Sunday, October 16, 2005

This week in Digital Imaging

All told, this past week in the world of digital imaging and photography has been a slow one. This weeks' announcements centre around a number of service advisories from the likes of Olympus, Ricoh, Minolta, Canon, Fuji, Nikon and Sony. It seems like there have been some common problems with CCD's supplied by Sony between 2002 and 2004. For more info; visit DPReview, as they have done their usual excellent job of tracking these issues.

On another front Fujifilm have announced a new camera. The FinePix Z2 which uses a large LCD instead of a viewfinder, offers a wider aperture range of up to F8, longer shutter speeds of 4 seconds and 256-zone metering. Fujifilm have also reduced the price of their FinePix S3 Pro, Digital SLR.

Canon has updated its professional editing and RAW conversion software; Digital Photo Professional. Version 2.0.3 fixes a couple of issues such as missing color tones in images taken with the EOS-1D or the EOS-5D and also changes a setting name in Picture Styles from B&W to Monochrome.

Canon have also released firmware version 1.2.4 for their EOS-1D Mark II and version 1.1.4 for the EOS-1Ds Mark II. The new firmware includes a fix for file numbering errors during bulb exposure shooting and improves the reliability of operation with a few CompactFlash cards. A problem that could lead to horizontal line noise in the EOS-1Ds Mark II has also been addressed.
Breeze Systems have released v1.3 of BreezeBrowser Pro. New features include automatic lens distortion correction and support for RAW files from Canon's EOS 5D and EOS-1D Mark II N cameras.

DPReview have also released the latest iteration of their excellent dpreview resolution chart for testing your digital cameras.

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