January 2014

Sony NEX-3N: Pushing APS-C mirrorless pricing to $350 with lens

Sony Alpha NEX-3N Mirrorless Digital Camera with 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 Lens (Black)As if point and shoot cameras weren’t having enough trouble, Sony is now selling a mirrorless camera with an APS-C sensor for $350 with a 16-50mm lens. The features a 16MP sensor and BIONZ image processor. You can jack the ISO up to 16000 (although with noise of course) and it shoots 60 fps video at 1080i.  

Gaining slideshow productivity with Proshow’s Remix feature

Especially with the popularity of mobile devices for viewing photos, slideshows are a perfect way to show off the best of your images – or simply to share the highlights of an event or trip. Creating quality slideshows can be a time-consuming process, so any tool that helps me make better shows, faster, is a good thing. Regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of Proshow’s offerings – Producer and Gold on the desktop, and Web for when you’re mobile or on a Mac. However, I’ve struggled a bit with how to leverage Proshow’s powerful Wizard tool while still having customizations like beginning and end captions. Fortunately, the clever Remix command has come to my rescue…

Sony DSC-QX100 ‘Smart Lens’: Product in search of a purpose

Sony DSC-QX100 Digital Camera Module for SmartphonesFeaturing an excellent 1” sensor and Zeiss f/1.8 zoom lens packed into a solidly-made black metal cylinder, the is a nice piece of hardware. Unfortunately awkward ergonomics and seriously deficient software leave it adrift as more of a curiosity or a niche product than any type of segment-defining breakthrough. Let’s look at what it does right, and wrong, and whether it still might be in your future…

Hands-on with Photoshop’s new Perspective Warp: For when you can’t fit a ladder in your pocket

Sometimes you just can’t be where you want to get the right angle on a shot. Or maybe you thought you were, but later you need to use the photo in a different way and want to move your perspective around. Photoshop has always offered some tools to do that, but today Adobe added a powerful new one – Perspective Warp. Using it you can shift the apparent point of view of an image around, even creating combinations of perspectives that could never have been captured in a single photo…

Hands-on with the retro Nikon Df DSLR: Great fun in an awkward package

Nikon Df DSLR Camera with 50mm f/1.8 Lens (Silver)I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with the DSLR for the last month. When I crouch behind the retro-styled body and snap off shots that will be captured on the excellent D4 sensor, I feel like it could be the ultimate street photography camera. It is quick enough (5.5 fps), has world-class image quality, and is about half the size and weight of a . Besides, I figure it looks cool, and I certainly get some odd glances as if to say “is that a film camera you’re using?” My euphoria lasts until I need to change a setting. That’s where the retro design gets in the way. Read on and I’ll help you decide if the needs to be in your camera bag or in your collection…

ThinkTank Retrospective 7: Finally a field-worthy modern camera bag that doesn't look like a camera bag

Think Tank Photo Retrospective 7 Shoulder Bag (Pinestone)Happy 2014, everyone. I wanted to start the year off right, so for our first review I’m covering a really slick camera bag I had the pleasure of using for nearly a month on my Southeast Asia photo tour. (If you’re in Las Vegas, you’ll see me with it at CES next week too). It is the new , although many of the points in the review apply equally well to its siblings like the , or the