Steves Digicams has just posted reviews of 3 Panasonic Lumix digital cameras, including the DMC-FX5 (pictured).

Website: Steves Digicams - Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX5 Review

Website: Steves Digicams - Panasonic Lumix DMC-LC70 Review

Website: Steves Digicams - Panasonic Lumix DMC-LC50 Review

The Hungarian website Index Digicam have just reviewed the tiny 4 megapixel Pentax Optio S4i, which has a 3X optical zoom, 1.8 inch LCD monitor and features the first PENTAX digital cradle-style lithium ion recharge base unit.

Website: Index Digicam - Pentax Optio S4i Review

The Danish website DigitalMagasinet have published a comparative test of the HP Photosmart R707 and the Canon IXUS 500 5 megapixel digital cameras.

Website: DigitalMagasinet - HP Photosmart R707 vs Canon IXUS 500

Casio have just released a new firmware update (Version 1.01) for the 6 megapixel Casio EXILIM PRO EX-P600 digital camera.

Improvements Provided by This Update
V1.00-V1.01
- High-speed night scene recording.
- Zooming of portrait orientation images (without changing to landscape orientation).

Website: Casio EXILIM PRO EX-P600 Firmware Update

New KODAK PROFESSIONAL Inkjet Photo Paper Delivers Exceptional Color, Detail and Quality for Pros, AdAm Photographers

Universally Compatible with Dye, Pigmented Ink Printers; Instant Drying Media

Rochester, Jun 01—Eastman Kodak Company today introduced KODAK PROFESSIONAL Inkjet Photo Paper for professional and advanced amateur (AdAm) photographers.  The high quality, instant-dry paper, available in glossy and lustre finishes, is compatible with all inkjet printers and represents the first KODAK PROFESSIONAL branded inkjet- media in the market.

Featuring a true photographic base with high-quality pulp and state-of-the-art paper chemistry, the new instant-drying cut-sheet inkjet photo paper delivers outstanding image quality, whiter whites, accurate flesh-tone reproduction and a wide color gamut.  With a range of recommended and custom color profiles developed for popular inkjet printers, the paper delivers a bright, saturated color and sharp detail.  The competitively priced paper will appeal to commercial, portrait/social and AdAm photographers.

A-Digital-Eye have reviewed the 4800x1200 dpi Canon Bubble Jet i80 high speed mobile printer. The Bubble Jet i80 is available now for around £199 inc VAT.

” took this little printer with me on a recent trip. Since it supports PictBridge compatible cameras, all I needed was a cable for my Canon 10D camera. No need to lug along a laptop. For true portability, the i80 printer has an optional lithium ion battery pack for $99. or a charging cradle with battery for $139. Another option is a car power supply. I simply used the included power supply which supports 120 and 240 volts for those traveling abroad. Printing couldn’t be simpler. When browsing photos on your camera’s LCD, simply select the photo’s you want printed, and how many copies of each. Cropping is even supported. Hook up the cable between your camera and printer, go to the print setup menu on your camera, choose paper size, bordered or borderless, and let it print. 2 minutes 40 seconds later you’ll have a nice sharp 4x6 inch borderless print all without the use of a computer!”

Website: A-Digital-Eye - Canon Bubble Jet i80 Review

Princess Cruises Escapes Press Release 31/05/04

This summer sees the return of the Princess Cruises Escapes Travel Photography Awards - the biggest professional and amateur travel photography competition in the UK.

Following the huge success of last year’s inaugural competition which received over 5,000 entries, the Princess Cruises Escapes Travel Photography Awards are once again calling for members of the public to enter the cream of their travel photography for the chance of winning either a luxury Mediterranean cruise on one of Princess Cruises grand class ships (amateur category) or £10,000 cash (professional category).

Photographs can be entered under one of 5 categories - Land-scapes, Sea-scapes, City-scapes and Sport-scapes, a new category for 2004 which will capitalise on the wealth of exciting sporting events that are taking place around the world this year.  Also returning this year is the popular ?E-scapes? category in which photographers are asked to capture the emotion of travelling as opposed to the destination itself.  This may be by using people to communicate the culture of a country or capturing a particular scene that really tells a story of a place.

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.