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Vibration-Powered AA Battery Charges Up When You Shake It

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:20:25 -0400

Soon, thanks to Brother Industries, that caveman approach to technology could actually work. The Japanese company is demonstrating standard AA and AAA batteries that incorporate vibration-powered induction generators, so they actually charge when you shake them.

In the prototypes, each functional battery takes up two battery slots: one for the generator and the other for the capacitor that stores the charge. The unit is sufficient, according to Brother, to power a TV remote or an LED flashlight, which they will be demonstrating at the Techno-frontier 2010 exhibition in Tokyo next week.

Truly, an idea whose time has come. Next they need to get to work on a device that recharges when you curse at it.

[Tech-On]

Want To Live in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry For a Month?

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:28:40 -0400

Well, now you can, friends. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago would like to add you to its collection. Temporarily, anyway. The museum is sponsoring a contest to win a month's stay inside the museum, where you can spend quality time in the 14-acre site, hanging out in the submarine and in the cockpit of the United Airlines 727.

The ideal candidate is an adventurous, outgoing person with a strong interest in learning about science, the museum Web site says. The winner will perform live science demos, including blowing up chemicals, and interact with museum guests. You have to speak English, be able to lift 40 pounds (the museum site says they'll come up with something for you to lift) and be able to shoot and edit photos and video.

The winner will have to live in the museum -- yes, including sleep -- from Oct. 20 to Nov. 11. No slumber parties are allowed.

You have to document your experience, but you'll walk away $10,000 richer and infinitely nerdier. Plus they promise to give you gadgets. Count me in!

[Month at the Museum]

Gallery: The Goods, August 2010

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:09:06 -0400

Check out this month's most innovative computers, cameras, gadgets, toys and more

How To: Pair High-Quality Vintage Leica Lenses With Your Micro Four Thirds Digicam

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:45:23 -0400

We tested a new-old setup of our own to see if pairing some of the best lenses in the world with a modern digital camera is worth the money

Naturally, photographers diving into digital interchangeable-lens compacts were eager to pair them with super-sharp Leica lenses, and there are several adapters on the market that make this a possibility. But is it worth it?

To find out, I assembled a new-old rig of my own using the following gear:

Olympus's EP-2, a Micro Four Thirds format camera ($850 body-only)
Novoflex's Leica M-Mount Micro Four Thirds adapter ring ($270)
Leica Elmar-M 24mm f/3.8 lens ($2,400)

I also shot with Olympus’s 17mm f/2.8 Micro Four Thirds lens ($275) for comparison.

It's really pretty simple--the thin adapter ring screws into the camera body on one end and the Leica lens on the other, and you're set--the adapter has no optical component. A few other companies make Leica M-Mount adapters for Micro Four Thirds (including Panasonic/Lumix), so you have some options there. And with that, you can attach any bayonet-mount Leica lens made in the last 50 years or so to your brand new digicam.

As you can see, it’s not a cheap proposition, with the adapter alone--basically just a thin metal ring, albeit a precisely machined one--setting you back nearly a third the cost of the camera itself. But if you’ve dabbled in Leica lenses before, you’re probably used to paying a premium.

Shooting with a Leica lens on a modern digital changes things, but not always in a good way. First of all, there’s no auto exposure control--although you can pretty handily simulate aperture priority mode by setting the aperture dial on the lens to what you want, and letting the camera choose the shutter speed and/or ISO in its own aperture-priority or program mode.

You also lose auto focus, which in a way is kind of nice. The shutter fires the instant you press the button, always, and if there’s enough light for a high enough aperture, you can pre-set to a wide enough focus range to cover your potential subjects for point-and-fire shooting--a technique long employed by street photographers with rangefinders for instant, decisive-moment captures. But if you’re shooting with the aperture wide open in lower light, you’ll need to focus via the LCD, which can be cumbersome. A digital zoom focus-aid mode on the EP-2 gives you a closer look, but it takes a couple button presses to reach it (and obscures most of your composition view at the same time).

Optically, performance was pretty good. Colors were rendered with lifelike saturation, contrast was solid and depth-of-field selection at lower apertures made subjects pop. But Leica glass--or any $2,400 lens, for that matter--shouldn’t only be “pretty good.” In fact, back at my computer, I couldn’t tell a significant difference between the shots I took with Olympus’s system lens, which I’ll remind you is nearly 1/10th the cost.

Click here to launch a photo gallery with some test shots

Why is this so? The answer involves looking at how digital cameras capture light in comparison to 35mm film systems, and how that process can vary significantly from camera to camera.

Almost all lenses shine a circle of light at the recording medium inside the camera (film or sensor). But conventional photos aren’t round--they’re square or rectangular, which means some of the light is getting cropped off. Where this crop happens can vastly effect change image quality in edge sharpness and vignetting. Generally, a Leica lens is designed assuming the light-recording medium is a 35mm piece of film with an aspect ratio of 3:2 (or a similarly sized full-frame sensor, like in the company's first full-frame digital, the M9).

Not only is the sensor used by the EP-2 and the Micro Four Thirds system 75% smaller than full-frame, it’s also composed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means it’s grabbing a just a tiny slice of the light being put out by the Leica lens--a slice that may not produce the best-quality final image.

Christian Erhardt, Leica’s VP of Marketing who works closely with engineering, identified other areas of potential incompatibility:

“Our lenses our designed to work best with full format,” said Erhardt. [With a different sensor size], the light can hit different pixels of the sensor at a very extreme angle--once you have that, the image may be slightly out of focus, or not as bright around the edges.”

“One reason why we've decided not to move into Micro Four Thirds is that we have looked at the sensor size and realized that it cannot produce the image quality that we need. Therefore we decided to stick with the full format in addition to APS-C,” Enhardt continued. “It's all about the ratios.”

In addition, software plays a huge role in forming a modern digital camera’s final output image. It is in software that things like vignetting and sharpness can be adjusted, compensating for a lens’s weak spots. In some cases, the actual image put out by a lens is greatly distorted, often to accommodate a compact body size. It’s not until the sensor data is passed through the camera’s processing software that funhouse-mirror-looking distortions are corrected. Throw an unexpected lens into the equation, and things can get messy.

Conclusion
If you have some treasured Leica M lenses laying around gathering dust, a $270 adapter may be well worth the price to have some fun with them on a new digital Micro Four Thirds body. With their manual controls, they lend a rangefinder-like feel to a modern digital body, and can enable some nice from-the-hip shots on the street. And the optical performance, while not the same as you would see with full-frame, was certainly still very good in the images I shot.

But if you’re looking for a fixed-focal-length, fairly fast and resonably sharp lens for a new MFT camera, save yourself two thousand dollars and go with the fixed-focal-length 17mm pancake. You can also look into one of several lenses Panasnic produced to Leica specifications for the larger Four Thirds system, which you can use with another (cheaper) adapter. These two systems use the same sensor, so performance is likely to be similar.

Some further reading from our friends at Pop Photo:

Camera Test: Olympus PEN E-P2
Lens Test: Panasonic Leica D Summilux 25mm f/1.4 AF
Lens Test: Leica 14-50mm f/2.8-3.5

In Stores Soon: Graphene-Enhanced Li-ion Batteries That Charge In Minutes

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:58:00 -0400

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is working with a private firm to develop and commercialize lithium-ion battery electrodes using "Vor-x," a proprietary graphene material invented at Princeton University.

Adding small amounts of high-quality graphene to a Li-ion battery can improve its power and cycling stability without sacrificing high storage capacity, according to Vorbeck Materials, which produces the graphene. Typically, you have to choose between high capacity and quick charging ability.

Vorbeck last year became the first company to commercialize a graphene product, offering graphene-based conductive ink for use in printed electronics. The firm spun out of graphene research conducted in Princeton's Ceramic Materials Laboratory, run by Ilhan Askay, who co-invented Vor-x.

Materials scientists are tinkering with several ways to improve the storage capacity, charging/discharging speed, and safety of Li-ion batteries, but graphene battery electrodes is a new step.

Li-ion batteries work by transferring lithium ions between a cathode and an anode using a liquid electrolyte. Improved cathodes can allow more ions to transfer, which can increase the battery's storage capabilities.

Graphene, made of carbon sheets one atom thick, is prized for its conductive properties and has potential for semiconductors or electronic displays. Now it could help power those electronics, too.

Testing the Goods: Vicon Revue, a Wearable Lifeblogging Camera

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:30:36 -0400

Watch as the Vicon Revue keeps an automatic photo log of a PopSci intern's weekend in NYC

What’s New
Worn around your neck, the camera takes the pictures as you move around and enter new environments with their different levels of light, temperatures or even wind speeds. It has built-in sensors, including an infrared eye and an accelerometer, to register these changes and tell it to shoot at a rapid-fire speed of one picture per second until conditions settle.

The camera also comes with software that creates video flipbooks of the images — basically visual memory logs. The applications of the log are very practical: Think a recall aid for people with Alzheimer’s or memory loss. But for our purposes, it was an automatic life blogger. Nifty, right?

The Good
For a person like myself, with a criminally bad memory, the camera did help me remember finer details from a Mets-Yankees Subway Series game in mid-June. For instance, I’d forgotten that I’d eaten a (quite bland) BBQ chicken sandwich, subsequently washed it down with a bubble tea, and lamented my poor-sandwich choice when I spied some pulled pork during a tour of the other stadium food vendors.

The sensors, for the most part, picked up on faces I saw when I was moving around. When I walked through Times Square the Thursday before the baseball game, the camera rapidly shot pictures as I slowed down, jerked from side to side and sped up to evade ongoing foot traffic.

As for its manual-control side buttons, I have mixed feelings. Its privacy button, which when pressed prevents the camera from shooting for two minutes, helped me out when I used the bathroom. The other button, a manual shutter, did not seem to work so well; I tried to take a shot of two yoginis in the middle of Times Square, but because the camera does not have a preview screen, I couldn’t tell whether I had taken the shot. I later learned that I didn’t.

The Bad
Even though the camera’s fisheye lens is tilted slightly upward to see what your eyes do, wearing it around your neck misses a vital detail: you can turn your head without turning your whole body. At the baseball game, for example, when I leaned to the side to say something to my friends, the camera continued to point forward at the field, rather than capture the face of the person I was talking to.

On the whole, the Revue’s pictures were quite low-res and blurry, but given that it can store several days’ worth of activity, that’s a mixed bag. And, when you view them as a quick-moving slideshow, you’ll hardly have time to notice.

And forget about getting a photo of anything if you wear the camera in the dark. Take, for instance, my trip to New Haven, Conn., to attend a friend’s birthday party. All I see in the picture is darkness and the blinding glare of the streetlights, even though I remember passing by several people on way to my friend’s house.

I had planned to take shots of various other events too, such as a visit to the Guggenheim in New York. But because the camera’s battery meter was not very intuitive (a blinking green light telling that sometime within the next three hours, the camera will shut off, rather than a battery meter traditionally found on digital cameras), I did not charge the camera and thus lost the opportunity to preserve a memory.

The Price
$730 (est. import).

The Verdict
Still, the camera ultimately gets its job done—-if it takes shots before sundown, that is. With it, I remember the small details: those cues, those sandwiches that help me recall other details and complete my experiences.

Apple Press Conference Addressing iPhone's Antenna Issues Starts Now [Updated]

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:00:51 -0400

Rather than continuing to communicate only with Steve Jobs's contradictory, condescending emails, Apple has called a short-notice press conference to address the growing problem that is the iPhone 4's faulty antenna design. Will there be a recall? Free bumper cases? Follow along with one of many liveblogs (we liked Ars Technica and GDGT last time) and check back here for analysis after. Update: Apple kinda sorta admitted there is a problem, and will pay for an Apple "bumper" or another third-party case for any current iPhone 4 owner who requests one via the web.

An Impressive, Custom Underwater 3-D Camcorder Setup

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:27:58 -0400

The BS Kinetics DuoDive housing comes from German photography shop Digi-Dat and allows two LANC-compatible (a protocol for controlling cameras remotely) digital video cameras to be carefully mounted side-by-side within an airtight housing (Cheng opted for two Sony CX550V AVCHD models). A built-in LCD monitor and a few buttons positioned on the backside of the camera allow the user to operate the rig with diving gear on, although as Cheng points out on his blog, there’s no way to control exposure unless you want to rig something up yourself.

You can launch your own 3-D life aquatic for around $3,700. There’s more to the story, as well as photos of the unboxing and assembly process, on Cheng’s blog.

[Eric Cheng via engadget]

Get Your Free iPhone 4 Case Now

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:24:09 -0400

[iPhone 4 Case Program App]

Gallery: Testing Leica Optics With the Micro Four Thirds System

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:45:39 -0400