Sony DSC-QX10 and DSC-QX100 smartphone lens-cameras leak out alongside the upcoming Honami i1

Now this is innovation, folks. Sony's reportedly gearing up to announce a pair of "lens cameras" that attach to your existing smartphone or tablet.The lens-cameras will attach to a smartphone, therefore transforming it into a high-end point and shoot snapper via a wireless connection. The handset’s display will work as a viewfinder (a dedicated app will more than likely be involved in the process). The unique devices are said to feature a sensor, processor, zoom lens, WiFi connectivity and an SD card slot, but no display or other typical controls (beyond a zoom toggle and perhaps a shutter release)which each feature built-in sensors (presumably Exmor RS CMOS BSI setups), BIONZ image processors,and NFC (presumably Bluetooth too?) and a microSD slot.. You'll use your handset or slate to control the lens, adjust framing and transmit images. According to SonyAlphaRumors, the electronics giant is expected to release two models: the DSC-QX10 (pictured above) and the DSC-QX100. The latter will ship with the same 1-inch sensor used with theRX100 Mark II, while the other lens will include a larger 10x focal range and a 1/2.3-inch 18-megapixel CMOS sensor this apparently uses a 1-inch sensor in a setup which is highly praised by photography aficionados and also appears inside the Nikon 1.. The idea is that you attach them to your smartphone magnetically and link up via the NFC/Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, using the phone display and on-screen camera controls.It’s also been suggested that both models may have built in optical image stabilisation (OIS). According to the report the lens-cameras will be more widely compatible than you might think, working with both a range of Android handsets and Apple's iPhone, rather than just Sony devices. There's no word on pricing or availability, but with Sony's IFA press conference right around the corner, we'll likely get the full scoop (and hopefully some hands-on time) come September 4th.While it is nice to see innovation from Sony, this is just the first round of these devices. If there’s a future in this market, I would expect to see something much different and more compact over the next couple generations.

Apple iPhone 5S leaked parts point to a dual LED flash

Apple is tipped to unveil its next-generation iPhone and the much anticipated low-budget iPhone, on September 10. The two smartphones are reportedly going to be called iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, respectively, and have already stared in numerous leaks. The latest rumors, includes a few photos of the spare parts that are allegedly destined for the iPhone 5S and confirm the presence of a dual LED flash.

The leaked images show us the elongated hole for the flash that are widely used to house dual LED flash. The port is very small for the usual Xenon flash, so if the leaked images are to be trusted, the iPhone 5S will indeed come out with a dual LED flash.The iPhone 5S has been rumored to have an improved camera sensor with a Dual LED flash for better low-light performance for some time now. Last week, we even saw that purported camera sensor for the device, that had a separate flash module, indicating a Dual LED flash was probable.The iPhone 5S has been rumored to have a 12MP camera with an improved lens, along with a Dual LED flash and morePrevious images showed one white LED and one red/orange. It could just be for advanced auto white balance and color correction. If so, it would certainly fit in with previous improvements to Apple’s camera. While other manufacturers are all trying to make images bigger, and upping the ISO levels, Apple’s continuous aim is to just make images better. Something it’s achieved with the iPhone every year since its inception.

Apart from the addition of the dual LED flash, it looks like the design of the upcoming Apple iPhone 5S will remain identical to the previous edition.

However, Apple is expected to make some under-the-hood changes and bring some more firepower to its smartphone. But until September comes we’ll have to live on such leaks and play the guessing game about what exactly is the new iPhone going to be all about.

Canon testing EOS-1D X successor with alleged 75MP+ Pro DSLR

A pre-production high resolution Canon DSLR is currently undergoing field testing. The camera is a pro-sized body like the 1D X. The resolution of the sensor is greater than 75MP. Wow! The rear LCD is shockingly high resolution. So is the frame rate, which is possibly greater than the 1D X; however, I don’t know if that’s at full resolution or not. Presumably, the camera has a new processor (or processors) inside to handle the increased resolution and the higher frame rates. What’s even more interesting is that the source believes that there might be an announcement for this camera prior to the end of 2013; however, availability may not be until next year. Of course, Canon has tested cameras and technologies before that never made it to the market. And, this seems like such a massive jump in resolution from what is currently on the market. However, Nikon jumped from the 12MP D700 to the 36MP D800. Tripling Canon’s top cameras at 20+MP resolutions puts us in the ball park of 75MP. Additionally, Canon has had a 50MP APS-H sensor since at least 2007, and a 120MP APS-H sensor since 2010. A 75MP or higher resolution full frame sensor is not out of the realm of possibility – particularly when we are seeing smartphone cameras at 41MP.

The Canon EOS 1S has been in the rumor mill for some time as a high resolution pro DSLR, albeit prior rumored specs of 47MP-ish. Just because Canon is testing cameras with 75MP+ sensors doesn’t mean that a 47MP sensor won’t end up in the final model. Likewise, that Canon EOS 3D has been floating around for several years as a rumored high resolution model. Recently, those rumors were revived with possible sightings and claimed specs in the 46MP range. While I believe that this pre-production camera is in the wild, I’m not ready to proclaim that Canon is going to announce a 75MP+ DSLR this year. I just have a hard time believing Canon will make such a big jump. Yes, you read that right – Canon is supposedly testing out a new DSLR camera which will have a monstrous sensor with over 75 million pixels. It will retain the look and build quality of the EOS-1D X, but with a ultra high-resolution rear screen to go alongside the unheard-of sensor. 

Nokia Lumia 1020 to be unveiled at Nokia Zoom in August

The Nokia EOS or Nokia Lumia 1020 has been doing the rounds in the rumorland for a while now and the upcoming Lumia smartphone is expected to be announced at the "Nokia Zoom" event on July 11.The pricing details of the Nokia Lumia 1020 have been revealed ahead of its official release, courtesy of a leaked inventory of a Microsoft Store. According to the document, the Nokia EOS will be called as Lumia 1020 as initially rumoured, and not Lumia 909 as suggested by evleaks. Furthermore, the Nokia Lumia 1020 is said to retail for $602 SIM-free and the smartphone will be available in Yellow, Black and White colour options. The shipments of Nokia Lumia 1020 will hit the stores on July 22 and the smartphone is expected to go on sale in the first week of August. We will be bringing all the latest news from the "Nokia Zoom" event as and when it happens. Nokia is holding a big event in New York City on July 11, which it calls "Zoom Reinvented." We have already seen major leaks about a spectacularly powerful Nokia EOS camera phone with a 41-MP camera, in many ways it is more of a camera with a phone attached. The device is likely to be a smartphone flagship for Nokia; it is though to be called the Nokia Lumia 1020. It is one of the newly invented ‘ phamera ‘(Just like the Samsung Galaxy S IV Zoom) It turns out that a lot of invites have been sent out to international media, not to mention high-level Nokia employees are teasing the EOS on Twitter, lending credence to the rumours that next month's event will likely feature a Lumia device with much greater imaging capabilities than anything else in Nokia's Windows Phone line up." As for the phone specs itself, we don't have a ton of information beyond the camera features that have been heavily touted: "While Nokia uses the PureView brand on a number of existing devices, such as the Lumia 920, 925, and 928, we have yet to see a Windows Phone with the same calibre camera that was on the original 808 PureView Symbian smartphone. That phone had a massive 41-megapixel sensor with unique technology that let users zoom in on an image with no loss of quality, and featured superb low-light capabilities." The party bears a new tagline too, “Zoom. Reinvented, after dark.” This is all in preparation for the Nokia Lumia 1020 / EOS launch. The phone will pack a 41MP sensor (41 million reasons) and that will enable zoom akin to the one the Nokia 808 PureView had, that was PureView phase 1. Then the Lumia 920 came with a smaller sensor, but optical image stabilization and focus on low-light performance, which was PureView phase 2. With all those hints of zoom and low-light imaging, are we about to see PureView phase 3 that combines the two previous technologies? Given the recent barrage of EOS leaks, we naturally have to wonder if an 808 PureView-like Lumia device will be the star of the show, though it could be something as simple as the Lumia 925. So far there is a lot of mystery regarding whether the Nokia EOS will sport a metallic body or a polycarbonate one. The recent leaks point to a metallic body. However, the earlier leaks had suggested that Nokia EOS will come with a polycarbonate body much like the other smartphones in the Nokia Lumia range. Earlier rumours have suggested that Nokia EOS will pack in OLED display, which has a screen resolution of 768X1280 pixels. The smartphone is also expected to have 32GB of internal storage. Some purported images indicate that the Nokia EOS will come with a dedicated camera button that will be situated on the right panel. There have also been news reports suggesting that Nokia EOS will feature a new "Nokia Pro Camera" app that has a refreshed interface. This app will be in addition to the regular camera app. The refreshed camera interface will also offer manual focus option.

Samsung launches another camera, this one with 20MP and 24x zoom

While its mostly been busy blurring the lines between smartphone and cameralately, Samsung's still churning out regular shooters as well. Case in point: it just launched the WB110, a 20-megapixel successor to last year's 16-megapixel model packing the same 26x optical zoom. That's far from superzooms like Nikon's 42x P520, but Samsung's model does go a touch wider with a 35mm equivalent range of 22.3mm to 580mm. Other highlights include 720p AVC/H.264 video, 3,200 max ISO, Smart Auto mode to aid in tricky still and movie exposures, a pop-up flash and a 3-inch HVGA (480 x 360) display. None of those specs will set the world on fire, so hopefully the price won't burn your wallet once Samsung gets around to announcing it. There's no date for availability either, but the rest of the story's in the PR after the break. powered ones in recent memory like the Samsung Galaxy NX, not to mention having made some forays into the DSLR world as well, but there is still room for compact digital cameras, or at least those that are not too professional looking, so much so that a soccer mom could also snap photos of her happy family for all posterity without batting an eyelid. The latest digital camera to roll off Samsung’s production lines would be the Samsung WB110, which happens to be a 20-megapixel shooter which will continue from where last year’s 16-megapixel model left off, although the Samsung WB110 would still come with the very same 26x optical zoom.:  Smart Auto, in still image modes, analyses key elements in photographers' compositions and automatically adjusts photo and movie settings to help users capture the best shot possible.Live Panorama lets you photograph seemingly endlessly panoramic shots and preview them live on the screen by holding the shutter-button and sweeping across the scene.

Sharpest ever image of the sun shot with an ultra complex camera(microscope)

Scientists have captured the sharpest ever images of the Sun's outer atmosphere, using an innovative new camera on-board a sounding rocket. An international team of scientists discovered fast-track 'highways' and intriguing 'sparkles' that may help answer a long-standing solar mystery.Researchers used a sounding rocket to launch the NASA High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) which obtained images of the solar atmosphere (the solar corona) five times sharper than anything seen before and acquired data at a rate of about one image every five seconds.The new camera observed the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light and focused on a large, magnetically-active sunspot region. Images from Hi-C reveal a number of new features in the corona, including 'blobs' of gas ricocheting along 'highways' and bright dots that switch on and off rapidly which the group call 'sparkles'.In the new images, small clumps of electrified gas (plasma) at a temperature of about one million degrees Celsius are seen racing along highways shaped by the Sun's magnetic field, researchers said.These blobs travel at around 80 km per second - the equivalent of 235 times the speed of sound on Earth. The highways are 450 km across. The flows of material are inside a so-called solar filament, a region of dense plasma that can erupt outwards from the Sun. These eruptions, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs),carry billions of tonnes of plasma into space. If a CME travels in the right direction it can interact with Earth, disturbing the terrestrial magnetic field in a 'space weather' event that can have a range of destructive consequences from damaging satellite electronics to overloading power grids.The discovery and nature of the solar highways allows scientists to better understand the driving force for these eruptions and help predict with greater accuracy when CMEs might take place. Another new set of images could help explain why, with a temperature of two million degrees, the corona is around 400 times hotter than the solar surface. Hi-C images reveal dynamic bright dots which switch on and off at high speed.These 'sparkles' typically last around 25 seconds, are about 680 km across and release at least 1024 Joules of energy in each event. The sparkles are thus a clear signal that enormous amounts of energy are being added into the corona and may then be released violently to heat the plasma."The camera is effectively a microscope that lets us view small scale events on the Sun in unprecedented detail. For the first time we can unpick the detailed nature of the solar corona, helping us to predict when outbursts from this region might head towards the Earth," said Robert Walsh Director of Research at University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). The findings will be presented at the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.The findings will be presented at the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.

Smell , the new whiff of the Camera !

With the one-click simplicity of Flickr and Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, recording our memories has never been easier. But with such ease has come overload. More than seven billion photos are added to Facebook every month, while 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. We are drowning in a sea of hastily snapped images, our entire existence flattened into a scrolling feed of frozen frames."We take pictures of everything and load it all online, to the point where it is all infinitely replicable and disposable," says designer Amy Radcliffe, whose MA project at Central Saint Martin’s set out to bring a more meaningful sensory dimension to storing our favourite memories. What if you could recapture the aroma of that freshly baked birthday cake or the scent of the wild flowers in that Alpine meadow on your last holiday? Or maybe you would choose to recall the musky pong of your first pet, or the comforting whiff of that shampoo your girlfriend used to use? The Madeleine – named after Marcel Proust's story of involuntary memory prompted by biting into a cake – is Radcliffe's design for a new kind of camera that records not images, but smells. "Sense of smell has a direct link to emotional memory," she says. "It is the sense we react to most instinctively and the furthest away from being stored or replicated digitally."Her project, developed in the college's Textile Futures department, draws on "headspace capture" techniques pioneered in the 1970s by Swiss fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser, for obtaining the composition of rare botanical scents for the perfume industry. Radcliffe's "scentography" camera has a retro-futuristic form, referencing both this 70s heritage and our growing nostalgia in photography – embodied by clunky Lomo cameras and wistful Instagram filters. With its faceted ceramic casing, glass funnel and plastic tubes, it also looks like a mysterious piece of scientific apparatus. So how does it work to make it work, you place the funnel over the object or environment you wish to capture, then a pump sucks the air across an odour trap made of Tenax – a porous polymer resin which adsorbs the volatile particles that make up the smell. It can take anything from a few minutes to capture the scent of fresh strawberries, to around 24 hours to store the more subtle aroma of an atmosphere. "It's like a huge electric nose. It processes the particles and produces a graph-like formula that makes up the smell. From this formula you can artificially recreate the precise odour," she said. Users can take their exposed odour traps to the local lab in the same way they would take a 35mm film to be processed - the product being not photos, but delicate vials of the scent, along with a bronze disk of the specific formula, bringing a precious, ritualistic quality to the process. With the addition of smell and sound (like in the Samsung Galaxy S IV) is there a revolutionary change to photography? The memories will now be re-lived!