News Archive - December 2001 Return to: Current News Archive Index Monday, December 31, 2001 Happy New Year! 15:53 EST - As our readers begin to take the jump into 2002, it is time for spending time with family, remembering the past and planning for the future... It always seems difficult to realise that another year has flown past so quickly, and 2001 has been no exception... In a year that brought such immense tragedy only a few months ago, we're sure many... (More) Friday, December 28, 2001 Nikon posts software updates! 23:30 EST - New versions of Nikon View, Scan and Capture programs support the latest operating system from Microsoft, and include other changes for Mac and Windows users... Nikon Inc. has posted updates for its Nikon View, Scan and Capture programs on its support website which add support for Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP. Downloadable immediately, there... (More) Minolta: Updates for DiMAGE 5, 7! 23:12 EST - Both cameras get new viewer utilities; DiMAGE 7 also gets new firmware update... Minolta USA has released updates for users of both its DiMAGE 5 and 7 digital cameras. For users of both cameras, there is now a new version 1.1.1 of the DiMAGE Image Viewer Utility, with improved RAW... (More) Olympus C-4040 Zoom - *good* images finally posted! 22:08 EST - Final images round out our full review of Olympus' 4 megapixel digicam... Yeesh, I won't even *say* how long this one's been lagging on the back burner! - The original prototype model of the C4040 I received for testing had a CCD defect in it, resulting in a vertical yellow... (More) Full review updated for Nikon Coolpix 5000! 10:02 EST - I've now completely updated my review of the Nikon Coolpix 5000, including all my usual performance and timing measurements. Overall, it's a very solid performer, albeit not the speed demon I'd been expecting based on Nikon's early billing. (It's actually about average, speed-wise, see the numbers in the review.) I did like it's operating controls a lot though, and liked its color handling very much... (More) PhotoPoint: Is no news bad news? 18:57 EST - Two weeks into the online photofinisher's outage, there's still no comment to customers or the media... Regular readers will be well aware of the problems for online photo-sharing and photofinishing website PhotoPoint.com, which vanished without warning on Friday, December 14th - along with the website of... (More) Thursday, December 27, 2001 X' marks the spot at Minolta! 03:17 EST - Teaser unveiled at the Minolta website suggests an addition to the DiMAGE digicam line is coming soon... Minolta Japan has added a brief macromedia flash presentation to both its Japanese and English-language websites suggesting that it will soon announce a new 'digital imaging device' for next year. Thus... (More) Digital Dream ships digicam 'keychain'! 00:02 EST - Dubbed the "l'Espion", new digicam offers tiny size and a price to match... European camera company Digital Dream Co., which sells its products in Germany, France, the Netherlands, England and Spain, is now shipping a digital camera 'keychain' which looks like it could win awards... (More) Monday, December 24, 2001 A Christmas Message from Dave 13:21 EST - A hearty "Merry Christmas" to all our readers, with a nod to the forces of political correctness thrown in for good measure... From everyone at the Imaging Resource, and most particularly from the Etchells family (for this really is very much a family business), our very best wishes for a truly joyous and blessed Christmas season!... (More) Saturday, December 22, 2001 Server move *largely* successful... 17:13 EST - We moved the main site to a temporary server today, it went *pretty* smoothly. In preparation for a software upgrade on our main server, we moved our main domain over to a temporary box for the next week or two. This move should be pretty transparent for most folks, other than the... (More) Friday, December 21, 2001 Nikon releases CP5000 firmware! 15:19 EST - As promised - and on schedule - new firmware update appears on the Nikon website to correct a potentially damaging glitch in the Coolpix 5000 digital camera... We told you a week ago that Nikon Inc. had discovered a problem in its newly released Coolpix 5000 digital camera which could potentially cause it to be rendered inoperable, and at that time noted that... (More) Thursday, December 20, 2001 Pixel Genius releases metadata tools! 16:12 EST - Understand the implications of EXIF metadata, then view data on your images in PhotoShop and import it into a FileMaker database... Pixel Genius LLC, a group of 8 people with extensive backgrounds in photography and software design, has released a new version of its MetaReader plugin for PhotoShop 6.0. Available for both Mac and Windows... (More) Cameraid 1.2b3 now available! (UPDATED) 13:52 EST - Latest beta of the Macintosh imaging tool has quite a few changes... Juri Munkki, author of Cameraid, a Macintosh program for acquiring, viewing, renaming and transforming your digital camera images, as well as creating index web pages and thumbnails, has been in touch... (More) Epson PhotoCenter offline! 11:51 EST - Problems at Pantellic looking worse all the time as major customer announces plans to bring its photo-sharing site in-house... IR readers Al Mark and 'AlohaBev' just dropped us a note to point out something which really does seem to hammer yet another nail into the coffin of PhotoPoint.com and parent company Pantellic Software... (More) Tuesday, December 18, 2001 PhotoPoint - the plot thickens! 23:25 EST - Has the online photofinisher reached the end of the road...? An email forwarded to us by IR reader 'Sandy' suggests that the outage at online photofinisher PhotoPoint might be more permanent than the many users who've emailed us since the site went down on Friday... (More) Qimage Pro 2002 released! 00:14 EST - Popular imaging utility gets a new number for a new year soon to come... Mike Chaney, author of the superb Qimage Pro and Profile Prism imaging utilities, has emailed to let us know of a new release of the former. Qimage Pro 2002 v1.1 is a fairly major new release, with a... (More) Monday, December 17, 2001 DCRP reviews Coolpix 5000! 23:58 EST - 5 megapixel Coolpix with its distinctive tilt/swivel LCD gets the 'Jeff Keller treatment'... Our friends at the Digital Camera Resource Page (which this weekend was mentioned in the Washington Post!) have now posted their review of Nikon's Coolpix 5000 digital camera. Jeff wraps up by concluding:... (More) More on the PhotoPoint situation! 13:28 EST - Site still down for a fourth day as reader emails continue to flood in... We told you yesterday about a major outage ongoing at online photofinisher PhotoPoint.com, and whilst we've yet to elicit any comment from our contacts at the company, some reader emails do shed more light... (More) "Official" test results (finally) posted for Canon S30! 11:00 EST - Dave offers his conclusions on Canon's pretty little digicam... Dave here: Yeesh, the flow of cameras has slowed down a little, but I don't seem to be getting any more dug out! (I have a number of back-end server-related projects I'm working on, as well as a sizeable... (More) Sunday, December 16, 2001 Troubles once more at PhotoPoint? 12:32 EST - Online photofinisher which spent days offline without warning last July has vanished once more... We've been absolutely flooded with emails over the last couple of days enquiring as to the status of online photofinisher PhotoPoint, which last July changed hands. Current owner Pantellic Software Inc.'s... (More) Friday, December 14, 2001 Nikon discovers Coolpix 5000 firmware bug! (UPDATED) 15:36 EST - Problem can render camera inoperable; new firmware on the way to correct it... We just received an email from the PR people at Nikon USA, regarding a problem with the Coolpix 5000 camera. In brief, the camera can be damaged under certain circumstances if it is switched on with the... (More) Club Photo promotes Album To Go! 2:25 EST - Online photofinisher Club Photo has distributed a press release promoting its Album To Go 2.0 image software for the Palm OS platform. Specifics are in the press release below, but in brief Handspring has trained sales teams for its Visor PDA products on the software as being "Free Palm OS Image-Handling Software Ideal for PalmOS". Album To Go can be downloaded free of charge from the Club Photo... (More) Steve's Digicams reviews Nikon Coolpix 5000! 14:23 EST - Nikon's first 5-megapixel Coolpix in Steve Sanders' capable hands... Nikon's Coolpix 5000 digital camera, the company's first 5 megapixel model, is also its first flagship model to feature a tilt/swivel LCD display rather than the swivelling body design which has been the... (More) Thursday, December 13, 2001 DPReview updates 1D with production details! 15:12 EST - Phil Askey offers his verdict on Canon's top-notch digital SLR after trying out a production model... We just recently updated our review of Canon's EOS-1D professional digital SLR after trying a full production-model camera, and our friends at the Digital Photography Review website have just done the... (More) Wednesday, December 12, 2001 Olympus announces 3D ScanTop! 02:34 EST - We showed you it at Comdex; now it is shipping on the US market... Olympus America Inc. has today officially announced its new 3D ScanTop device for creating three-dimensional object panoramas, a device we recently showed you in Part One of our Comdex Report. Now available... (More) SiPix announces portable color printer! 02:20 EST - PocketColor 100 runs on 4 AA batteries and prints directly from the SiPix SP-1300 digicam... Digital camera manufacturer SiPix Inc. will today announce the latest addition to its line of portable printers, in the form of the SiPix PocketColor 100. Featuring USB connectivity and direct-print capability... (More) Monday, December 10, 2001 iCorrect now available for home users! 22:24 EST - New version of the color-correction software from Pictographics targetted at home and enthusiast use can run stand-alone or as a plugin... Pictographics International Corp. has announced the release of a new program in its iCorrect color correction line. iCorrect 3.0 removes some of the higher-end functionality from the iCorrect 3.0 plugin... (More) Olympus drops digicam prices! 16:09 EST - Two models now $100 cheaper, two more get free 64MB SmartMedia cards - and all of them will look great under the Christmas tree with a 10% discount from State Street Direct. Hurry though, that offer ends today! Olympus America has dropped the price of its D-40 Zoom and C-4040 Zoom digital camera models by $100 effective immediately, according to the good folks over at IR advertiser State Street Direct. Previously... (More) Sunday, December 9, 2001 IR gets TechTV's seal of approval! 19:18 EST - Mention in Friday's 'The Screen Savers' gives us a significant increase in visitors... One of the nice things about running a site like ours is when our readers refer their friends, family and colleagues to us - it means that you've found our service helpful, and is one of the most important... (More) Full set of test photos uploaded for Nikon Coolpix 5000! 15:24 EST - I've now uploaded a complete set of my standard test shots for the Nikon Coolpix 5000, based on a full-production model (albeit one with a chunk of 4 bad pixels - Nikon's shipping me a new one to reshoot with...) I'll be completing all my standard tests over the next few days, should have the *full* review updated by the end of the week (lots of other stuff going on here, so I'm multiplexing rather heavily at the moment). Quickly though, the 5000 seems to be a very solid performer, but I don't think is quite the earth-shaking event some fans were expecting. It's quite fast from shot to shot, at about 2 seconds or so, for... (More) Finally! Canon EOS-1D review updated for full production model! 15:22 EST - Oh, my aching bandwidth! As if the load from the Nikon Coolpix 5000 production photo downloads wasn't enough (see the item below), I've just uploaded a full update of my Canon EOS-1D review, based on a full production model. Besides reshoots of all my standard test images, writer/photographer Gal Friday Stephanie Boozer shot a mini-gallery of random, non-standardized shots, so our readers could see more of what the camera does with a wider variety of subjects. Overall, I was quite pleased with the changes Canon made in the production model, relative to the last prototype I saw: My biggest complaint about both levels of prototype I tested previously was that... (More) Thursday, December 6, 2001 FLASH! First *Production Model* Nikon Coolpix 5000 photos online! 16:22 EST - Knowing how **eager** people are to see shots from a production-model Coolpix 5000, I've posted what I have shot so far on the site, via a thumbnail page. This is only a small subset of the test images, but should be interesting. The resolution is *very* high, this looks like an excellent lens. I have a lot more shooting to do, to experiment with white balance... (More) Wednesday, December 5, 2001 New version of Asiva Photo released! 11:39 EST - Macintosh imaging application now compatible with the latest operating system for that platform... Austin, Texas-based Shapiro Consulting Group Inc. has announced that it is now shipping a new version of its Asiva Photo application compatible with MacOS X. Asiva Photo 1.02 for OSX is compatible with... (More) Tuesday, December 4, 2001 Olympus launches new site design! 15:44 EST - Consumer section of the Olympus website designed to be "more informative and easier to use"... Camera manufacturer Olympus America Inc. has announced a revamp of the consumer section of its site in a press release. Aimed at improving ease of use and making the site more informative, the redesign... (More) PhotoMesa 1.3 final released! 15:34 EST - Beta for latest version of Java image browser ends, v1.3 now available... We told you back on November 12, 2001 that a new beta version of PhotoMesa, the Java image browser created by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, had been released, and today... (More) New filters from Fred Miranda! 01:38 EST - Latest additions for Photoshop 5+ users decrease Olympus E-10 / E-20 noise, and sharpen images... Professional photographer Fred Miranda, whose 'Highlight Recovery' action for PhotoShop we told you about last August, has recently released several new actions for users of Photoshop 5 and 6. The e-isoR... (More) Monday, December 3, 2001 Praktica announces two new digicams! 16:05 EST - Latest models from the German camera manufacturer are rebadged versions of cameras from Premier... Our friends at LetsGoDigital.nl have today posted news of two new digital camera models from German company Pentacon, which sells its products under the Praktica brandname. The Praktica DCZ 2.1 and DCZ... (More) iNova betas high ISO noise filter! 13:28 EST - Freely downloadable PhotoShop 6 action for Mac and Windows promises to reduce high ISO noise to more acceptable levels... Peter iNova, the man behind the highly recommended eBook 'Mastering Nikon Compact Digital Cameras', has been in touch to let us know that he's released a new ISO noise reduction filter for PhotoShop 6... (More) Nikon announces new appointment! 13:16 EST - Jerry Grossman promoted from VP of Internet Development to VP of Marketing for Consumer Digital Products and Compact Cameras... Nikon Inc. has announced that it has appointed a new Vice President of Marketing for Consumer Digital Products and Compact Cameras. Jerry Grossman, who joined Nikon in 1993 and most recently headed up... (More) Return to: Current News Archive Index