In case any of our illustrious readers have been curious about where I have been, I was in the process of moving from Sacramento, Northern California, where I attend college, to Los Angeles, Southern California, where I am from. As if simply keeping up with the Jones’, Canon has also decided to move, and will start building a new high-tech headquarters at Long Island, New York.

This isn’t huge news, as the United States headquarters of Canon have been in Long Island for 35 years and New York for 60 years, but it is worthy nonetheless. As far as history goes, Canon has been a large part of the U.S. economy

Canon U.S.A. began in 1955 with five employees as the New York branch of an up-and-coming camera company. Today, the company is a global imaging brand leader that every American looks to for consumer and business innovations and technologies. Canon has been a fixture in the Long Island community since 1971 when the company moved its headquarters to Lake Success, N.Y., from Woodside, Queens, N.Y. When Canon moved to Long Island in the 1970s, the Company employed approximately 80 people.

Canon U.S.A. Corporate Headquarters is responsible for more than 10,000 employees in 35 facilities across North, Central and South Americas.

The most notable improvement that this new headquarters will bring forth, besides the state-of-the-art facility and office section, is the additional creation of over 6000 jobs for the local community and business. Canon: nice!

Full Press Release

It’s the DXG 589V, the world’s first digital camera that records videos and plays games. Similar in design to the lauded Sanyo Xacti, its compact design is held in your hand vertically with a twist up screen. The lens snaps pics compliments of a 5 megapixel CMOS sensor and records 640 x 480 MPEG-4 video at 30 frames per second.

Perhaps its most unique feature is gaming. Turn the unit sideways and the screen orients itself resembling a Gameboy. There’s a d-pad that rests on the side of the lens barrel and action buttons on the right which by the way look eerily similar to someone else’s design. Gameboy-like or not, it doesn’t play Gameboy games. Instead, the 589V comes with 20 built in games.

If you’re still unsure about it, how about video recording direct from any video source (TV, DVD, VCR) to take on the go? SD card storage and hey, it even works as a digital music player so if you look at the big picture - it’s the convergence device everybody wants right?

$199.99 available now at your local Best Buy and Circuit City.

In a typical day of working and traveling, millions of wireless devices are used, seen, bought, and sold. All of these products share one thing in common: their innate ability to consume and engulf batteries and power from outlets. The sheer amount of environmental pollution and waste created by the use of disposable batteries and dead chargeable batteries is enormous, not to mention the average cost of replacing and charging those batteries.

Along with the cost is the huge inconvenience of having a device lose power from lack of battery charging or actual battery inoperability. There are several ways to fix this problem, the most straightforward one being to create longer-lasting batteries that have less of an environmental impact. But now, four companies are poised to take the battery market into a new era: wireless charging and power. Read on for a preview of Wildcharge, Powercast, eCoupled, and Splashpower, all of which have their own respective method of providing power on-the-go.
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Ever worked in a printed circuit board inspection factory? Probably not. But if you did, you would know that it’s a lot of tough work. Staring at tiny little transistors, through-hole paths, and conducive traces for errors can be terribly boring, even with the aid of cameras that magnify the components for easier viewing pleasure. Now Sony has stepped in with the answer to the question (42), and has brought with them the XCL-5000 model from their CameraLink series, bidding the inspectors’ darkened spirits goodbye for the calming peace of a cloudless sky.

Instead of using several low resolution cameras to create a higher resolution collage, Sony’s XCL-5000 can replace multiple cameras by simply being better. As their press release states:

The XCL-5000 is a black-and-white model that incorporates a new 2/3-inch progressive scan CCD sensor with square pixels. This imaging technology can capture high-quality, high-resolution video at 15 frames per second, and supports up to 12-bit processing with a C-mount lens.

Since it is only one camera, it saves space in the factory and provides quicker results, since there is less overhead required to build the image of the printed circuit board or display to be inspected. The highly complex assortment of cameras and pieces needed to accurately inspect a PCB would be heavily reduced when replaced by the XCL-5000, which also means that cost would be decreased as well (more money is always good).

With a form factor of 44 x 44 x 57.5 mm, and a suggested price of $4,377, this should be on every machine manufacturer’s and inspector’s wish list.

Sanyo just announced their new mid-range Xacti DMX-CG65 digital pocket camcorder. Still sporting the 6 megapixel CCD and 5x optical zoom but all recordings now support H.264. Use it with the new 8 GB SDHC cards and you can record up to 10 hours of footage.

Japan only for now but it’s a Xacti so it’ll show up in other parts of the world sooner than later. The Japanese will get the obligatory silver and black models along with a green goblin color. Not sure how I feel about that one.

Do you suck at taking pictures? Does your photography of normally decent looking people come out looking horrid? Well, you’re not alone. It’s a good thing that Irish company FotoNation has a new technology to cover your ass and fix your jank portraits.

FotoNation’s Face Tracker technology makes taking photos much easier with its ability to detect the location of faces and adjust the camera’s settings for the best possible picture. And if the subject is ulgy, then it throws the camera out of focus to protect your precious eyes. Okay, I lied about that last part. This technology automatically finds and focuses on faces regardless of where they are in the viewfinder, and then adjusts focus and exposure for results that may even make it look like you know what you’re doing.

So you think you need this? The upcoming Pentax Optio A30 is no slouch with 10 megapixels, anti-shake functions, and this face tracking feature. Also, Pentax has more to choose from with the Pentax Optio S7 and Optio A20 digital cameras, so you really have no excuse for your crap head shots anymore.

This gorgeous little number is Canon’s new TX1 digital camera, and Canon wants you to think of it as a hybrid imaging device. Its tall, camcorder-style design gives engineers more front-to-back room to work with, permitting Canon to fit a 10x optical zoom lens inside. The lens retracts into the camera body when powered off. Consider yourself teased.

If you’re not rubbing your legs together in lusty anguish, then this will send you over the top: the TX1 also records HD video at 720p. Optical image stabilization and a 1280×720 30fps movie mode should make for excellent quality video, allowing you to ‘have it all’ in one sleek package.

Canon packs in the latest in their digital processor line, the DIGIC III, giving it 2.2 frames per second continuous-shooting speed. Throw in Face Detection autofocus and ISO settings from 80 to 1600, and this ultracompact is set to catch anyone’s tech-loving loins ablaze. Look for this very soon, set to sell for about $500.

Back in my day getting red eye out of pictures taken with cell phones required post-photoshoot touch ups on a computer. Thanks to FotoNation which has just released its new red eye correcting technology for camera phones the touch up can be done automatically and on the spot.

FotoNation is well known for its red eye technology and has provided it to brands such as Kodak, Nikon, PENTAX, Sanyo and Samsung for their digital cameras. FotoNation also won the 2006 European IST award for its red eye correction technology. With all that under its belt you know it’s not a bunch of guys working in their mom’s garage with a budget based off string and a can of lima beans. Of course if you want the more professional version of what I just said you can hear it straight from the CEO.

“FotoNation’s Red Eye detection and reduction technology has become the defacto standard for embedded implementations of red-eye correction in today’s digital cameras,” said Eran Steinberg, CEO of FotoNation.

The new technology will be making its first product appearance on the Nokia N73, N80 and N93 series of camera phones. Although it will be demonstrated at the Photo Marketing Association Show (PMA) in Las Vegas, Nevada, March 8-11, 2007. I hope vegas is prepaired for the storm of avid camera phone photographers.

That’s something you don’t hear everyday huh?  Well from the look of things it might be a phase you should start becoming familiar with.  Start-up company Zink (Zero Ink) have developed a revolutionary new type of inkless printing technology.

The Zink system “can be embedded in any device.” It is also more environmentally friendly, the company says. Ninety-five percent of ink cartridges never get recycled.

With the ability to shrink printers to the size of a PDA, I’m sure that we will see more and more uses for this type of technology. Zink will be getting the ball rolling by releasing the first two products; a standalone pocket printer and a camera with printer technology built in.

The first printers using Zink’s technology will only produce 2 x 3 inch photographs, but other sizes may be produced in the future. The target price is $99 for the standalone printer and $199 for the camera printer. Paper for the Zink items will run around $19.95 for a pack of 100 sheets. Besides working with camera and hardware manufacturers, Zink is trying to land deals with paper producers.

[via CNET]

Olympus has decided to humor the stalker in all of us and created the SP-550 UZ which is a compact digital camera with an unnerving 18X wide angle telephoto zoom. Most rival cameras compete with about 12X so this is a significant jump. The camera packs a 7.1 megapixel resolution, 15 frame per second sequential shot and other good stuff such as the bright capture technology which illuminates a shot without flash. The camera retails for $499.99 which is pricey but that’s a lot of zoom for the buck. If you’re in the market for a high end compact digital camera, this may be worth a look.

[Via Olympus]