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Photographer and occasional Wired.com contributor Dave Bullock has organized a photography club on Skid Row, a massive encampment of 7,000 to 8,000 homeless people in downtown Los Angeles.

Using cheap digital cameras obtained through a city arts grant, the Skid Row Photography Club made more than 20,000 photos over the past six months, and they’ve now put on an art show during LA’s Downtown Art Walk.

Dave wants to keep the project going, and to do that he needs more cameras. He welcomes donations of old (but still working) digital cameras with any number of megapixels. Got a camera you want to donate to the club? Email Dave at eecue@eecue.com and tell him the Gadget Lab sent ya.

Skid Row Photo Club’s First Show [thanks, Dave!]

The Polaroid insta-photo system was supposed to die a natural death last year but the popularity of the kitchy format is forcing opportune companies into creating new versions.

Fujifilm announced today that it is bringing the Instax 200 instant film camera to the U.S., which makes 3.9 × 2.44-inch instant photos, costs $70, and will use Polaroid film similar to the classic rig. After taking a picture, the photo will immediately come out undeveloped, and the user will see it come into focus in real time.

There is no word on whether you will have to shake it in order to pretend it accelerates the process, but no there’s no question older folks will do so out of habit. As a result, we expect everyone above the age of thirty to be wildly exposed.

According to FujiFilm, the Polaroid film will sell for $29 for every pack of 20 pictures. Considering that a set of 24 to 32 digital pictures is easily developed in any drug store for less than that, it looks like folks will be paying an awful lot for the pleasure to relive their childhoods.

It’s true that the portable photo printing market seems too niche to succeed (especially when placed against its direct digicam competitors in price and quality), but the ‘Long Tail’ business strategy adopted by many manufacturers is allowing these items to survive, and even thrive. ‘Non-blockbuster’ gadgets gain a modest popularity through a small, rabid group of fans, and Polaroid insta-photos are no exception. Flickr has several Polaroid aficionado groups, and software applications have been created to recreate the classic white-border/smudge appearance of the classic pics.

And the Instax isn’t the only camera about to take advantage and will depend on the popularity of the Ghosts of Gadgets Past. The TOMY Xiao TIP-521 digicam is a the modern version of the Polaroid camera and is a joint project between a Japanese company and Zinc, the digital printing outfit that came out with the PoGo USB printer attachment late last year.

The Xiao is a stylish 5-megapixel digicam that comes with its own attached mini-printer. It pushes out full-color 2 x 3-inch pictures (of thermal-based ink) in less than a minute, and comes with a bunch of small, customizable features, such as a gallery set that squeezes in a bunch of images into the small frame.

The camera is also wireless IrDA-enabled. This means that in theory, your friend could send a picture from his phone to your Xiao for a print out, but the social implications of this feature are fraught with danger. It should be safely hidden from your pushiest of friends.

The Xiao will be released in Japan for about $350 dollars starting next week and should be available in the U.S. by January 2009, if not earlier.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the iPhone to support Adobe’s Flash software: Apple’s terms-of-service agreement prohibits it.

Although Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone, Apple is unlikely ever to permit it to appear in the handset’s App Store, no matter how much customers want it.

"I’m pretty skeptical that Flash could be
implemented in a way that doesn’t violate the Terms of Service of the
developer’s agreement," said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game.

Flash is Adobe’s highly popular platform for displaying interactive graphics, animations and multimedia within a browser. According to Adobe, 98 percent of desktop computers currently support Flash, which has led to its widespread use by web developers. Adobe’s recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for Windows Mobile has prompted speculation that an iPhone version might be coming soon. But the speculators may be waiting in vain, based on Apple’s TOS and the company’s history of tightly controlling applications for its smartphone platform.

Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash
has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia
platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert
business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could
compete with the iTunes Store.

Apple’s well aware of these problems, which is
why the company wrote a clause in its iPhone developers’ Terms of
Service agreement (.pdf) that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone:

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code
by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in
architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise," reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement, which was recently published on WikiLeaks. "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except
for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and
built-in interpreter(s)."

This
could come as major disappointment to iPhone owners, as the lack of
Flash support has been a paramount complaint about the handset since
its release. No Flash means that the iPhone browser is incapable of displaying a large portion of
the internet. For example, free Flash games aren’t supported, videos
can’t be streamed from the vastly popular television and movie site
Hulu, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won’t work on the iPhone.

It’s no wonder
Adobe is expressing reluctance about the prospects of Flash for iPhone.
The company on Monday demonstrated a version of Flash for Windows
Mobile handsets. And all that product manager Michele Turner could say
about iPhone was, "We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is
really up to Apple."

Adam
Dann, CEO of Nullriver, agrees that Flash would take away some of
Apple’s control. Apple eventually banned Nullriver’s application
NetShare because it violated AT&T Terms of Service agreement by
turning the iPhone into a wireless modem for tethering. If Apple
introduced Flash to iPhone, it’s possible Nullriver could code a Flash
version of NetShare, repeating that violation, Dann said.

Dann added that the only way
Flash could ever appear on the iPhone is if Adobe offered an extremely
stripped-down version of the software. But even if there is a "Flash Lite" for
iPhone, that just reinforces the point that the handset’s owners still will not have a true Flash experience.

And aside from taking
software control away from Apple, Flash would introduce a slew of other potential headaches
as well. Flash apps could hurt battery life, suck up the graphics-processing unit’s
power, use an inordinate amount of memory, or potentially introduce security risks. Apple has plenty of customer complaints to address about the iPhone; the last thing it needs is to add Adobe and Flash to the pile.

In August, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority pulled
an iPhone
advertisement because the commercial
said, "All the parts of the internet are on the iPhone." The lack of
Flash and Java support on iPhone were enough for the ad to be deemed
misleading. And it’s
looking like Apple won’t be able to air that ad again.

Apple did not return phone calls for comment.

Here at the G-Lab we love Make, the magazine for hackers, modders and DIY freaks. And, by extension, we dig Makezine, the online home of the mag. Sometimes the projects are a little too ambitious (DIY DNA sequencing, anyone?) but once in a while there is a true gem, a project so cool that you can’t not do it.

The Scanner Camera is one of those projects. It’s a perfect destination for your useless scanner and better still, it’s reversible, meaning you can always go back to scanning boring old pieces of paper.

The video shows you just what to do: essentially you tape a 7″x7″ black box the the top of an old flatbed, fit a magnifying-glass lens into a smaller box and slide that inside, and then punch a few different sized holes into black cards to use as apertures.

That’s it. The image is focussed by moving the inner box in and out, and the light levels can be controlled with the black cards. The images are amazing, and best of all, if you have a Canon LiDE scanner like the one in the video, it’s powered from the USB bus so you could even hook this up to a laptop and go shooting outside.

I will be trying this out over the next few days. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Weekend Project: Scanner Camera [Make via Lifehacker]

After some months of saving my pennies, I blew them this week on a Nikon D700. Remember our post about buying old, full frame lenses and using them on your small-sensor DSLR? There was a reason for it — those cheap old lenses will last you until you move up to full-frame.

There are plenty of reviews and incredibly detailed spec-sheets for the D700 already online, so here I’ll just cover a few of the quirks and delights I have found so far. In short, though, the D700 kicks ass. It’s easy to use, and takes an incredible picture, even in the dark.

That Sensor

The headline feature of the D700 is its full-frame sensor, which is the same one you’ll find in the flagship D3. You only get 12 megapixels, but they’re big pixels, and their light-gathering ability is extraordinary. The top ISO available on the D700 is a staggering 25,600, a full eight stops faster than ISO 100. At that setting, though, the pictures are terrible. Convert them to black and white and they look exactly like they have been through a photocopier. A photocopier that is running out of toner. That said, even this is better than the results that the Canon G9 gives at just ISO 1600.

Drop just one stop, to ISO 12,800, and things are a lot better. The pictures are still noisy but Nikon has tweaked its noise reduction algorithms to mimic film grain, or so it seems. The EXPEED processor has no mercy with color noise, but is a little easier on the luminance noise. What does that mean? It means that the nasty stuff is cleared out, leaving a grainy but pleasing result.

Drop the ISO to 6400, the highest setting with an actual number (Nikon uses names like H0.3 for the more sensitive settings) and you’d never know you were shooting at more than 800. This, combined with a fast lens (a 50mm ƒ1.8, for example) means you can shoot in ambient light, handheld, at night. And coupled with the heavy body, which steadies things, you can handhold to some pretty slow shutter speeds, too. If you were to add a shake-reducing lens into the mix, you’d likely have no trouble with shooting 2001’s monolith in a black hole. At midnight.

The Knobs and The Aperture Ring

About that heavy body. The weight is reassuring (body only and without the battery it weighs 995g, or 2.2 lbs.) but the feel in your hand is what counts. I used to own a couple of Nikon F100 bodies and the feel is similar, if a bit chunkier. The biggest change for anyone moving up from a cheaper DSLR is the manual controls. Instead of all the functionality being hidden away in menus, most of the important functions get their own knobs, dials and switches.

Those of you who remember our post “History’s 5 Best Interface Designs” will know I’m a big fan of knobs:

Its strength is its simplicity. Once you have twisted one knob, you know how every other knob works. If it is marked, its position provides visual feedback. If not, our brains easily associate the amount of twist with the level of the knob’s effect. And best of all, it’s the only controller we know of which can go up to 11.

Better still, many of the knobs can be customized to do different things. Part of the fun is digging through the custom settings inside the menus to figure out just what you can tweak. The short answer is “almost everything.”

But the one thing I really love, the discovery of which actually brought a small tear to the corner of my emotionally suppressed eye (hey, I’m English. We don’t do emotions) is the aperture control. You can choose to use the aperture ring around the lens to set the size of the hole, shifting it away from the finger-dial on the grip (custom function f9, page 326 in the manual).

For someone who has this muscle memory baked in since childhood, this is huge. You lose the fine grained control of the 1/3 stop adjustments available with the command dial, but the shutter speed takes care of this. You also lose the Live View function, but you can always switch back temporarily (and quickly).

Live View

It works, and the high resolution screen means it looks great, but the live view is janky as hell. Here’s how you use it: Turn the dial on the top to the LV setting (it’s the same dial that chooses between self timer, single and continuous shooting). Then press the shutter release all the way down. The mirror flips up and live view is on. To refocus, press the shutter half way. The mirror flips down, the camera focusses, and the mirror flips up again. And when you actually take a picture, the mirror flips again.

You can choose the “tripod mode”, which uses contrast detection like a compact camera, but it is slow as molasses. To me, Live View is little more than a gimmick. You can, however, zoom in on the live view image to see a 100% rendering for easy manual focussing (if holding a two pound camera plus lens at arms’ length and twisting the focus ring is your thing) and there’s a semi-useful level that can be superimposed on the image, but still: Gimmicky.

Built-in Flash

Really. Why? C’mon, Nikon.

Full Frame

The full frame sensor means that all your DX lenses are useless. If you were hoping that you could use your 18-55mm DX zoom as an ultrawide objective, you’re out of luck. You can force the camera to treat the lens as a full frame one, but you’ll get heavy vignetting at the wide end and a drop in image quality away from the center at all focal lengths.

The D700 defaults to reading just the central part of the image area, which means that an 18mm lens will act just like it does on a DX camera and give the equivalent view of a 27mm lens. The rub is that you are then shooting at just 5 megapixels. Even my D60 doubles that. For Lomo-style fun and frolics, though, those extreme angles, low-definition edges and black corners can be useful.

Auto Focus

The D700 has 51 focus points, all of which can be individually selected, and 15 of which are cross-type sensors which are faster and more accurate. There are several modes, from single point AF to a 3D tracking mode which remembers the color of the thing you first focus on and then locks onto it like a junkyard dog on a schoolkid as it moves around the picture.

But all you really need to do is to set it to auto and forget about it. The D700’s autofocus is uncanny. It seems to know what you are taking a picture of and it locks on almost instantly. If you ever saw the Clint Eastwood movie “Firefox” (or read Craig Thomas’ book), you’ll remember the thought controlled weapon system in the plane. I believe Nikon took this and built it in to the D700. It really is that good.

Should You Buy One?

There’s so much more to this camera that we have no chance of covering it here. But if you’re thinking of buying a D700 (and especially if you are weighing it up against the more expensive D3), go ahead. I haven’t had this much fun taking photos since I sprung for a Leica M6 some years ago (yes, I saved long and hard for that one, too. I then sold it to pay the rent). Bonus: Stick the 472 page manual in the bathroom and you’ll have your morning reading taken care of for weeks. $3000, or thereabouts.

Product page [Nikon]

Review [DP Review]

Review [Imaging Resource]

Review [Ken Rockwell]

Maybe we can finally believe the hype. Jim Jannard is formally announcing his customizable digital video and still camera RED system today that aims to take on DSLRs and further push the boundaries of video quality.

But the hypemaster couldn’t help himself with only one announcement. Oh no. He had to go out and give us a prototype of a RED 3D camera (see pic below), giving the 3D movement another boost of juice (albeit a vaporware-ish one) that suggests that technology will be legitimate and mainstream within a few years.

After taking a quick look at the specs of RED’s DSMC, we can say that the system is, above all, ridiculously ambitious. You have to build up the camera from the ‘brain’ of the system (named ‘Scarlet’ and the super high-end ‘EPIC’), built with camera sensors that range from 2/3 of an inch to a huge 6×17-cm. That sensor’s bigger than my apartment.

But probably the most interesting idea about this system is its easily customizable design. If a bigger sensor is released in the future (or if the prices come down), you don’t need to trash your video camera — you just upgrade it with a new sensor. That’s not a bad way to sell a system that could set as many records for its price as for its number of pixels in a sensor.

The Scarlet will come with several lens mount options and will be able
to shoot 3K @120fps (with still pictures at 4.9 megapixels) all the way
up to 6K @30fps (at 9.4 megapixels). They’ll be priced as low as $2,500
but most likely will go over ten big ones for the better rigs.

The EPIC sensors will shoot from 5K @100fps (with still pictures at
13.8 megapixels) to 9K @50fps (at 65 megapixels), and the price range
will range from $28,000 to over $45,000 when they are released in the Spring next year.

Jannard is also promising an unfathomable 261-megapixel sensor for the rig within two years. We’ll believe that one until we see it, or until Guillermo Del Toro comes out of his cave and says he’ll use that camera to shoot The Hobbit.

RED isn’t the only company to integrate HD video and digital pictures
into one rig. One of the true innovations of the year so far came up
when the Canon 5D Mark II built-in the ability to shoot 1080p HD video. Other companies are obviously looking into integrating video into their DSLRs to not fall behind and to take advantage of the improved optics.

So far, the early word on all RED cameras has been that they are
slightly unstable and quite a bit unfinished. But the video quality is
really the key, and most early examples have been special and (almost)
worthy of that hype.

See also:

• New Chips Poised to Revolutionize Photography, Film
• Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema’s Ultrahigh-Res Camera
• The RED DSLR: A Wish List
• Immersive Media’s Geodesic-shaped Camera Rides the Wave, Captures 360-degree Action Video

Faster, bigger and, erm, anniversary-er. A year ago, Eye-Fi launched its splendid Wi-Fi enabled SD cards which let you beam your photographs directly at the internet, or onto your home computer. To celebrate, the Eye-Fi folks are selling an Anniversary Edition card, which doubles the capacity to 4GB and offers faster read/write speeds beween camera and card.

The Anniversary Edition is priced the same as the Eye-Fi Explore: $129, but comes without the geotagging and the year-long free hotspot access offered by the Explore. You do get access to Eye-Fi’s webshare service, though, which sends your photos into the cloud towards the photosharing site of your choice.

But while these extra features can be added to the Anniversary Edition just by buying them from Eye-Fi, if you get the all-included 3GB Explore, you’re clearly not going to be able to just download more storage — you’re stuck at 2GB.

Available “while supplies last”, although we can’t imagine Eye-Fi won’t be adding a 4GB card to the permanent collection soon enough.

Product page [Eye-Fi. Thanks, Gina!]

The OSx86 hacking scene, which involves installing the Mac OS onto generic PCs instead of those shiny Apple boxes, is characterized by the troubles of marrying hardware to software. In short, OS X just doesn’t have drivers for many of the internal parts such as Wi-Fi cards and, almost as important, sound hardware.

In fact, getting sound in and out of a netbook Hackintosh has proved to be a big challenge. At least with Wi-Fi you can always just swap out the card for an Airport-compatible one. Enterprising hackers also helped us to get the headphone jack working on our Gadget Lab Wind, and now the folks at ipis OS X have done the same for the Eee PC.

Like the Wind solution, you need to install Apple’s developer tools and a new audio driver to get things working. Unlike the rather clunky Wind solution – which requires typing a command into the terminal every time you want to switch from headphones to the internal speakers – the Eee hack is packaged as a menu extra.

The picture above shows Audieee, a small application (227KB) which sits up in the menubar and lets you toggle the output. That’s about as simple as things can get until someone figures out how to have the output switch automatically when you plug in some headphones. Now, please, someone make this work on the Wind!

Audieee: The less ugly stop-gap [ipis OS X. Thanks, Scott!]

This is not a review of the SanDisk Extreme IV 4GB Compact Flash card. If you do want to know the real-world performance of this card vs. its rated 40MB/sec write speed, it is 26.187MB/sec in a Nikon D700 when writing RAW files (for more, see Rob Galbraith’s breathtakingly extensive set of memory card tests).

No, this is a review of the card’s packaging, a ridiculously elaborate and frankly huge set of interlocking parts which do nothing so much as take up valuable space in a shipping container.

First, we must note that the Extreme IV series is at the top end of SanDisk’s range. This card, the 4GB model, cost €53, or $67. It seems that, for that kind of money, SanDisk feels the need to pad the package so the buyer will have something substantial to fill his or her shopping bag.

So, how bad is it? Using my computer’s handy on-screen ruler, I checked the dimensions. The box measures approximately 6″ x 6″ x 0.75″, or 27 cubic inches. My maths is terrible, but I can imagine that you could fit a lot of unpacked CF cards in that space, even if they were housed in their little plastic protective cases.

Onto the unboxing. First, we see the actual box itself, with a few common household items in the photograph to give a sense of scale: a 2G iPod Nano, a standard disposable lighter and a small, cute rubber dinosaur.

Even at this stage we get an idea of the waste. The picture on the front of the box is life-size. If it was to curl up its tail, the dinosaur could fit comfortably on top. Next, the second stage of this Matryoshka-style odyssey.

Here we get our first glimpse of the card, whilst doubling the amount of cardboard on display. Could we just reach in and pluck the card from its nest, slot it into our camera and go out shooting? The answer, predictably, is no, as you can see below:

Onto stage three and we can see that the card is still covered by a plastic lid, with some vacuum formed pits to make sure it lines up and cannot slip, even for a second. That, apparently, is an important feature of plastic packaging inserts. To its credit, SanDisk has made these plastic sections without any sharp edges, so no blood will mar the beautiful matt and gloss black outer sleeve, nor the embossed gold lettering. That is attention to detail.

Here we jump a few stages to arrive at the full glory of the SanDisk Extreme Experience. At bottom left, below the dinosaur, is the plastic lid. At right we see the lifetime warranty and, ironically, the environmentally-friendly disposal instructions therein. This paper pamphlet folds out to nine times its original size. Joining the dead tree is a CD which contains data recovery software. Useful, and also downloadable.

You can also see the card itself, and the little plastic box it comes in. Finally, at the bottom is a “complementary travel case”, presumably to be used by the pampered card when it goes on vacation without you. Here’s a close-up:

And another:

And one more, folded:

The little key-ring is fairly sturdy, and held in place by a thickish cord. There is also a small ribbon that can be seen in the picture above, which reads only “Made in China”. The build quality of the case is satisfactory, but the feel of the foam from which it is made is quite off-putting — when you squeeze it, you are reminded of a styrofoam egg-carton. Hardly the image SanDisk is trying to project.

In conclusion, the SanDisk box is perfectly qualified to offer an excellent on-shelf presence, whilst simultaneously swimming upstream against the packaging-reduction trend in the rest of the consumer electronics industry. Would I recommend it? If you need the card inside, then this packaging certainly does its protective job on the way from store to home.

Would I prefer a smaller pack, less wasteful of both fuel and materials? Undoubtedly. And did I just write seven hundred words about a box? Yes. Yes I did. 709, in fact.

Product page [SanDisk]