Digital Gadgets

Ken Rockwell’s Nikon D200 is fast, smooth, and quiet. Ken points out that the D200 uses two very different kinds of memory for storing images.
We’re all familiar with the CF cards used to store hundreds of images. These aren’t that fast and card makers rate them for write speed. The D200 uses these for recording your images.

The D200, like all professional digital cameras, has a second very high speed internal cache memory called a buffer. You never touch this. This buffer memory stores 25 frames of JPGs, 21 frames of raw or 19 frames of raw + JPG.

The buffer memory is fast enough to store all these frames at the full 5FPS rate, or faster.

More: digitalcameratracker.com

The new Samsung ‘S’ series of digital cameras come in 5, 6, or 8 megapixel variants with a miserly choice of colors to choose from – silver or black.

All ‘S’ series cameras are equipped with the Friendly Effect Key that allows the user to adjust the color of the photos taken in addition to creating visual effects such as split screens. It can also record video in VGA resolution @ 30fps. Less than 10cm wide and 26.4mm thick, the ‘S’ series of cameras look pretty much like any other ordinary newbie cameras.

More: ubergizmo.com

Ricoh dubbed the original Caplio R3 the “smallest digicam in the world with a 5x or greater optical zoom lens” when it was announced last September. The Ricoh Caplio R30 offers the exact same dimensions and weight as the original R3 model, but with a slightly reduced lens range at the telephoto end. Where the original R3 offered a range of 28 - 200mm, the R30 provides a range of 28 - 160mm. As with the R3, body thickness is kept down courtesy of a “double retracting lens system”, which separately moves two lens elements into the optical path when the lens extends as the camera is powered up, and removes them again as the camera powers off.

The R30’s lens is coupled with a five megapixel CCD imager, the same as the original R3 model. However, where the R3’s sensor was mounted on a moving platter, allowing it to be used for a CCD shift-type image stabilisation system, the R30’s sensor is fixed in place. Hence, the R30 cannot offer the Vibration Reduction system from the original R3.

Other features of the Caplio R30 are largely the same as the original R3 model. The only other differences we noted between the spec sheets are that the flash range at telephoto is just slightly further for the R3 (since it doesn’t have as powerful a zoom), and that the battery life was slightly increased for the R3 (likely because the CIPA standard battery test requires the entire zoom range to be traversed once between each shot, and possibly also because there is now no CCD shifting to consume battery power).

More: imaging-resource.com

Ricoh Co., Ltd., (president: Masamitsu Sakurai) today announced the release of the new Caplio R30 compact digital camera featuring a 5.7x optical wide zoom (28-160 mm in 35 mm camera format) in a trim body only 26mm thick.

The new Caplio R30 is positioned as a more affordable version of the Caplio R3 (Released on November 11, 2005) which featured a 7.1x optical wide zoom lens. Inheriting the Caplio R3’s unique Double Retracting Lens System, the R30 houses a 5.7x (28-160 mm) wide-angle, high powered zoom lens in its compact, 26 mm thin body.

* Designed to have part of the lens assembly protruding from the camera cone during lens storage, the wide-angle, high-powered zoom lens is more compact.

Ricoh has historically manufactured products based on the concept of Expandability. In addition to the wide zoom, the new camera achieves increased photographic possibilities, anywhere, by employing an enhanced macro function–Ricoh’s specialty–and anytime by extending the quick response function, a conventional weakness of digital cameras, which contributes to the concept.

More: cameratown.com