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It’s still not quite point-and-shoot, but it looks like some researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (or NICT) have gone some ways towards making holography a tiny bit more practical. As Tech-On reports, their method is based around a fly-eye lens that consists of a number of micro lenses, which allows for moving images to be captured in normal lighting conditions, and is also used to display the image after a computer works its magic on the raw images. There are still a few fairly significant drawbacks to the setup, however, as the image displayed is currently limited to one centimeter in size with a two degree viewing angle, although the researchers say they should be able to increase that to a four centimeters within the next three years. Check out an equally tiny image of an actual hologram captured with the system after the break.

Continue reading NICT researchers develop new method to make holography more practical

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Misc. Gadgets

NICT researchers develop new method to make holography more practical originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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!]

Unless you’re my Dad, then your reaction to any kind of gift card will usually be a resounding “meh!” If you are my Dad, then I have a message: Hey, Dad. It’ll be a book token for you again this Christmas, OK?

Target, though, has jazzed things up by actually turning the gift card into a gift itself. This modest digital camera is also a token that can be used to buy a proper digital camera, or anything else that takes your fancy. You can buy one for anywhere between $50 and $1000, fully redeemable, of course.

It’s definitely low-spec, with a 1.2 MP sensor and just 8MB memory (enough for 50 pictures). To get the photos off the camera and on to a computer, you hook it up via the included USB cable. Software is provided for PCs, but we imagine that it should just show up as a USB mass storage device anyway.

Despite its obvious crappiness, we love this camera, or at least the idea of it. Although a gift card is probably the best bet to make sure Granny doesn’t buy you a fishing net and a book instead of that, erm, netbook you asked her for, unwrapping one is unarguably dull. Adding a meta-gift to the mix really makes sense. Bonus: Turn it on its side and the front panels looks like a scary metal version of Edvard Munch’s scream with added evil, glowing eyes. They really thought of everything.

Product page [Target via Coolest Gadgets]

Motorola’s latest offering is an impressive camera integrated with a standard feature phone.The company has collaborated with Kodak to create the Motozine ZN5 exclusively for the T-Mobile network.

The phone priced at $100 and available starting today has a 5-megapixel camera.Motorola says it has tried to replicate the feel of a digital camera interface within the phone. That means a shutter button, auto focus, a flash and a viewer.The device also comes with 1 GB memory card. 

Among the photo sharing options is a one-click access to the online Kodak gallery where users can upload the photos.The phone also allows for web surfing, email and instant messaging.

What’s your favorite cameraphone?

Photo: analog_chainsaw/Flickr

Your house is full of crap, and you know it. Along with that old suit you’ll “fit into again one day” and the cupboard full of juicers and lemon squeezers, it’s likely you have a lot of computer hardware you’ll never use again. That’s normal though, right? Everyone has a collection of USB card readers, cables and battery chargers in the bottom drawer, after all.

But I’m talking about big, modern gadgets you may even have just bought. Things that you think you need, but were clearly a waste of your money. Here’s a list of five things that are useless, and which you should send to the thrift store right now.

First, an anti hate-mail caveat: Some of this kit is still useful in a professional context. If you use this stuff every day, you know who you are — please don’t write in. But for the rest of us, these hunks of plastic are just taking up space and electricity.

Printers

Buying a printer is like buying a timeshare in a vacation home. It looks cheap until you figure out all the extra costs, and that you don’t ever use it after the first year. Outside of an office or a photographer’s studio, they’re obsolete — myriad online printing sites will take care of your photos, at a better quality and lower price than you’ll get at home.

Still printing articles to “read later”? Get over it. Almost any cellphone has a good enough screen to read text. If you have an iPhone, you can even use the “Instapaper” application to automate the process — hit the Read Later bookmarklet and enjoy the article later, away from your desk. The forests will thank you for it.

Scanners

Related to printers, only even less useful. Slow, clunky and noisy, scanners used to be good for digitizing photos and text. Now, your camera or even your phone will do the same. Almost nobody uses film anymore, and for those who do, the lab will pop a CD of your photos, already digitized and dust-free, into the envelope along with the prints.

If you regularly scan text documents and use OCR (optical character recognition) to make them into something other than dead trees, you can forget that, too. The average cameraphone can take a clear enough picture to read the text, and from there you can either email it to a service like ScanR (which converts your pictures to editable PDFs) or just drop it into EverNote, a cross platform application which does the same. Your filing cabinet has never been so empty.

Built-In Optical Drives

This one is a qualified entry on the list — you sometimes still need a DVD or CD drive to actually get information onto your computer. Once it’s on there, however – in the form of an OS installation or a ripped CD – you don’t need it anymore. Putting an optical drive in a notebook seems, well, old fashioned.

In fact, a modern optical drive just isn’t that useful anymore: Hard drives are so cheap that backing up to multiple DVDs is pointlessly slow and painful. CDs don’t need to be burned when you can just email a MP3 file, and actually taking a DVD on a trip to watch on, say, the plane, is an extravagance your laptop’s battery won’t appreciate in this day of fast DVD rips and movie downloads. Buy a MacBook Air or a netbook and keep a $20 burner around for emergencies.

Fax Machines

Still sending faxes? Hi grandad! The fax was useful when it was the only way to move documents around faster than mailing them. Now it’s pointless. Most documents never exist in paper form anyway, so you’ll need a printer just to get started with the sending. And if you fax directly from your computer, that’s no excuse, either — why not just email the PDF?

An email is as trackable as a fax, and harder to fake (I may or may not have altered faxed documents for previous employers). It’s also a lot harder to lose, and a lot easier to find if you do. Granted, a trip to the fax machine buys you a few minutes away from the desk, but then, why not just quit the office altogether and work, like I do, from the comfort of your bed?

Landline Phones

There’s one big reason that people keep a landline at home: 911 calls. The landline runs off power from the telephone line itself (a neat precursor to power over ethernet) so if there’s a blackout, the calls still go through (unless you have a cordless handset, of course). And because a landline is tied directly to a single address, the emergency services know where you are.

But a cellphone is always with you, even when you’re hiding under the bed from burglars or murderers. What if your battery dies? Borrow another phone — there’s always somebody around. And if you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere and things get ugly, a landline won’t help you anyway. What about coverage? It’s true that cellphone coverage in the US is not exactly ubiquitous, but again, if you’re out in the sticks with no signal, you’re unlikely to find a landline anyway.

The emergency services still know where you are, too. Your rough location is tracked by the cell tower routing your call, so you’ll be directed to a local call center. With GPS enabled phones, things will only get better.

Burglar alarms? File under the caveat above. If you have a dedicated line, fine. Just don’t rent a second one just to hook up a handset you don’t need.

There’s one other problem with a landline, or rather, with your brain: You don’t remember anyone’s number anymore. Stick with the mobile, and learn to be less paranoid.

Anything else? What junk do you have at home that does nothing but collect dust? Tell us in the comments

It used to be that a hairbrush or an old broomstick would do the trick to transport you into the Rock God of your dreams. Then came Guitar Hero, and later, Rock Band, with their dinky plastic instruments. But it seems even that isn’t enough, so Logitech has announced a “proper” guitar to hook up to your PlayStation 2 or 3.

The Wireless Guitar Controller, Premiere Edition, with its rather non-rock name, is a solid, wood bodied axe in the spirit of a Fender Stratocaster (well, except for the headstock). The fretboard is fashioned from rosewood, the frets and the tuning pegs are metal, as are the bridge and vibrato arm (or whammy bar).

The $250 guitar hooks up wirelessly using Logitech’s preferred 2.4GHz band (a USB dongle comes in the box) to the PlayStation and works with any Guitar Hero game. If you’re rocking the World Tour edition, you can use the “Touch Sensitive Neck Slider” and the “Star Power button”. The thing even comes with a gig bag, inside of which your controller will actually pass for a real guitar.

We suggest you rough the case up a little, leave your hair unwashed, grab a can of Carlsberg Special Brew and head onto London’s Tube. You’ll fit right in. Available December.

Product page [Logitech via Joystiq via GamerFront]

pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/10/plixr_flash_based_online_image_editor.jpg” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”494″ height=”322″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /br While it’s not the most full-featured image editor you’ll ever use, Pixlr makes it fairly easy to do some sophisticated (and unsophisticated) things with images online. The Flash-based web app has an impressive set of tools, from a text engine that can use nearly any font available on your computer to layers and filters for masking and effects, respectively. Incredibly, there’s even a multilevel undo! You can import images from your machine or via URL, or paint something up yourself, and either way save it to your desktop. It’s fun to play around with, though quickly frustrating if you’re used to more powerful tools. But it sure beats MS Paint! emOriginal photo by a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeygottawa/400926090/”Mike G/a./em/p div class=”related”a href=”http://pixlr.com/”Pixlr/a/div br style=”clear: both;”/
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Windows/Mac only: Instant JPEG from RAW allows you to browse RAW photo files from a number of high-end digital cameras directly in Windows File Explorer and Mac OS X Finder. The software extracts the JPEG thumbnail usually embedded in a RAW file and makes it the file’s system icon—which makes editing large batches of pictures much quicker and easier. Instant JPEG from RAW is a free download for Mac or Windows after registration (license key arrives via email).

Using a couple of basic tools in Photoshop and other image editing programs, you can take a flat image and make it pop with just a little bit of effort and no experience in the finer arts of exposure and color correction. With a little practice, you can get some quick and dirty work done in just seconds that will make your presentation, blog, or social network profile pictures look a lot better online. Even cellphone snapshots can be made presentable while your instant noodles soften. Here’s how:

This bulldog is quite cute, but the flat contrast, dead colors, blur and noise aren’t doing it’s already comically bemused mug any favors. Let’s see if we can’t create a profile picture that will get the pack on Dogster howling. While for the purposes of this demonstration I’ll be using Photoshop, the same work can be done in GIMP, Paint.NET and other full-featured image editing software applications.

Love Your Curves

Select Image > Adjustments > Curves from the Photoshop drop-down menus. Welcome to the most awesome digital image editing tool known to human (and bulldog) kind.
See the three eye-dropper icons near the bottom? Our first chore is to select the first one to set the black point of the image. The goal is click on the darkest portion of the image in order to set the low threshhold for detail. The point you select and everything darker will become true black. I selected a corner of shadow in the top-left of the image.
Next, we use the middle eye-dropper to set the gray point. It doesn’t matter how dark or light the point is — just that it’s supposed to be a neutral gray tone. This can quickly remove a color-cast, which often occur when a camera set to indoor light is used outdoors or vice-versa. If a gray object has a reddish tinge, for instance, this feature will make it color-neutral and shift the colors in the rest of the image accordingly. I selected a bit of what’s supposed to be white wall near the top of the image.Finally, we use the last eye-dropper to set the white point. This is pretty much the opposite of setting the black point. Click on the brightest portion of the image, in this case, the highlight on our furry friend’s cheek.
Now our simple black diagonal line has been joined by red, green and blue friends. These represent how the eye-droppers adjusted the red, green and blue parts of the image. Behind them, the gray shape is called a “histogram,” and shows the distribution of tones in the image. What we want to do is make sure the range of tones in the final photo equals the possible range of a digital image. So we grab those little sliders at the bottom and adjust the dark and light points to match where the colored lines first meet the bottom and the top of the graph, respectively.
Now that the image is as color-correct as you can expect after twenty seconds of fiddling, we’ll want to bump up the contrast. Why should you hate Brightness and Contrast? Because it would preserve all the image data in the shadows and highlights that our histogram promises is there. So instead we’ll create an “s-curve” to pump up the contrast. First, select a point midway along the black diagonal line. Just click to select — don’t move it.
Now we’ll select another point halfway between the midpoint and the highlight, or three-quarters of the way up the line. This we’ll move very slightly up and to the left.
Add a point on the other side of the mid-point, and move it a little down and to the right. The more extreme your “s” the more contrast you’ll perceive. (Inversely, if you have a u-shaped histogram with lots of color information in the dark and light areas, you can reduce contrast by pointing the “s” in the other direction.)

Unsharp Mask is Your New BFF

There are two problems with this image, and we can fix one but not the other — namely, it’s a little blurry thanks to the cheap plastic iPhone lens, and it’s “noisy” (the spattering of grainy color throughout) because of the cheap iPhone image capture chip and heavy doses of JPEG compression. Sharpening increases the contrast between a range of pixels, which can make the image clearer but also brings out the noise. Normally you might just try Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen or Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen More and eyeball it, but this calls for a little finesse. Since I’ll be reducing the image size quite a bit, I’m going to go for sharp and a little noisy, and use Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask to massage it. Amount sets how much additional contrast is desired, radius determines the are sampled around each pixel, and threshold sets how different two tones need to be before the filter kicks in. Futz with these for a few seconds until you like what you see — I’d say my adjustment is about medium-to-light sharpening.

Don’t Be an Image Size Queen

While you want to start with the highest-resolution image with the least amount of compression you can, and do all your adjustments and filters at that size, you don’t want to choke up someone’s screen real estate and bandwidth with a huge image. And nothing smooths over the bumps in a photo’s personality like a trip to the shrink. Select Image > Adjustments > Image Size and re-size it to something appropriate (in this case, I re-sized to 247 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall for the before-and-after images at the top).

Compress Your File Into Skinny Jeans

Don’t be a bandwidth-hog with fatty files. Use File > Save For Web to let you set the compression level and preview both the image quality and the file size. By default, I usually set the JPEG compression level to 65 — which in this case means an image just a tad under 25 kilobytes, which shouldn’t bother broadband users. Et voila, our sweet puppy will soon be getting invitations to all the best purebred parties.

(Original image by Artur Bergman)