Camcorders

Evidently the Canon 5D Mark III SLR must be a pretty hot item.

Because Apple just released an update to its Mac OS X camera support whose sole purpose is to let iPhoto, Aperture, and other photo applications view and edit the new camera's raw images.

Usually such Apple updates add support for a collection of new cameras, but time is of the essence now that the 5D Mark III is shipping. Many photographers who use this class of camera shoot raw images (data taken directly from the image sensor, not processed into JPEG by the camera) for the … Read more

Carl Zeiss today announced 15mm and 135mm members in its CP.2 family of adaptable lenses geared for both cinema and SLR uses and due to ship in the fourth quarter.

The CP.2 line of Compact Prime lenses can be fitted with adapters to Canon or Nikon SLRs, to PL-mount cameras common in the video and cinema industry, Micro Four Thirds cameras from Olympus and Pansonic, or Sony's NEX cameras with E-mount lenses. The CP.2 line is geared for cinema purposes, though, for example with a long-travel focusing ring.

The lens family spotlights the convergence of traditional … Read more

Well, that didn't take long.

Less than four weeks after Adobe Systems released Lightroom 4, the company has issued a release candidate for Lightroom 4.1 to squash bugs and add support for one of the hottest cameras going right now, the Canon 5D Mark III.

The 22-megapixel, full-frame SLR brings new low-light sensitivity, faster performance, overhauled autofocus, and other improvements over its 3-year-old predecessor. But until now, Lightroom fans who have the coveted $3,500 camera could only see its raw files by converting them into the Digital Negative format with Adobe's DNG Converter software.

Other improvements … Read more

Don't beat yourself up if you didn't know that some modest video editing abilities are tucked into the premium version of Photoshop CS5.

But expect a lot more starting today, when Adobe Systems releases an open beta version of Photoshop CS6 code-named Superstition.

The new version brings video from the higher-priced Extended version of Photoshop to the standard version, and it adds editing features such as the ability to apply Photoshop tone and color adjustments. And instead of relying on Apple's QuickTime, the new tool draws from Adobe technology elsewhere in the Creative Suite, such as the … Read more

There's so much big news surrounding Photoshop CS6 that I'm not sure where to start. This is Adobe's first-ever public beta of its most important product (expected to ship sometime in the first half of this year). It's the first Adobe product to incorporate the company's new DRM architecture. It's the first version of Photoshop to take video seriously and to make it into the Standard Edition of the product rather than the extra-pricey Extended version. It's the first version to integrate the company's GPU-accelerating Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE). And for the first time in more than 20 years, Photoshop goes dark.

The beta, which is actually the Extended version of the product, is downloadable from Adobe Labs or Download.com, though at a hefty 1.8GB, it's not for the bandwith-constrained. While you can't run it simultaneously with previous versions, like every Adobe update it installs completely separately so that you can keep predecessors.

Dear Adobe: while that's very convenient, I still want the option to actually update from the previous version. I am tired of the cruft Creative Suite leaves behind every time a new version comes out; on my previous system, I had random directories left over from at least three generations of CS. Given that your new subscription model is designed to drive users to more-frequent updates, you'd better deal with better ways to clean up behind yourself.… Read more

I love making movies. If I could have a do-over, career-wise, you'd see my name in film credits instead of on blog posts (not that I don't have equal love for the latter, of course).

That's why I've always been drawn to camcorders, which let me indulge my inner Spielberg--even if it's just to create music video-style family montages. I've purchased several over the years, always relishing the improvements in resolution and image quality.

But, let's face it, things have changed. Now that most smartphones and many tablets can shoot video--in some cases … Read more

Toshiba has announced new SDXC and SDHC cards that support the UHS-1 high-speed interface--and the new Exceria brand name to go along with them.

The Exceria name is meant "to reflect a combination of 'excellent' and 'experience,'" Toshiba said in a statement this week, but I wouldn't have guessed that without being told. Too bad Sony got there first with Xperia.

The new cards come in three varieties. At the top of the heap are models that will arrive in July with read speeds of 95MBps and write speeds of 90MBps; they'll come in 8GB, 16GB, … Read more

The end of next year seems a long way off, but you know how these things go: blink and it'll be December 2013.

That's why diehard Flip and FlipShare users may be happy to learn of a new service designed to let them instantly transfer their FlipShare video libraries to a different storage provider--before Cisco shuts down FlipShare at the end of next year.

Givit, a private video-sharing platform that launched in public beta last November, announced today what it calls "seamless integration" with FlipShare, which, Givit says, will let FlipShare users move their libraries with a single click.… Read more

I've found that photographers fall into two camps: those who use their camera till it drops dead of exhaustion before considering a new model, and those who feel the need to update as often as possible.

I think the wait for the Canon EOS 5D Mark III has been killing both those groups. It's been so long that a lot of hard-used 3-plus-year-old 5D Mark IIs are ready to surrender, and the frequent updaters have been buffeted on a sea of rumors and delays. But the 5DM3 is almost here--shipping within a few weeks, in theory--and it looks like it will have what it takes to please them both.

While the 5DM3 is obviously big news, Canon's intent to drop of the price of the 5DM2 (to what, I don't know yet) and keep it on the market is pretty important, too: $3,500 is pretty steep for a lot of people who want to go full-frame, and it helps keeps Canon in competition with the newly price-reduced Nikon D700.

As you'd expect, the 5DM3 consists of a combination of technologies, features, and design updates rolled out in the EOS 7D and the more recent 1D X. The result is a camera that looks similar to its predecessor but that's otherwise almost completely different. … Read more