LATEST ADDITIONS

My friend Toko is the best golfer I’ve ever known. He ordered new graphite shafts from a mail order company in Texas and reshafted his clubs by himself. When you hear these two facts you may think that he was using state-of-the art, custom-made equipment.

Quite a few weeks ago I was invited to contribute my prognostications for photography in 2009, an annual feature in Shutterbug I usually participate in. In early fall of 2008 what I was seeing of the world, I was loath to say what the next day would bring much less the next year, so I declined to participate as usual. Today with 2009 just a few days hence, I am no more inclined to participate in prognostication of what the future next year will bring. Although I would like to indulge in the hope change could produce, but every time I turn on the TV news or read the newspapers I hear the same prayers to the ideological economic gods that have been worshipped for the last 30 years and brought us to where we are today. Being a poor relation of the media myself, and although I try to serve a useful mission to the community of readers I serve, all but a few magazines today are the communities of people they once were, and now just cogs in a corporate conglomerate wheel that turns only to grind out a bottom line profit. For most whether on-line, on the tube or still on the newsstand, those who are still speaking continue to voice the ideas of the past, and to me it reflects a lost generation in time since 1980, that thankfully came to an end in this last election and economic crash of 2008. To me the question is will the old-fashioned ideal of an editorial purpose be renewed to make what is espoused by those in the media again serve the community of people who are the listeners, the readership of a magazine or will there only principle remain the number at the bottom line of a corporate ledger.

DxO Labs has unveiled www.dxomark.com, a new website delivering key objective metrics of sensor performance for a variety of cameras measured directly on the RAW image. Available as a free online resource, dxomark.com makes it possible for the first time to assess the intrinsic quality of a camera before the impact of any RAW conversion.

“There are many valuable resources reviewing the image quality of digital cameras, but none of them consider the actual RAW signal straight from the camera sensor,” explains Nicolas Touchard, Vice President of Marketing, DxO Labs Image Quality Evaluation business. “Demanding photographers who shoot in RAW should only care about the genuine quality of the RAW image, yet until now they have had to rely on measures based on converted RAW images, obviously biased by the processing applied to them, whether embedded or performed offline with a software RAW converter. Furthermore, as RAW converters evolve and improve, the latent potential of RAW images can only be gauged by analyzing the RAW images themselves, projecting the potential quality achievable with the ultimate RAW converter. This is why we believe that our approach will dramatically change the way photographers evaluate digital cameras.”

dxomark.com provides in-depth measurements of all the relevant characteristics of a sensor: actual ISO sensitivity (which generally differs from the value reported by the camera), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), dynamic range, tonal range, color depth and sensitivity, metamerism, etc. dxomark.com already covers 50 popular cameras, including Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLRs) and high-end bridge cameras offering RAW image format. The site will be updated on a regular basis with new cameras.
dxomark.com RAW image quality database relies on DxO Analyzer, the world’s leading turn-key laboratory solution for image quality evaluation. Thanks to its accuracy, completeness, and reliability, DxO Analyzer has become the reference tool for numerous leading imaging industry players, photography magazines and websites.

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Trial downloads of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product family are available now on Adobe.com, allowing users to test out the software before purchasing. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency – and packed with hundreds of innovative, time saving features – the new Creative Suite 4 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

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