camera+

Olympus has a handful of new digital cameras on the way, including two models with some interesting features we haven't seen before.

The 7-megapixel Olympus SP-550UZ replaces the SP-510UZ as the company's premier ultrazoom camera. While the SP-510UZ had a powerful 12x zoom lens, its replacement goes even further. The SP-550UZ uses the most powerful zoom lens we've seen in a midrange camera, a 28mm-to-504mm-equivalent telephoto lens that offers an 18x magnification factor. The zoom power is impressive enough, but the 28mm-equivalent wide-angle shot makes the camera seem even more appealing. The SP-550UZ features Olympus' dual image-stabilization … Read more

Pentax announced two new 7-megapixel digital cameras for the spring, the Optio T30 and M30. The high-end T30 sports a 3-inch touch screen as its biggest feature, while the more conventional M30's appeal is in its solid feature set and much smaller price tag.

The Optio T30's touch-screen LCD functions much like the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-T50's, with most settings and features accessible through the touch screen's menus instead of buttons. It also includes a basic paint mode, for editing and drawing on images in the camera itself. Besides the touch screen, the T30 includes face-recognition … Read more

When I talk about niches of the "new Internet" that are pretty much totally saturated, usually I mention social networking sites or online video portals. Here's another one: Photo sharing! I'm inherently going to be pretty skeptical of any start-up that comes around and decides to take on the Flickrs and Photobuckets of the world. In order for me to be optimistic about a new photo-sharing site, it's going to have to offer something really new. The subject of this post, Radar, thankfully does. It's designed specifically for swapping camera-phone photos around with your … Read more

Taiwan-based Genius is a company that seems obsessed with making all-in-one devices. But how they decide what goes into the "all" part of the equation remains a mystery.

We were mildly interested last month by its cross between a mouse and a VoIP phone, which we could see coming in handy on some occasions (maybe). But its latest Franken-product, the "Look 313," is a combo camera and speaker set--a device whose use eludes us. Electronista indicates that the USB system can be used as a hub, but we think it's real market is American Idol … Read more

Canon has just announced two new models in its PowerShot A-series line of cameras. The PowerShot A460 and A550 are two new, inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras scheduled to hit stores in February.

The PowerShot A460 features a 5-megapixel sensor, lagging a bit behind most 6- and 7-megapixel budget cameras on the market. It includes a 38-to-152mm-equivalent 4x lens, which gives it a bit more power than most compact cameras' 3x lenses. Finally, it uses a small 2-inch LCD screen, which thankfully leaves enough room for an optical viewfinder.

The PowerShot A550 is slightly more impressive than its little brother, but not … Read more

Camero, a company out of Israel that has developed a camera that can "see" things through solid walls, has raised $14 million, bringing the total is has raised to $20 million.

The investment comes about four months after it showed off a prototype of the Xaver800 and began to sell systems to customers. Investors include Greylock Partners, Motorola Ventures and Walden.

The Xaver800 doesn't technically capture images directly. Instead, it issues ultrawideband signals and the data harvested is then used to create 3D models of things the signals bounced off of. The trick is that the camera … Read more

I love gadgets, especially if they can fit on my wrist. Televisions are cool, but TV watches are cooler. Lasers are awesome, but watches with lasers built into them? Even more awesome. And now there's a camera you can fit onto your wrist.

The Digital Hero 3 is a 3-megapixel, wrist-mounted, waterproof sports camera. It's tiny and hardly the most impressive shooter at CES, but it can take 3-megapixel still images and 30fps VGA videos with sound. It fits inside a waterproof case that straps to your wrist, so you can easily shoot snowboarding, surfing, or any other … Read more

I'm starting to believe that camera manufacturers are able to stuff tiny quantum singularities into their products. The only way I can explain the increasing range of the internal zoom systems in ultracompacts is with a fold in space. Casio's latest fold holds a 7x zoom, with the 35mm-equivalent range of 35mm-266mm, in an inch-thick ultracompact.

With a camera so small and light, shake can be even more of a problem than usual with long zooms. Casio compensates with no less than four different antishake techniques, including a mechanical CCD-shift image stabilizer and the usual combos of high-ISO … Read more

Over the last couple of years, Samsung has made a real effort to step up its still camera offerings. This year's CES introductions continue that trend with more stylish designs and smattering of convenient features. You won't find any new dSLRs here, but there are six new compact cameras with pixel counts ranging from 6 megapixels to 10 megapixels. Two of the cameras fall into Samsung's L-series, which is aimed at advanced shooters, while the other four belong to the S-series, targeted at the point-and-shoot crowd. All of Samsung's new still cameras include in-camera editing, so … Read more