ISO 3200 - Nikon D80 versus the Fujifilm S5 Pro

Here is an interesting comparison of the high ISO between the Fujifilm S5Pro and the Nikon D80. The pictures were from a Korean website called SLRClub.com. Considering the noise on the Nikon D80 rated very well in many reviews says alot about the Fujifilm S5Pro.

At ISO 3200, the Fujifilm S5 Pro is extremely good.





Source: SLR Club - English translated version

Canon 40D Rumors

Due to increased competition from Nikon with the popular Nikon D80 and the Nikon D40, Canon needs to release the Canon 30D successor soon. The rumors so far are that the Canon 30D successor will be the Canon 40D with the following specifications:

10.1 megapixel CMOS sensor (28.7 x 19.1mm)

2.5 inch widescreen (250,000 pixels)

Self-cleaning sensor unit

Memory -Compact flash cards.

ISO 100 -3200 with a possibility of a high mode ISO 6400?)

Processor - DIGIC III

Dimensions 14,8 x 10,9 mm, 720 grams

Only time will tell.







Here are the links to the Canon Hong Kong and English websites where a alleged leaked information appeared briefly.

Digital Camera Sales Slows in the US

According to Reuters, fewer shoppers reached for digital cameras as a gift during the holiday season, leading to the first-ever quarterly decline in U.S. shipments, according to an industry report issued on Thursday.

In a clear sign the U.S. market has matured, shipments of digital cameras fell 3 percent in the fourth quarter to 12.1 million units from 12.4 million units a year ago, research firm IDC said in its "U.S. Digital Camera Market Share Review" report.

That was a sharp contrast from double-digit gains in previous years, when the attraction of film-less cameras swelled as consumers replaced their traditional film devices.

"Demand has definitely cooled," IDC analyst Christopher Chute said. "There was (also) a move away from giving an inexpensive camera as a gift and about 85 percent of those sold were to people buying another camera, maybe as upgrade."

Canon Inc. (7751.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) led the market with 2.5 million units shipped in the quarter, followed by Eastman Kodak Co. (EK.N: Quote, Profile, Research) at 2.4 million and Sony Corp. (6758.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) at 2.2 million.

Kodak, which bowed out of the low-end camera market in an effort to sell more profitable models, surrendered its top ranking to Canon for the full 2006 year. Canon had a 20 percent market share, followed by Sony with 17 percent and Kodak at 16 percent, IDC said.

For the whole of 2006, U.S. shipments of digital still cameras, including digital SLRs - or single-lens-reflex - models, reached 29.8 million units, driven by price drops and rebate programs. This represents only 5 percent growth over 2005.

Shipments to the United States are expected to rise, but only slightly in 2007, to about 30 million units, Chute said, as consumers continue to replace older models in order to get more powerful features.

IDC added that Samsung Electronics (005930.KS: Quote, Profile, Research) and Matsushita's (6752.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) Panasonic (6752.T: Quote, NEWS, Research), which has large marketing strategies in place, may be threats to top tier players.

Digital cameras have been around since the 1980s, but only became a mass-market item in the 1990s.

What is interesting is that that the hottest selling items are now LCD TV. According to CNet, LCD televisions beat out digital cameras to become the top-selling gadget during the 2006 holiday season.

From 2003 to 2005, digital cameras generated the most revenue when it came to U.S. holiday spending on consumer electronics, computers and cameras, NPD analyst Steve Baker said. But this year, the $925 million spent on televisions with liquid-crystal displays topped the $825 million spent on digital cameras.

"Clearly, price was a huge driver this year, and availability," Baker said of the LCD TV surge. In addition, LCD TVs spread to the more lucrative 30-inch-and-larger category, which plasma and rear-projection TVs previously had had largely to themselves, he said. A total of 1.3 million LCD TVs shipped in the holiday season, he said.

Faster Chip Technology from Intel could end up in Digital Cameras

Here is some interesting news that Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors.

According to the New York Times, company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.

The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, Digital cameras and for cell phones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with less battery drain.

The work by Intel overcomes a potentially crippling technical obstacle that has arisen as a transistor’s tiny switches are made ever smaller: their tendency to leak current as the insulating material gets thinner. The Intel advance uses new metallic alloys in the insulation itself and in adjacent components.

Word of the announcement, which is planned for Monday, touched off a war of dueling statements as I.B.M. rushed to announce that it was on the verge of a similar advance. I.B.M. executives said their company was planning to introduce a comparable type of transistor in the first quarter of 2008.

Many industry analysts say that Intel retains a six-month to nine-month lead over the rest of the industry, but I.B.M. executives disputed the claim and said the two companies were focused on different markets in the computing industry.

The I.B.M. technology has been developed in partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s main rival. Modern microprocessor and memory chips are created from an interconnected fabric of hundreds of millions and even billions of the tiny switches that process the ones and zeros that are the foundation of digital computing.

They are made using a manufacturing process that has been constantly improving for more than four decades. Today transistors, for example, are made with systems that can create wires and other features that are finer than the resolving power of a single wavelength of light.

The Intel announcement is new evidence that the chip maker is maintaining the pace of Moore’s Law, the technology axiom that states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, giving rise to a constant escalation of computing power at lower costs.
“This is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but it will generate a big sigh of relief,” said Vivek Subramanian, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

For several decades there have been repeated warnings about the impending end of the Moore’s Law pace for chip makers. In response the semiconductor industry has repeatedly found its way around fundamental technical obstacles, inventing techniques that at times seem to defy basic laws of physics.

The chip industry measures its progress by manufacturing standards defined by a width of one of the smallest features of a transistor for each generation. Currently much of the industry is building chips in what is known as 90-nanometer technology. At that scale, about 1,000 transistors would fit in the width of a human hair. Intel began making chips at 65 nanometers in 2005, about nine months before its closest competitors.

Now the company is moving on to the next stage of refinement, defined by a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers. Other researchers have recently reported progress on molecular computing technologies that could reduce the scale even further by the end of the decade.

Intel’s imminent advance to 45 nanometers will have a huge impact on the industry, Mr. Subramanian said. “People have been working on it for over a decade, and this is tremendously significant that Intel has made it work,” he said.

Intel’s advance was in part in finding a new insulator composed of an alloy of hafnium, a metallic element that has previously been used in filaments and electrodes and as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants. They will replace the use of silicon dioxide — essentially the material that window glass is made of, but only several atoms thick.

Intel is also shifting to new metallic alloy materials — it is not identifying them specifically — in transistor components known as gates, which sit directly on top of the insulator. These are ordinarily made from a particular form of silicon called polysilicon.

The new approach to insulation appears at least temporarily to conquer one of the most significant obstacles confronting the semiconductor industry: the tendency of tiny switches to leak electricity as they are reduced in size. The leakage makes chips run hotter and consume more power.




Source: NY Times