Free Republic

Shocking news: Kodak, the company that invented the first digital camera back in 1975, announced today that it is pulling out of the camera market entirely. The phasing out of digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and digital picture frames will likely happen by the end of June. Instead, the company will be focusing on licensing out its patents and brand name

Nikon has unveiled a new superzoom compact camera called the P510 that offers a ridiculous 42x optical zoom — the highest zoom ratio ever seen in such a camera. In 35mm terms, the lens goes from a 24mm on the wide-angle side to a 1000mm on the telephoto end. The 16.1MP camera also boasts a 3-inch LCD screen, 1080p video recording, GPS, 5fps continuous shooting, and ISO 3200. It’ll hit store shelves later this month with a price tag of $430.

It appears that, bushy haired Chris Rock doesn’t like Newt Gingrich; or at least being asked questions about him. Maybe it was the fact that it was 4AM? As part of the Sundance festivities Rock was at a late night event at Tao when he was unexpectedly hit with a bunch of political questions. The New York Post reports, “A guy walked up to Chris and his entourage and said, ‘Hey, could I get a photo of you with my girlfriend? When rock turned around there was a video camera in his face, and someone asking him about Newt Gingrich....

It just occured to me that although I've been enjoying this site for a long time I've never passed on the link.This site has owners manuals for many older cameras and flashes.It's free to download but the site is supported by donations, so kick in a couple of bucks.If you've ever tried to hunt down an old manual the value of this collection is obvious.SUPPORT FREE REPUBLIC BEFORE YOU SEND MONEY TO ANYONE!!!

Kevin Hayes feels like the luckiest man alive. Three years ago, the 43-year-old Melbourne man was in Canberra and lost the $5000 Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR camera his wife bought him for his birthday, and he had all but given up hope of getting it back when he found out about the website stolencamerafinder.com M The site helped him track the lost or stolen camera to a man who works at a Sydney tattoo parlour a few weeks ago and NSW Police have since collected it. Hayes expects to have his camera back any day now, and NSW...

Here are some developments in the ongoing Olympus scandal: investors and a former director are currently calling for fired CEO Michael Woodford to be brought back to clean house and right the ship. At the same time, The New York Times is reporting that Japanese investigators are still trying to understand a $4.9 billion hole in Olympus’ financial records, and believe that over half of that amount were paid to organized crime groups in Japan. More specifically, the company is accused of being linked to Yamaguchi-Gumi, the country’s most infamous yazuka organization.

Reporting from Washington— On the evening of April 5, a pilot settled into a leather captain's chair at Creech Air Force Base in southern Nevada and took the controls of a Predator drone flying over one of the most violent areas of southwestern Afghanistan. Minutes later, his radio crackled. A firefight had broken out. Taliban insurgents had ambushed about two dozen Marines patrolling a bitterly contested road. The Air Force captain angled his joystick and the drone veered toward the fighting taking place half a world away, where it was already morning. He powered up two Hellfire missiles under its...

Jonas Pfiel's "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" sports 36 cameras and contains firmware that stitches their output together to form a global panorama; you throw it into the air and at the top of its arc, it takes a snap and processes it.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Despite all the advances in digital photography, most people are still plagued by the problem of blurry photos, a problem compounded by the use of cameras embedded in cell phones due to their small size. Problems of blurring generally can be divided into two types. The first is problems with focusing, which can usually be avoided if the camera operator will simply wait for the automatic focusing feature of their camera to do its job. The second type is much more difficult to solve as it involves camera movement while the image is being shot. It’s this second...

A former Atlanta woman on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the Atlanta Police Department, contending an officer illegally seized her camera after she took pictures of officers kicking a man who was handcuffed and laying on the ground. The suit said Felecia Anderson, 24, who lived in the West End on Oct. 14, 2009, saw members of APD's now-disbanded Red Dog unit raiding her neighbor's house. When she also saw officers kicking and dragging a man, she went home and got her camera, the suit said. As Anderson filmed the incident as she stood on the sidewalk, officers ordered...

SNIPPET: "Dan Folk (21), an Israeli who was invited to the event in which over 100 students took part, ended up getting a business card and memento from Ahmadinejad. "It was at his hotel in Manhattan, we got there and had to wait in the security check line for nearly an hour," said the student, adding, "we gave them our cell phones and any kind of camera we were carrying. During the security check I showed them my Israeli driver's license and the Iranian security officer smiled at me." Folk said he had mixed feelings over the question of whether...

Scientists are a step closer to constructing a digital version of the human visual system. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an algorithm that can be applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imagery to show a moving image a person is seeing. Neuroscientists have been using fMRI to study the human visual system for years, which involves measuring changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. This works fine for studying how we see static images, but it falls short when it comes to moving imagery. Individual neuronal activity occurs over a much faster time scale,...

Most of the junque at the thrift shop today was either terminal or overpriced. I'll let it sit until they get tired of looking at it!I found this little guy way back in the showcase, it works!Pony 135 Production: 1950-1954 Film format: 135, 24x35mm frames Shutter: Kodak Flash 200 1/25 - 1/200 (M sync only) Lens: Kodak Anaston 51mm f/4.5 - f/22 Can't lose for 3 bucks!

Ok, summary for those of you who don't want to or can't watch the video: eight-year New Mexico veteran cop Burt Lopez took a chick out to some private property for a quick triple-x throw-down. They thought they were only being watched by a chihuahua, but the whole thing was caught on tape and the rest, as they say in my country, is history. And for the rest of his life, Burt Lopez will be peeling stickers off his car that read "To Protect and Service". And all acts of cop sex shall henceforth be known as getting Burt Lopezed....

A Concord man giving away lemonade at a farmer's market was threatened with wiretapping charges last Saturday when he refused to stop filming a police officer and a fellow vendor. Garret Ean didn't have a permit to sell lemonade, which drew the ire of the president of the Concord Farmer's Market. Ean filmed the confrontation, and continued to film when a Concord cop showed up and threatened to arrest him for wiretapping. Photojournalist Carlos Miller (who we interviewed for the November issue of Reason about the war on photography) has the story: The man, whom Ean identified as Steve Blasdell,...

A congressman from Ohio had cops grab the cameras of constituents during a town hall meeting. Steve Chabot, a Republican, had cell phones and cameras confiscated in order to “prevent an embarrassing Youtube video from making the rounds,” according to Carlos Miller, who runs a blog documenting efforts by the state to stifle the First Amendment rights of photographers. Police said the cameras were taken “to protect the constituents.” A local television station, however, was allowed to videotape the meeting and the brazen move by Chabot and the cops.

In 2013, the European Space Agency will launch the Gaia spacecraft. Its billion-pixel imaging sensor will be among the largest digital cameras ever to exist, and over the course of its mission, it's estimated that Gaia will detect 15,000 new alien planets. Gaia's gigantic sensor is comprised of 106 separate CCD detectors, mosaiced together to form a monster camera over three feet wide. The resulting imaging system is so powerful that it will be able to precisely measure the width of a hair from over 600 miles away, and from here on Earth, it could spot a dime on the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has sued a former NASA astronaut to recover a camera used to explore the moon's surface during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission after seeing it slated for sale in a New York auction. The lawsuit, filed in Miami federal court on Wednesday, accuses Edgar Mitchell of illegally possessing the camera and attempting to sell it for profit. In March, NASA learned that the British auction house Bonhams was planning to sell the camera at an upcoming Space History Sale, according to the suit. The item was labeled "Movie Camera from the Lunar Surface"...

On my last thrift shop expedition I found this Pentax K1000. It is probably from about 1976.It was clean, the shutter worked fine but the meter was dead.When I got home and opened it up I found that a leaky battery had dissolved the lead from the battery box.The battery box contact is stainless steel and the wire had been crimped in place. It wasn't possible to open the crimp, it's too small to work with.There is a product made for repairing the defroster grids on car windows, it's a conductive paint product. I used it to repair the wire...

I've been putting this rig together for a while now, one piece at a time. It's all just about new in condition.The Minolta Maxxum XTSi was released in 1998, the 3200i flash is from a few years earlier.This is one of the toys I lusted after when it came out but couldn't afford, the body alone was 600 bucks in 1998.Minolta digital cameras appeared not long after this, rhen the line was bought by Sony. If I put this camera next to my Sony Alpha digital the XTSi, although smaller, shows a lot of the same design trends, likely from...

Tachyon GunCam™ – the entire collection bundle, or a la carte – consists of a variety of mounts that will secure the Tachyon OPS and OPS HD cameras to almost any handgun, rifle, or shotgun. Tachyon’s Picatinny Rail mount can easily be mounted to any gun that is equipped with a Picatinny rail. For guns without rails, such as rifles and shotguns, they offer attachable rails designed specifically for each type of gun. They even have a rail mount designed for scopes. The Tachyon OPS camera’s patented symmetrical mounting design allows them, in their mounts, to rotate four ways and...

Will Foreman has beaten the speed cameras. Five times and counting before three different judges, the Prince George’s County business owner has used a computer and a calculation to cast reasonable doubt on the reliability of the soulless traffic enforcers. After a judge threw out two of his tickets Wednesday, Mr. Foreman said he is confident he has exposed systemic inaccuracies in the systems that generate millions of dollars a year for town, city and county governments. He wasn’t the only one to employ the defense Wednesday. Two other men were found not guilty of speeding offenses before a Hyattsville...

I finished another project tonight. This Minolta X9 has been sitting in a project drawer until I got time to mess with it. A capacitor triggers the shutter and also regulates shutter speed. Blown capacitors are common on the X9s, Minolta seems to havw bought a big batch of bad ones.. The new capacitor shouldn't have that problem.It's a simple soldering job for young hands and young eyes, which I don't have! I finally figured out a workaround and got her done! The X9 is a later generation than my XG-M, lots more plastic but it has some nice features...

We have reaction just in to our newsroom... from a seattle man arrested after refusing to show his i-d to security agents at the airport ... and filming the incident. just about an hour ago... an Albuquerque jury cleared Phil Mocek of all charges. "It's been a long time - I feel good that we had police and tsa on record saying that you don't have to show id to fly and that you can use a camera at the airport." Phil Mocek faced charges including disorderly conduct, and concealing his identity... following the 2009 incident. the defense argued Mocek...

I am a parent of a 6th grader who wants to take photographs of kids playing indoor basketball and volleyball. I am looking for a camera which will take indoor shots with good white balance and freeze action for these sports. I do not want to go to a DSLR with humongous lens. I do not need professional quality, but also don't want blurry snapshots. I haven't found any point and shoot cameras which will do this; can anyone recommend something perhaps between that and a DSLR? I think that the shutter speed needs to be about 1/300th; what would...

Michael Allison, a 41-year-old backyard mechanic from southeastern Illinois, faces up to 75 years in prison for an act most people don’t realize is a crime: recording public officials. Allison lives in Bridgeport, Illinois, and often spends time at his mother’s house in Robinson, one county to the north. Both towns have abandoned property (or “eyesore”) ordinances prohibiting the parking of inoperable or unregistered vehicles on private property except in enclosed garages. These rules place a substantial burden on hobbyists like Allison; to obey the law he must either build a garage—which he says isn’t an option, given his property...

From the 1982 Sears catalog. A lot of this stuff is still around and still going strong, they really don't make them like they used to. I gave my 1983 Minolte XG-M a check last tonight, still in great shape, but I've worn out 3 digital cameras in the last 10 years. The XG-M was close to 300 bucks in 83 though, it would be expensive to make today

From the Examiner via Gateway Pundit, another TSA outrage from this weekend: the defendant, Sam Wolanyk says he was asked to pass through the 3-D x-ray machine. When Wolanyk refused, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel told him he would have to be patted down before he could pass through and board his airplane. Wolanyk said he knew what was coming and took off his pants and shirt, leaving him in Calvin Klein bike undergarments. “It was obvious that my underwear left nothing to the imagination,” he explained. “But that wasn’t enough for the TSA supervisor who was called to the...

BALTIMORE - A judge threw out criminal charges Monday against a Maryland man who videotaped his traffic stop by a plainclothes state trooper and posted the video on YouTube. Anthony J. Graber III had been indicted under Maryland's wiretap law, which requires the consent of both parties to record a private conversation. His video shows the trooper pulling his gun and telling Graber to get off his motorcycle before he identifies himself as a police officer. Harford County Circuit Judge Emory A. Plitt Jr. ruled that the wiretap law did not apply to a traffic stop because the conversation was...

After a rash of burglaries on his construction sites, a Nashville builder installed a wildlife camera in one his properties. He caught the thief and posted the pictures on Craigslist. With burglaries up in Nashville, people are looking for creative ways to stop them. Officials with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said home burglaries are up 15 percent year to date over 2009. An East Nashville builder may have the right idea. How about a deer camera? A deer camera is a hunting camera that is motion activated. The camera sits dormant until an animal passes by. The motion sensor...

Got an old Polaroid you want to shoot!This is a little too rich for my blood, LOL

Video Linky "In these newly preserved tests, made in 1922 at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, actress Mae Murray appears almost translucent, her flesh a pale white that is reminiscent of perfectly sculpted marble, enhanced with touches of color to her lips, eyes, and hair. She is joined by actress Hope Hampton modeling costumes from The Light in the Dark (1922), which contained the first commercial use of Two-Color Kodachrome in a feature film. Ziegfeld Follies actress Mary Eaton and an unidentified woman and child also appear. George Eastman House is the repository for many of...

I was in my favorite thrift store last week, found this sitting in a plastic bin with a 5 dollar sticker. It had a 28mm lens on it, I found a 35-70 f2.8-4 Sigma for another 18 bucks.I've been cleaning and testing, got it ready to roll again. The Minolta XG-M came out in the early 80s, it has auto exposure and manual focus. It all cleaned up to about 99%. I'll shoot it some and the rest of the time it will look great on my shelf.I can get negatives digitized to discs, it isn't very expensive.

Advice regarding the war against photography: So what should you do if you’re taking photos and a security guard or police officer approaches you and tells you to stop?

For those of you that have not seen it this is a great video of various types of bullets in super slow motion. The techno music is a bit much just turn off the sound and enjoy!

You’ve heard about the yellow screen splotches and the wonky antenna that requires you to hold the new iPhone just right. But now a new issue is coming to light: a faulty camera system that not only affects your ability to take pictures, it can foil your attempts to use FaceTime, the video chat feature that is the iPhone 4’s top talking point.

"Picture this: A hammer-wielding man pries a security camera from the side of a Modesto law office. It takes him a couple of minutes. And all the while, the camera is rolling, perfectly capturing his grimacing face as he works."

The Rolling Green hills of Sonora, California, no longer lure prospectors with the promise of gold, but for Matthew Hagerty the draw is just as powerful: They’re a secluded hideaway ideal for perfecting his military invention, called SmartSight. Ten years in the making, SmartSight is a gun-cam system that allows a soldier to see around corners and shoot targets without putting himself in the line of fire. It consists of a wireless video camera mounted to the rail of an M4 or .308 SOCOM carbine, a small computer worn on a military vest, and a thumbnail-size color head-up display affixed...

One of my genuine concerns with the direction of our society is the rise of ‘Gotcha Government’. By that, I mean a government that increasingly regulates the minutiae of our lives and imposes increasingly extreme punishments when we fail to precisely adhere to each meddlesome stricture. Get a parking ticket lately? It’s probably $50 or more (‘Gotcha!’). Try to buy some beers at Jewel on Saturday morning, or at the airport waiting for a flight? Get out your ID, Grandpa. No matter how old you look the proprietors fear government stings to catch them “in the act” (‘Gotcha!’). Don’t get...

Crowds cheered Saturday for the University of Washington Men's rowing team as they pulled far ahead of Syracuse and Oxford. But the little electric helicopter that was speeding low over the water, chasing the rowers, got almost as much attention from the tens of thousands gathered for the race with oohs and aahs trailing the whirring contraption. So what was it all about? Well apparently it is a somewhat secretive camera platform. The operator asked photographers gathered at the Conibear Shellhouse not to take closeups of the prototype helicopter that had just been center stage along the Montlake Cut. This...

People who ran a light recently at a South Seattle intersection known for red-light cameras have caught a break. The camera ...was stolen earlier this month and police are still searching for it. A police spokesman said they've identified a car they believe was involved in the theft, but the investigation is ongoing. The camera is owned by American Traffic Solutions, the vendor that contracts with the city. Under normal circumstances, the city pays $3,750 per month for the camera service. Between July 26, 2006 -- the first day a red-light camera ticket was issued in Seattle -- and May...

SAN FRANCISCO — Three Hayward cousins have pleaded guilty to shooting a man in the face with a BB gun because they thought he was gay, and were sentenced to six months in jail. Mohammad Habibzada, 24, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, and Sayed Bassam, 21, also will be on probation for three years and must complete as much as 400 hours of community service, including 40 hours of hate-crime sensitivity training, according to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. Police said the men went to San Francisco on Feb. 26 armed with an air rifle and video camera, targeting people who...

When I bought my Sony DSLR I hung on to my Panasonic FZ30 and my old Olympus c2100. Sometimes I want to travel light and there are situations where the smaller camera gets results with less effort. The rose is from the Panasonic, amaryllis fron the Sony.I'm on my second FZ30 I ran the first one until it stopped, lots of shots.

The cameras, which combine number plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver, are similar to those used in roadworks. The AA said it believed the new system could cover a network of streets as opposed to a straight line, and was “probably geared up to zones in residential areas.” The Home Office is testing the cameras at two sites, one in Southwark, London, and the other A374 between Antony and Torpoint in Cornwall. The `SpeedSpike’ system, which calculates average speed between any two points in the network, has been developed by PIPS Technology Ltd, an American-owned company with...

  Story by Staff Sgt. Christine Jones22nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Seconds can feel like hours . . . pulse racing, heart pounding, hands shaking uncontrollably, as all around lives are changed forever in the blink of an eye. But in that blink, time doesn't stop. Life is still happening around you and it is your mission to photograph every part of what is happening in that moment. Even after an explosion.As Combat Camera, that is the job. As a member of the 4th Combat Camera Squadron it's my mission.Images and video by 4th Combat Camera...

Smooth Camera Catches Obama Stumbling But Plays It Off Like Nothing Happened

A bird box resembling a traffic camera has put the brakes on speeding motorists racing through a village. Retired police officer Bill Angus placed the box on a pole at the edge of his property in order, he says, to offer a little help to the local birdlife.

Photo detective work could solve an enigma nearly nine decades old. But will it vindicate Hillary's historic climb or rewrite the record books? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine left their camp less than a kilometer from the summit of Mount Everest on a mission to be the first mountaineers to ascend the world's highest peak (8,850 meters). They were never to be heard from again. Whether either man reached the summit—almost three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic 1953 climb—has been an open question for nearly 86 years. Although more than half a...

Are Face-Detection Cameras Racist? By Adam Rose When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped. Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant who goes by the Web handle "jozjozjoz," thought it was...

Springfield, Mass. —A cameraman working on a ballot integrity initiative with Americans for Limited Government Foundation was wrapped up in a large Martha Coakley campaign sign by her supporters as he tried to video the campaign rally. According to Erich Heyssel, who was attempting to film a Coakley campaign event, “While filming at a Martha Coakley event I was approached by two men holding a 4×8 sign. They proceeded to hold the sign up in my line of sight, I tried to move, and was continuously blocked by these men and their sign.” Heyssel continued, “The situation escalated as they...