PENTAX Imaging Company has announced the PENTAX Optio W60 compact digital camera. Lightweight and fully waterproof, the Optio W60 features 10 megapixels and a 5X zoom lens with 28mm wide-angle capability. The enhanced design of the Optio W60 allows the camera to operate up to 13 feet underwater for two hours and at extreme temperatures well below freezing.

Other important features and modes of the PENTAX Optio W60 include a High-Quality Movie mode with HD resolution up to 1280 x 720 pixels (comparable to a 720p HDTV at 15fps) as well as Auto Picture mode, fast Face Recognition, Smile Capture, Blink Detection, an Underwater Movie mode, High Sensitivity Digital SR mode that automatically adjusts the sensitivity up to ISO 6400, and an LCD monitor with a 170 degree wide-angle view and Anti-Reflection coating to reduce glare.

The PENTAX Optio W60 will be available in July 2008 for US $329.95.

Learn more about the Pentax Optio W60.

When thieves stole Alison DelLauzon's camera while she was on vacation in Florida, she was able to retrieve her lost photos and her camera thanks to her Eye-Fi wireless-enabled SD memory card. The card sent her photos and photos of the thieves to a photo-sharing service when it came in range of a wireless network.

Read more about how WiFi enabled electronics are becoming harder to steal.

On the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, photographer Harry Benson remembers his thoughts in the moment:

He didn’t hear the gunfire, but when he heard the scream, Harry turned on his heel with his camera already halfway to his face. “This is what I came into the business for,” he thought, repeating it like a mantra in his head. “Don’t mess up now. Mess up tomorrow if you have to. This is history.”

Read More: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4022056.ece

OmniVision Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: OVTI), the world’s largest supplier of CMOS image sensors, today launched its OmniBSI™ architecture, a novel sensor design that uses backside illumination (BSI). OmniBSI enables improved image quality on increasingly miniaturized chips.

BSI methodology involves turning the CameraChip™ sensor upside down so that it collects light through what was previously the backside of the sensor, providing the most direct path for light to travel into the pixel. BSI technology affords a much larger aperture size, which allows for lower f stops, facilitating the development of better performing camera modules with superior camera performance.

OmniVision is currently demonstrating an 8 MegaPixel, OmniBSI CameraChip sensor, and expects to start sampling first products before the end of June.

As is so often the case with technology, if you wait long enough, it will become unnecessary!

A team let by MIT researchers has discovered that software is able to identify many common subjects in images that have been compressed to a very small size.

Deriving such a short representation would be an important step toward making it possible to catalog the billions of images on the Internet automatically. At present, the only ways to search for images are based on text captions that people have entered by hand for each picture, and many images lack such information. Automatic identification would also provide a way to index pictures people download from digital cameras onto their computers, without having to go through and caption each one by hand. And ultimately it could lead to true machine vision, which could someday allow robots to make sense of the data coming from their cameras and figure out where they are.

Read a synopsis of the research: MIT helps develop new image-recognition software