dotPhoto, Inc. Press Release 01/06/04

DOTPHOTO TRANSFORMS THE WAY CAMERA PHONES PRINT PHOTOS WITH “CLICK & DELIVER” PATENT-PENDING TECHNOLOGY

Prints Directly from Any Camera Phone - No Special Software Needed

June 1, 2004, West Trenton, NJ - dotPhoto, Inc. www.dotphoto.com, a global leader in state-of-the-art online digital image handling and the first company to enable camera phone photo uploads, announced today one-button Click & Deliver patent-pending technology that transforms the way camera phones print photos.  All camera phones (regardless of carrier) can now print “Cell Prints” directly from their cell phone without any special software.

Click & Deliver is completely automatic.  Users simply take a photo with their camera phone and email the image through their phone to [email protected].  dotPhoto then automatically checks the user’s personal preferences, and prints and ships their photos (called “cell prints”) on high-quality Kodak paper directly to the user.  It’s that easy.  To experience Click & Deliver, anyone can join the free service at http://www.dotPhoto.com, set their Click & Deliver preferences under MyAccount, and start e-mailing photos.  The basic photo-processing price is only 11? each for a 3” x 4” camera phone print.  The 3” x 4” print size optimizes the slightly lower resolutions of camera phones while maintaining the camera phone’s aspect ratio, so there is no need for cropping.  New dotPhoto users will receive their first 10 “cell prints” free of charge.

The June 2004 Competition is now open for entries. This is a monthly photography competition with a specific theme and prizes for the top 3 photos. The winning entries will be decided by a panel of judges. You just have to submit one photograph to the Competition Gallery that best interprets May’s theme, which is “The Urban Landscape”.

The following prizes will be awarded to the top 3 entries:

1st Place
Photobird.com one-year subscription with 100 megabytes of storage space
Kindly donated by Photobird.com.
http://www.photobird.com

2nd Place
1 copy of Ulead PhotoImpact XL
Kindly donated by Ulead Systems.
http://www.ulead.co.uk

3rd Place
1 copy of Picasa
Kindly donated by Picasa Inc.
http://www.picasa.net

PLUS
Each winner will also receive 15 digital prints, kindly donated by MyPIXmania.
http://www.mypixmania.com

Please make sure that you read the Monthly Competition Rules before submitting your entry. Note that you are only allowed to enter 1 photograph. The competition is worldwide and open to everyone.

You can now start submitting entries to the June Competition here:
June 2004 Competition

The May 2004 PhotographyBLOG Competition has now closed. The theme for May was “Silhouettes” - you can view all of the entries in this gallery.

The 1st / 2nd / 3rd place winners will be announced on Wednesday 9th May, and the prizes will be sent out shortly after :-)

Stuff Magazine have published a list of their recommended digital cameras, complete with reviews for each one. The Olympus Stylus 410 (pictured), which I reviewed yesterday, was awarded the title of Most Durable digital camera.

- Best Pro-Quality: Nikon Coolpix 8700
- Most Durable - Olympus Stylus 410
- Most Versatile - Panasonic D-Snap SV-AV50
- Most Compact - Casio Exilim EX-S3

Thanks to Sanj for the link.

Website: Stuff Magazine - Digital Camera Choice

If you are even vaguely interested in sports photography then you should definitely pay a visit to SportsShooter, which calls itself “the resource for sports photography”. Issue 67 of their Newsletter contains a number of interesting articles, including “Leaving Film Behind”:

“I was visiting an old friend, a successful commercial photographer who went digital about a year about when the 11- megapixel Canon 1Ds came out. Like anyone who could, he had waited until the quality in digital met his needs before he made the jump from film. Everything about his studio was high-end in 2004 digital studio terms- the computer, the inkjet, the DVD burner.

It wasn’t until I peeked in his equipment locker that I was surprised. Stacked row after row, twenty high: 1 Gigbabyte compact flash cards. There were four hundred and thirty-three, numbered in sequence with red sharpie.”

and “In The Bag: Horse Racing”:

“Whenever I see a uninformed comment on the message board referring to the ease of making images with remote cameras, I always wish that person would have to be one of my assistants for one day at a major event where we are doing multiple remotes, they’d get over themselves pretty quickly. And they’d learn just how precise this all is.”

Website: SportsShooter

The second review of the 8-megapixel Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 digital camera today is by a new website called TopicPoint:

“The A2 has a great movie mode. The best quality movie mode is 544x408 at 30 frames per second. You can use the zoom during the movies, and movies can be fairly long, over 6 minutes with a sufficiently fast and large CompactFlash card. Anti-shake mode also works to help stabilize images in movie mode too.”

Website: TopicPoint - Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 Review

There are two new reviews of the 8-megapixel Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 digital camera for you today. The first is an in-depth 14 pages from HardwareZone:

“The Anti-Shake feature really works! Of course, how effective it is for you depends on your hand holding skills. The choice of different color spaces and the various image adjustments (in small increments too) available are major pluses. In terms of operation, the A2 offers pretty fast startup time and improved AF speed over the A1. For purists, the availability of the RAW file format means more flexibility during post processing.”

Website: HardwareZone - Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 Review

Luminous Landscape have just reviewed Canon’s new EF28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM ultra high magnification zoom lens. With an approx. 11x zoom range covering everything from wide-angle to telephoto, Canon’s latest dust and moisture proof ‘white lens’ is designed to appeal to professional EOS photographers looking to reduce lens changes and the number of lenses they need to carry.

“Because of advances in computer-assisted lens design and also the use of exotic glass elements, zooms lenses have become very good indeed. The best ones are almost as good as the best primes, and much more versatile. But they are relatively slow. In fact few if any manufacturers are even producing new prime lens designs anymore, and some are even being discontinued due to slow sales. (Get ‘em while you still can). New lenses like these two high-end zooms are indicative of how manufacturers are no longer fighting for speed. People would much rather have smaller, though slower lenses, not faster ones.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - Canon EF28-300mm L IS Lens Review

The Slovenian website e-FotoGrafija have reviewed Canon’s new EF70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM telephoto zoom lens, which measures less than 10cm long and includes Canon’s Image Stabilisation technology to reduce camera shake.

Website: e-FotoGrafija - Canon EF70-300mm DO IS Lens Review

The Danish website Akamera.dk have reviewed the Digital IXUS i (also known as the PowerShot SD10 in some countries). This all-metal bodied 4.0 Megapixel camera packs 180 second video clips, a 32MB SD memory card and a 5.7x digital zoom into its tiny casing. Its half the size of many mobile phones and weighing in at just 100g. The Digital IXUS i is available now for ?299 RRP inc VAT.

Website: Akamera.dk - Canon Digital IXUS i Review

The compact Olympus mju 410 Digital camera is an updated version of the popular Olympus mju 400 Digital. Olympus have added a number of new features and improvements to this new model. The mju 410 Digital gets a new TruePic Turbo image processor, sunshine LCD screen, wider ISO range, more scene program exposure modes, movie recording function with sound and PictBridge support. So is the new Olympus mju 410 Digital the ideal compact digital camera for you? Read my review to find out.

Website: Olympus mju 410 Digital Review

This is a reminder that the May 2004 competition will end on Monday 31st May. The theme for the May Competition is “Silhouettes”. You just have to submit one photograph to the Competition Gallery that best interprets the theme. The winning entries will be decided by a panel of judges.

The following prizes will be awarded to the top 3 entries:

1st Place
1 copy of Ulead PhotoImpact XL
Kindly donated by Ulead Systems.
http://www.ulead.co.uk

2nd Place
1 copy of Picasa
Kindly donated by Picasa Inc.
http://www.picasa.net

3rd Place
Photobird.com one-year subscription with 100 megabytes of storage space
Kindly donated by Photobird.com.
http://www.photobird.com

PLUS
Each winner will also receive 15 digital prints, kindly donated by MyPIXmania.
http://www.mypixmania.com

Please make sure that you read the Monthly Competition Rules before submitting your entry. Note that you are only allowed to enter 1 photograph. The competition is worldwide and open to everyone.

The 27th Photo of the Week contest is now open. This is a weekly photography contest with no set theme and you can enter as many photos as you like.

The 26th Photo of the Week contest is now closed.

I will choose what I think are the best photographs in my opinion. I will not choose a specific number of images - it could be 5 one week, 13 the next and so on. Please note that my decision is final and I will ignore any attempts to question it!

The overall winner of the contest will then be voted for by you. A Public Poll will be setup on the PhotographyBLOG Forums and you will have 7 days during which you can vote for your favourite photo from the ones that I have chosen. The Poll will then be closed and the overall winner announced.

Vote now for your favourite image from the Photo of the Week 24th-30th May 2004 contest

DCResource have just reviewed the 4 megapixel Kodak Easyshare LS743 digital camera.

“The Kodak EasyShare LS743 is a nice choice for those looking for a compact, high resolution point-and-shoot camera. Enthusiasts will be turned off by its lack of manual controls and limited image quality choices, but the average shooter probably won’t miss either.”

Website: DCResource - Kodak Easyshare LS743 Review

AK47.tv is an online art photography magazine, published once a month, which showcases images from both fine arts and documentary photographers. It looks very similar design-wise to 28mm.org, but it’s mainly flash-based and features less photographers (6 in total this month).

Website: AK47.tv - May 2004 Issue (#2)

About.com have taken a look at the subject of colour correction in Photoshop, including 3 plugins (AutoFX’s AutoEye 2.0, iCorrect Edit Lab 4.0 and Curvemeister 1.1.8) that aim to give better results than the default tools.

“Photoshop is a program most of us love and hate. Dependable, stable, but at times immensely frustrating. Its built-in tool for colour balancing is one of the more limited aspects. However in the Curves dialogue it does give you a powerful tool for accessing and altering the figures in the files. Unfortunately the interface is one that gives only limited help in doing so.”

Website: About.com - Colour Balance Aids for Photoshop

An online article by the UK-based Independent newspaper attempts to cut through the jargon that surrounds digital cameras and show how to buy the right camera for you.

“If you go wild, then it is easy to spend far too much on equipment that probably exceeds your needs. And digital camera technology is not quite at the same level as the old-fashioned “SLR” (single lens reflex) systems that we’re used to with film. Quality is still variable; swapable lenses such as wide-angle and “macro” (close-up) are still the province of the top-end systems costing ?1,000 or more. But it is perfectly easy to get a camera that will serve all your amateur needs - and possibly have a few tricks to surprise you - for about ?200.”

Website: Independent.co.uk - The digital camera revolution need not snap your nerve

The latest article over at Luminous Landscape is called “Symmetry”, an essay on patterns in the way we see…

“Below are three photographs taken in January, February and March of 2004 respectively. None of them were done with any conscious intent. In each case I simply saw a composition that caught my eye, and photographed it. It wasn’t until viewing a print of the third photograph that I realized the similarity with the others taken just weeks prior. Putting the three prints up on my desk, side by side, I shook my head at the curious symmetry. This simply isn’t a style of shooting that I had done before, and I have no idea where it came from.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - Symmetry

Pretec MMC 4.0 USB Card Reader The First and Fastest in the World Taipei, Taiwan, June 1, 2004 ? Pretec Electronics Corp., the 2nd company in the world offering CompactFlash memory card (CF) card since 1995, is demonstrating the world?s first USB card reader supporting MMC 4.0 4-bit mode, which can possibly reach the access speed of up to 26MB/s, the highest speed flash memory card reader in the world today, at COMPUTEX TAIPEI Pretec Booth Hall 4, # 101A here at World Trade Center.

Supporting most popular flash memory cards in the market such as CF I, CF II (or 1? HDD), Smart Media, MMC, MMC 4.0 (4-bit mode), SD, MS, MS-Pro, etc., Pretec USB card reader is the most versatile card reader today. When MMC 4.0 8-bit mode is supported by Q4/2004, Pretec USB card reader can possibly reach a whopping speed of 52MB/s, close to the maximum speed of USB 2.0 specification. Pretec MMC 4.0 USB card reader is sampling now, with mass production scheduled by next month.