HP: DesignJet printers with auto color management

18:58 EDT - In the middle of a single press release from Hewlett Packard Co. summarising the company's digital camera announcements at the Photokina tradeshow, the standout product for us has to be four new (and closely related) Designjet series large-format printers.

The HP Designjet Z2100 and Z3100 - each model available in either 24" or 44" widths - are the first large-format printers to include an embedded spectrophotometer. Based on X-Rite Eye-One color technology and using an HP Color Center interface, this allows users to quickly create color profiles - and also allows the printer to calibrate itself to perfection. In essence, this will allow you... (More)

Canon: New photo viewers

06:43 EDT - Canon Inc. has today announced two new handheld multimedia storage viewer devices that are closely related, with the exception of storage capacity.

The Canon Media Storage M30 and M80 are designed to offer a user interface that will be familiar to users of Canon's digital cameras, and both feature a 3.7" TFT LCD display capable of displaying 262,000 colors with 160 degree viewing angle, 300cd/m2 brightness and 250:1 contrast ratio. The only differences between the units relates to the choice of hard disk. The Canon Media Storage M80 includes... (More)

We'll have video later of Fujifilm's Andy LaGuardia explaining how the new S5 Pro and F313fd tap into the company's unique face recognition software, developed for its photo processing systems. And we took a peek at Samsung's GX-10 dSLR, with its passive, active and dust mapping approaches to dust removal, a feature that seems to be increasingly common. Panasonic discussed its new L1 dSLR based on... (More)

Sigma announces SD14 digital SLR

02:00 EDT - Sigma Corp. has today announced a replacement for its now-discontinued SD10 digital SLR, with a new variant of Foveon's much-discussed X3 image sensor and plenty of other changes.

When it was announced in February 2002, the Foveon X3 sensor was seen by many as the future of digital photography because (unlike almost every camera on the market which uses a color filter array), the X3 sensors measure color information for all three colors at every pixel location. Sigma's SD9, announced alongside Foveon's X3, was the launch camera for the technology, and was followed by its successor... (More)

Sigma: Foveon X3-based compact

02:00 EDT - In what may well be one of the bigger surprises of the Photokina show, Japanese company Sigma Corp.has unveiled a new compact digital camera based on the same Foveon X3 CMOS image sensor that's used in its SD14 digital SLR.

Details on specifications are few so far, but between the press release and photos of the DP1, and the specifications for the SD14 that shares the same imager, a number of facts can be gleaned. The DP1 will have a 4.69 effective megapixel resolution from 14.1 million photodiodes arranged in three layers, as per Foveon's by-now famous layout which records full color information at every pixel location.... (More)

Pasini reports: Monday at Photokina

00:31 EDT - We've just posted our first live report from Photokina 2006, courtesy of roving reporter Mike Pasini.

Mike, along with Imaging Resource Senior Editor Shawn Barnett, doubtless scarcely had a chance to catch their breath straight off the plane, before getting down to chasing down all the stories you'll want to hear about. In his first report Mike takes a look at Apple's first ever Photokina presence, amongst other things. Hop on over and take a look now! (More)