Features:
• First ‘clickable’ touch screen smartphone purpose built for Vodafone - revolutionary tactile touch display
• Building on BlackBerry platform’s strong wireless heritage, the BlackBerry Storm is ideal for both consumers and business users featuring:

• Multi-media services including outstanding music and video experience:

http://www.vodafone.com/storm

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The new camera will sell for an estimated price of $2,700. It will have a full frame 21.1-megapixel sensor, DIGIC 4 imaging processor and an expanded ISO sensitivity range from ISO 50 to ISO 25,600. It will shoot at 3.9 frames per second (a disappointment to some who were hoping for a faster camera). Canon says that the new camera will be available at the end of November (just in time for Christmas grandma!).

It will also shoot 16:9 full 1080 HD video. The maximum length for videos on the new camera will be 4 GB per clip or 30 minutes, whichever comes first. The new camera will also have an input terminal for external microphones in addition to it’s built in sound.

Other features of the new camera include live view shooting and the ability to keep the shutter open in live view mode for quieter shooting (which Canon oddly says will be helpful to “law enforcement” in it’s press release). I can’t wait to see the follow up advertising campaign on this one, “Real cops shoot with Canon!”

It also includes a much needed dust cleaning system — dust on the full frame sensor was the biggest problem with the original 5D in my opinion.

Like it’s predecessor 5D model the new 5D will not have built in flash.

Apparently there is also a new grip (which looks massive) that will be available as an add on accessory for the 5D which will allow you to transmit images wirelessly to your computer or an FTP server. It’s said to include GPS which I would assume would mean that with this accessory you will likely be able to auto geotag your photos.

So will Thomas Hawk be buying one of these bad boys as soon as he can possibly get his hands on one in November? Hell yes! No doubt.

Even if you can’t or don’t want to spend $2,700 on a camera body though this is great news because the original 5D is sure to drop in price substantially and that is still one of the finest digital SLRs out to shoot with. If you want to pick up an old 5D cheap I’d be scouring eBay for a used one come November.

Along with the 5D Canon also announced an updated version of their popular 24mm f/1.4 lens. The new EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM lens. I have the current 24mm L lens and love it. I’d imagine the new one will be even better.

You can read the entire Canon press release on the new 5D here.

Additional coverage:

Techmeme
Engadget
Wired
I4U News
electronista
Gizmodo
1001 Noisy Cameras
Fred Miranda
Photo.net
Crave
Canon DSLR User Group on Flickr

Unfortunately no coverage on the new camera yet from the “We Say No to Video” Group on Flickr

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An interesting new feature is Picasa’s face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*. Get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the “Try it” button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I’m getting some results.)

Once faces are found, you can switch to the People tab and tag them with names. In my test photos I tagged Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin and others. I then uploaded more photos containing these persons. Google did not automatically tag them; what they do is find the rectangle within the photo containing a face, and then offer suggestions (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect), so you’ll end up semi-manually identifying the remaining faces. All in all a useful feature as this lets you group and find your photos by the persons in them, but it would become even more useful if Google were able to automatically assign matches.

Another addition to Picasa Web Albums is a game called “Where in the World?”. Here your job is to try to guess where a given snapshot was taken by clicking on a world map. You’ll then see the distance to the actual location and get more points the closer your pick. The game looks neat but it would probably be more fun if they’d more often show you pictures for which there’s a realistic chance to know the location (e.g. a picture of a famous monument versus a picture of a more general shore scenery). I wonder if Google has any intentions to get back some data for their AI to mine here, but considering the game already knows the location of each given picture, I’m not so sure.

[Thanks Hebbet!]

*Since some time, Google image results can also be restricted to show just faces.

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1. The compression is being done in software on the iPhone, where on Nokia phones there’s hardware support for that.

2. The camera isn’t close to as good, particularly in low light.

But, that said, lots of people only have iPhones, and don’t have Nokia phones, so this will let a lot of people do streaming video from their cell phones that couldn’t do it before.

One thing: if you do this, it’ll probably really drain your batteries (my Nokias only last about 40 minutes when I do streaming video) so beware of that if you try to stream something long.

UPDATE: One big thing is you need to jailbreak your iPhone before you can load this app. That’s very unfortunate because most people will not jailbreak their phones.

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1. Selective area processing of files. When using Adobe’s Camera RAW to process in the past, an image was an all or none, take it or leave it, proposition. Yes, you could increase the exposure and contrast on a shot, but you had to increase the exposure and contrast for *the entire* shot. Frequently when processing photos you want more control than that. For example, sometimes you might have a shot perfectly exposed except for the eyes in a portrait which are too dark. With Lightroom 2.0 you can now control all of the basic RAW tools (exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpening and custom toning) using brushes or masks to highlight specific areas of a photo.

2. Vignette Cropped Photos. I’m a vignette junkie. Vignette is the area around the edge of your photos that is sometimes dark, sometimes light. A lot of vignetting occurs naturally in my Canon 5D — especially with the large sensor. Sometimes I like to process a photo perfectly and take this vignette out of my photograph. Other times though I like to add a varying amount of vignetting in or even reverse it out creating a more over exposed edge to my photograph. In the past Adobe Camera RAW could control vignette, but only for the image loaded. If you wanted to crop that image there was no way to control vignette for that specific crop. Now with Lightroom 2.0 you can apply a crop to an image and then adjust your vignetting control after the fact on the new crop.

There is also a new “roundness” slider for vignetting control which enables the ability to give your photos a more rough vignette look vs. a more even or controlled vignette alignment.

3. Keyword recommendations. One of the ways to make your photos more discoverable on sites like Flickr and Zooomr is to add tags or keywords to your photos. You might tag a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge for instance “Golden Gate Bridge” and “bridge” and “San Francisco” and “night” and “California” etc. But frequently there are tags that you don’t immediately think of. For instance, if you tag a photo of your dog “dog,” maybe the tag “black labrador” would be another good tag. And maybe another one might just be “black lab.” With Lightroom 2.0 Lightroom analyzes other tags that you have used with your photos to offer up suggested or recommended tags that you might use. Especially if you hope to offer your photos for sale through stock photography agencies, these descriptive keywords are very important meta data. By learning about your past tags, Lightroom is smarter and suggests tags that you might want to add to your photos as you tag and process them.

4. Better Photo Sharpening Tools. One of the nice things in Lightroom 2.0 is that you have much better tools for sharpening your photos than you did previously. I especially like the way that as you sharpen your photos (or parts of your photos) you can see a fine detail view of the sharpening work. This helps ensure that you don’t overdo your sharpening for high resolution views.

5. Healing Brush tools. One of the things that I hated about my old processing system was that I could not use a healing brush inside of Adobe Camera RAW. A healing brush is used to take out little imperfections in a photo. Large sensor digital cameras are notorious for getting dust spots on their sensors. You see these spots most visibly in your photographers when you are shooting at small (high number) aperture settings. These annoying little dust spots have ruined many a great photo. In the past I would need to manually bring these photos into Photoshop to use the healing brush to clean up these spots. Now this can be done within Lightroom itself. The healing brush approximates an area of the photo immediately near the spot that you’d like to heal and blends that area into the spot. This also works great when you have that perfect photograph of your kid with just a dab of peanut butter on his face.

6. Enhanced Printing Tools. I love how Lightroom 2.0 handles printing your photos. With Lightroom 2.0 you can easily arrange multiple photos on a page with preset sizes. You can adjust the layout of the page into multiple columns or custom sizes for different photos. By providing enhanced layout options for printing, Lightroom allows you to use your printable photo paper space more intelligently and makes printing your photos at home easier than ever. I’ve got some large printing projects that I’m working on for a couple of collage pieces I’ve been meaning to do for a while and this tool will be very helpful when it comes time to print out a bunch of custom sized prints.

7. Support for custom camera color profiles and improved color photo processing from Adobe. One of the complaints that people have made about Adobe color processing in the past has to do with how it handles some colors. Specifically reds in photographs processed on Adobe’s software have sometimes lacked the big vibrancy that reds should have coming out a tad more orangish in some cases than reds. With Lightroom 2.0 Adobe has improved both their own color processing technology, but they have also added support for specific camera profiles. When you look at a photo on your camera’s LCD you are actually looking at a JPG interpretation of the photo that you just took. Frequently people will tell me that the colors that they see on their camera LCD are different than what they get when they take the photo home and try to process it.

With Lightroom 2.0 you can use either Adobe’s new and improved color profiling system (which does a much better job at interpreting vivid reds) or you can tell Adobe to bypass their own color profiling system and use the actual color profiling system that is inside your camera.

8. Smart Collections. Smart collections (like SmartSets on Zooomr and the SmartSetr application for Flickr) make sense. Frequently you will find yourself wanting to organize batches of your photos for various reasons. Lets say you want to see all photos of your daughter taken this year, or all photos of your daughter tagged with birthday, or a photo of all of your neon photographs taken in 2008. Whatever the case may be, you can build Smart Collections with Lightroom 2.0 to easily analyze and arrange your photos and allow you to better find and sort your work.

9. Smarter cropping and angling tools that show you a rotated view as you work. In the previous version of Bridge/Camera RAW that I used to process my photos, when you cropped an image and then rotated the crop you had to kind of turn your head sideways to visualize what you get. Now Lightroom 2.0 rotates the underlying image showing you a straightened version of what your new rotated and cropped photo will look like directly as you do this work.

10. Metadata SDK for custom metadata. The Metadata SDK that is being released with Lightroom is interesting. I’m not sure on any actual application for the SDK today but it is promising that by opening up this SDK to developers that there may be fantastic ways that we can use the metadata on our photographs in the future.

One of the things personally that I’d like to see develop over time would be a way that the social metadata that is added to your photographs can be reapplied to local copies. One of the nice things about online photo communities is that they encourage engagement with your photos. Many people on Flickr, for instance, have added additional tags and keywords to my photos online. At present there is no easy way to apply these added social tags to my existing photos. I’m hopeful that with Adobe’s new Metadata SDK that we might see some of these types of applications develop in the future.

I also think one of the first metadata enhancements that this SDK might make available would be some sort of geotagging add on.

There are lots of other enhancements to Lightroom 2.0 that I did not mention in this article. Probably the two biggest are that Lightroom can now support dual monitors and it can run natively in 64 bit on both Macs and PCs for added performance.

Adobe Lightroom retails for $299. Existing Lightroom users can upgrade for $99. You can download a free 30 day trial version of Lightroom 2.0 here.

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For instance, I searched for the word “friendship” and got a result titled “Obama Anniversary of Israeli Independence”. Moving the time bar line towards one of the yellow markers, I’m hearing Obama say, “… let us renew the friendship between our nations …”. Another search for “bubble sort” returns a quip from a Q&A Obama held at the Google headquarters, where Obama is answering a programming question.

While the hits returned look precisely correct, hovering over the yellow marker pops up a snippet which shows Google doesn’t get it completely right… like when they transcribe a piece as “… to recognize Israel and are fighting for friendship wolf they …”. Google admits as much in their blog post on this service, saying snippets “may not be 100% accurate”. They add that speech recognition “is a difficult problem that hasn’t yet been completely solved”.

This gadget shows that using speech-to-text technology, even when it’s very limited in scope right now, is a highly useful feature for video search. If and when Google ever rolls this out for all video content they indexed (or perhaps just for their YouTube content for starters), it could become an extremely interesting research tool. Besides just aiding search, extracting textual content from videos could also be used by Google to …:

Any of these features could have two effects: first, it could make Google Video or YouTube a more attractive place to search for and watch videos, and second, if a feature is only rolled out for YouTube (and if a content creator would like to have this feature for their video) it could make YouTube a more attractive place to upload videos.

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From the company… “This latest version is specifically designed to rapidly process a large volume of the recent generation of high-resolution satellite imagery (QuickBird and IKONOS) and the future GeoEye-1 and WorldView-2 imagery.”

Anyone with QuickBird and IKONOS imagery in GeoTIFF format directly from DigitalGlobe and GeoEye data vendors is invited to evaluate the whole range of image pan-sharpening methods and enhancement options included in the software.

With this utility program users now are able to conveniently process full scenes of QuickBird and IKONOS imagery to explore superior fused results. A fully-functional trial version is available at:

http://www.geosage.com/highview/features.html see also more details here.

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Some notes from Job’s speech… Thinner at the edges, full plastic back, solid metal buttons, 3.5 inch display, camera, flucsh headphone jacks (applaus) improved audio (dramatically). Jobs noted in a demo that the device will open a large attachement in seconds, comparable to Wi-Fi speeds! 5Hours of talk time on the battery, 5-6 hrs of browsing, 7 hrs or video watch time, 24 hrs of audio (clap!)… great performance and great battery life. New.. GPS (huge applause)… location services is going to be a big deal.. it’s going to explode. Locastion data from cell towers, WiFi, and from GPS.

Sounds cool but teh real selling point of this bad boy will be the $199 price tag (with 2 year contract) and for $100 more you get 16 GB and it comes in white too! - I’m not sure if the device will be handled by more carriers yet (like perhaps T-Mobile, but I doubt it) See http://www.apple.com/iphone/

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