Digital Shot

T’is the season for DVD camcorders: following the 3CCD VDR-D400 from Panasonic and the iVIS DC22 from Canon that we just spotted comes a model from Hitachi called the Wooo DZ-HS303 (yes, you read that right); unlike these other devices, though, the Hitachi — dropping August 30th — also lets your capture video to an 8GB MicroDrive. Billed as the world’s first camcorder to sport both a DVD and hard drive, the HS303 features a 10x optical zoom, standard 2.7-inch LCD, and three megapixel CCD, all in a 560-gram package. All-in-all a pretty decent feature set for 130,000 yen ($1,132), but as Digital World Tokyo points out, Canon will give you HD capabilities for only a few bucks more.

[Via Digital World Tokyo]

Hitachi’s Wooo DZ-HS303 DVD camcorder with HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Aug 2006 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Along with the more notable HV10 high definition model we brought you yesterday, Canon has introduced another new member to its family of iVIS camcorders: the DVD-equipped DC22. Besides its ability to record onto dual-layer, 8-centimeter discs, there’s not much that makes this product stand out from the pack; you’re getting a 2.7-inch flip out display, 2.2 megapixel CCD, and just a 10x optical zoom — far less than many other Canon cams on the market. Still, they’re not asking you to pay through the nose for this one either — it’ll go for about 90,000 yen ($785) when it drops in Japan sometime this month.

[Via Fareastgizmos]

Canon’s iVIS DC22 DVD camcorder originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Aug 2006 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Since it’s unlikely that your hand will get any steadier with age, and we probably won’t see optical image stabilization in cameraphones anytime soon, researchers are concentrating on ways to fix your crappy photos once they’ve already been captured. The latest salvo in the war against so-called hand motion blur comes from a team of computer scientists at MIT and the University of Toronto, who have developed an algorithm that can create a sharper picture by “estimating the distribution of a number of probable images” and coming up with a happy medium. Introduced at this year’s Siggraph Conference in Boston, the algorithm could potentially be included in future versions of Adobe Photoshop — which currently fights blur with a rather ineffective unsharp mask tool — although it will do nothing for blurring caused by moving objects or improperly-focused shots. Unfortunately, it sounds like this product is still at least a year away from commercial release, so tripods and nerve-steadying Pentazemin are still your best bets for the time being.

[Thanks, Alex]

Researchers develop algorithm to combat photo blur originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.