Micron, a leading CMOS image sensor manufacturer, launched a separate CMOS image sensor division called Aptina. Unlike big names such as Canon, Nikon, Sony etc, Micron (now Aptina) is not well known to many digital photographers due mainly to their mostly low-end (P&S and camera phone) and specialty image sensor product portfolio, even through they have the number one CMOS image sensor market share. If you don’t know already, Micron supplied the camera chip in Apple’s popular iPhone.
Things may be different soon as Micron start to crack open the high end market. I would not be surprised to see an Aptina image sensor in Nikon DSLR cameras in the future.
Posted in
News on March 5th, 2008.
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If you tried to access DPTnT from your mobile devices (photo or PDA), it was probably not a pleasant experience due to the site layout. Now it is the time to try again. We have implemented two different methods for your mobile access needs.
- The first one is transparent to users. Simply visit us from your mobile device and our site will automatically detect it and deliver a specially formatted content optimized for mobile access.
- The second one will require you to bookmark a special URL on your mobile device. You can click here, or enter the following as a bookmark:
http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/dptnt
The first one is a fully featured mobile version of DPTnT that includes the support of comments. The second is simply a Google feed reader optimized for mobile devices. Please let us know if they work and which one works better for you.
Posted in
Site Update on January 26th, 2008.
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DPTnT visitors in past few hours might have experienced page rendering problems. I would like to express our sincere apology to all who have been affected. Our site update didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Some CSS and page template issues caused the page rendering problems. Currently, all problems appear to have been fixed.
The updates will enable us to provide better contents that were not possible with the old layout due to size limit. Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.
Thank you for your continued support.
- DPTnT
Posted in
Site Update on December 15th, 2007.
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Not long ago, Microsoft submitted its HD Photo technology (tentatively titled “JPEG XR”) to the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) for considering as an industry standard. Now, it has been approved! Although I was a little skeptical about Microsoft’s motive, they seem to be committed to make the HD Photo as an open format. The highlights of the new format are:
- Pixel formats at 8, 16, or 32 bits per channel including high dynamic range (HDR) support using fixed or floating point representations.
- Progressive decoding architecture allows efficient decoding of an image at any resolution, quality, or any selected region by processing only a portion of the entire compressed file.
- Support lossless and very efficient lossy compression up to twice as efficient as the original JPEG format.
Posted in
Digital photography,
News on November 3rd, 2007.
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According to the report on news.com, more FX (Nikon’s marketing term for full frame) products are definitely coming but no details on the specifications or when. In the report, Steve Heiner, senior technical manager of Nikon SLR marketing, said Nikon is committed to bringing out more FX cameras, and more technologies at the highest end (Nikon D3) will trickle down to the lower end, which appears to mean Nikon will offer a lower-end full-frame model. Some rumors put that in second half of 2008. It is highly likely that it will compete against Canon’s successor to the 5D.
It will also be interesting to know who will make the sensor for Nikon. As Sony gets deeper into the red hot DSLR market, it may no longer be willing to supply sensors to Nikon.
Posted in
News on October 11th, 2007.
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Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999.
This New York Times story is quite telling. You can still get film rolls developed at places like Wal-mart or Walgreens, but many smaller shops are shutting down their film processing business. I still have one roll left in my Minolta X-700 that I need to finish. I have less and less incentive to do so since I am enjoying my digital photography so much. 
Posted in
News on October 9th, 2007.
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News, tips and tricks from the Picasa team at Google…
The all-new official Google Photos Blog was introduced by Jason Cook, a product marketing manager of Google Inc, on October 2, 2007.
We’ll be using this space to post feature updates, photography tips, and (of course) some of our favorite photo albums, all of which will keep you current with the latest developments from the Picasa team.
He also hinted some new photo related products coming from Google but offered no details. Well, Google may be the king of search engine, Yahoo’s flickr is the best photo sharing site today. Picasa Web Albums just isn’t as addictive or attractive as flickr.
Posted in
News,
Photography blogs on October 4th, 2007.
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DailyAwards.com is a peer-judged photo contest site for photographers of all skill levels. Users are encouraged to post their best work and have it evaluated by others in the community.
The site has an innovative weighted voting and scoring system that promotes fair judging by putting more power into the hands of people who have proven records of voting and winning.
A good feature of the voting process is that images are randomly selected and displayed on the voting page for a user to cast a vote regardless of how long the image has been in the system, given that the user has not previously voted on the image and the image does not belong to that user. This feature ensures that every image has an equal chance of receiving a vote.
Those who post images also have the opportunity to promote their business. Winner’s image gets displayed on the home page for the duration of that contest. Winning an annual award means your image and a link to your site is displayed for an entire year.
Some features of the site may appear confusing at first, so be sure to read the about page, site overview, and FAQ section before signing up.
Posted in
Photo contest on September 23rd, 2007.
1 Comment.
