­tal Print­ing, or port­fo­lio review.

More infor­ma­tion and reg­is­tra­tion form here.

Limited Space - seats still available.

Source: eduardoangel.com

Canon EOS M Images.

Yes, the answer is a most emphatic YES to every­one who has asked if I plan to pur­chase the brand-new Canon Mir­ror­less sys­tem. I just placed my order here. You have until Octo­ber to change your mind. I seri­ously doubt I’ll change mine.

So, in a nut­shell, we have a tiny cam­era body with a pow­er­ful DIGIC 5 image proces­sor, and a very nice APS-C 18.0 Megapixel CMOS sen­sor, which is the same sen­sor size one finds in the won­der­ful EOS 7D and EOS 60D. The touch screen and UI are vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal to the brand new Rebel T4i.  Appar­ently you can pur­chase the body only, but I have only seen the kit with the EF-M 22mm ƒ2.0 pan­cake lens. All the expected fea­tures like ISO set­tings from 100 to 12800, with expan­sion to ISO 25600, standard  aspect ratios (3:2 plus 4:3, 1:1 and 16:9), and  1080p at 24/25/30 fps and 720p 50/60 fps are there, BUT now we have con­tin­u­ous autofocus.

Canon EOS M Movie Resolution

The hybrid (stills and video) AF sys­tem uses “phase-difference AF to achieve approx­i­mate focus and drive the lens at high speed, then switches to con­trast AF for final focusing.” The movie files are recorded in MPEG-4 for­mat, using AVC.H.264 com­pres­sion and a vari­able bit rate. Pro­gram as well as and man­ual shoot­ing modes are sup­ported in movie mode.

And the cherry on top? The EOS M will take EF lenses thanks to the adapter shown below.  Enjoy the view.

Canon EOS M Cross Section

Canon EOS M Lens Mount Adapter

Canon EOS M Lens Mount Adapter

Canon EOS M 70_200

Canon EOS M with a 70-200mm 2.8 Lens

Canon EOS M 22mm lens

Canon EOS M 22mm lens

Canon EOS M Lens Mount

Source: eduardoangel.com

thedigitalvisual:

Canon Officially Announces the EOS-1D C and C500 4K Cinema Cameras

Read More…

NAB 2012 wrap-up.

• Black­magic announced a hard-to-believe cam­era fea­tur­ing a 2.5K image sen­sor, 13 stops of dynamic range, built-in SSD recorder, pop­u­lar open stan­dard uncom­pressed RAW and com­pressed file for­mats, com­pat­i­bil­ity with qual­ity EF and ZF mount lenses, and LCD touch­screen monitoring.

• Autodesk announced Smoke 2013 for the Mac, a new ver­sion of what the com­pany is now call­ing video edit­ing soft­ware and at users of Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Com­poser who want high-end edit­ing and fin­ish­ing tools in one app. The new price is “only” $3495, down from $14,995 for the 2012 version.

• Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS6 is out with and enhanced 64-bit play­back engine that can han­dle5K res­o­lu­tions, and higher, new trim­ming options, com­pat­i­bil­ity with Mac touch­pad ges­tures, a Warp Sta­bi­lizer that was pre­vi­ously con­fined to After Effects, and expanded mul­ti­cam edit­ing for more than four cam­eras. Tak­ing a page from its sis­ter app, “the audio ori­ented Audi­tion, Pre­miere Pro CS6 offers a redesigned and more func­tional audio mixer. Adobe also intro­duced Speed­Grade, a film fin­ish­ing and color grad­ing app, and Pre­lude, for ingest­ing, log­ging, and transcoding.

• Pana­sonic announced a bit­ter­sweet firmware update for the AG-AF100 that pro­vides 1080 50p and 60p modes. That’s the sweet part. The bit­ter? They want users to pay $300 for the upgrade.

Pana­sonic AF0100

• Canon announced the 1D C ($15,000), which has the same chas­sis and still shoot­ing fea­tures of the EOS-1D X ($6,800), and cap­tures 4096 x 2160 8-bit 4:2:2 video to a CF card at 24 fps. Unlike the X, the C swaps a head­phone jack for the X’s PC sync.

• The higher-end Canon EOS C500 ($30,000) offers the same ISO range as the C300 (320–20,000) and requires a ded­i­cated exter­nal recorder, but cap­tures in two full-RAW fla­vors: 4096 x 2960 (for motion pic­ture), and 3840 x 2160 (for 4K TV). Both of these modes offer 10-bit 4:4:4 at 60 frames-per-second. There are two addi­tional RAW option, 4096 x 1080 or 3840 x 1080 res­o­lu­tions, which are also 10-bit 4:4:4, but at 120 fps. The cam­era also offers

com­pressed RAW at 2048 x 1080 and 1920 x 1080 with either 12-bit or 10-bit 4:4:4 60p. Unlike the C300, the C500 doesn’t not have focus assist, or built-in ND fil­ters, or XLR inputs. Feel­ing a bit con­fused? Me too.

• Never shy from the spot light, RED announced a Dragon sen­sor upgrade, which is set to bring 6K res­o­lu­tion to EPIC and Scar­let cam­eras later this year The upgrade will cost EPICown­ers $6,000.

RED Epic

• Canon showed a pro­to­type 30-inch 4K ref­er­ence dis­play, but no word on pric­ing or when it will be com­mer­cially available.

• Nikon announced a brand new D3200 with all the usual bells and whis­tles: 24.2-megapixelAPS-C size (DX-format) CMOS sen­sor, full 1080p HD video in 24p or 30p with full-time aut­o­fo­cus, all for $700. The pic­tures I’ve seen are all in a ter­ri­ble cherry red.

• Sony announced the Alpha A57 DSLR cam­era (US$745 body only) fea­tur­ing a 24.3MP CMOSimage sen­sor, 10fps, and a 3-inch 921,600-pixel Xtra Fine LCD screen and full HD 1080p video (AVCHD) at 60 fps or 24 fps, com­pet­ing directly against Nikon’s D5100 and Canon’s EOSRebel T3i.

Blackmagic Camera

Black­magic Design Cin­ema Camera

Source: eduardoangel.com

Catching up with the coolest tech news. Summary.

I’ve been on the road for the past 2 weeks, with very lim­ited inter­net access. Today, I finally had some time to catch up with the lat­est tech­nol­ogy news (1683 arti­cles and 268 emails). These are, in my opin­ion, the most inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant announcements:

• Film­maker Jeff Desom took Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1954 film “Rear Win­dow” and turned it into a sin­gle panoramic time-lapse video.

Two years ago I set up my cam­era to take a pic­ture every 15 sec­onds for 36 hour and edited 698 still images into a 29-second video.

• Recently I was inter­viewed by PDN about the “13 Prod­ucts you need to add HD Video to your busi­ness.” Do you agree or dis­agree? Did we miss some­thing? We would love to hear your com­ments below. The arti­cle is also avail­able on PDN’s May print issue.

PDN May 2012

• Blurb posted a cool arti­cle about how we use the Book Mod­ule on Adobe Light­room 4. If you are inter­ested in explor­ing this option don’t miss one of our upcom­ing sem­i­nars. Here’s the sam­ple book (about wine!) we created.

click here to continue

• Canon announced the EOS 60Da, specif­i­cally designed for astropho­tog­ra­phy. The cam­era has the same image sen­sor as the stan­dard 60D, but it has been reworked for enhanced trans­mis­sion of a spe­cific wave­length of red light — 656 nanome­ters — within the vis­i­ble spectrum.

• Tenba announced the Roadie II Hybrid, a carry-on com­pli­ant rolling cam­era case than can be con­verted into a backpack.

Tenba

• Sony announced the NEX FS700, a new 4k-capable E-mount cam­corder, with 1080p video and 60p, 50p, 60i and 24p. Appar­ently a firmware upgrade will enable 4k cap­ture and Raw out­put, as well as slow-motion footage (up to 960 fps at reduced res­o­lu­tion and 240fps in Full HD). As always, our friends from Abel Cine posted a great arti­cle about the new sys­tem here.

Phase One New Camera

• A few months ago we tested Adobe Pre­miere Pro and Twix­tor to find out which one was bet­ter for slow motion. We chose skate­board­ers as the sub­ject mat­ter, which proved to be very chal­leng­ing. On these new tuto­ri­als (Part 1 and Part 2) a pro skate­board­ing pho­tog­ra­pher dis­cusses var­i­ous com­po­si­tion tips and techniques.

• David Pogue, the New York Times tech­nol­ogy colum­nist wrote about the changes he has wit­ness dur­ing the last year on pro­fes­sional TV and film cam­eras while shoot­ing a new PBS show. He cov­ers the flex­i­bil­ity of inter­change­able lenses and amaz­ing low-light capa­bil­ity of the new (Canon, Sony, and Pana­sonic) dig­i­tal systems.

• Canon announced a free Dig­i­tal Photo Pro­fes­sional (DPP) update to enhance EOS 5D Mark III CR2 file cor­rec­tions. The soft­ware update will be avail­able next month.

• Adobe is host­ing a free Webi­nar this Fri­day April 6th at noon Pacific Time titled “Devel­op­ing Dig­i­tal Pub­lish­ing Suite Con­tent for the New iPad.” This is a VERY rel­e­vant topic for any­one cre­at­ing and deliv­er­ing online con­tent, which means, everybody.

Source: eduardoangel.com