Tag: Optical

Pentax adds a new digital compact camera to its RZ series. Featuring a slim, lightweight body, the Pentax Optio RZ18 offers a powerful 18x optical zoom lens covering focal lengths from 25mm wide angle to 450mm super-telephoto.

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2010) Bowerbird males are well known for making elaborate constructions, lavished with decorative objects, to impress and attract their mates. Now, researchers reporting online on September 9 in Current Biology, have identified a completely new dimension to these showy structures in great bowerbirds.
The birds create a staged scene, only visible from the point of view of their female audience, by placing pebbles, bones, and shells around their courts in a very special way that can make objects (or a bowerbird male) appear larger or smaller than they really are.

Varioptic, the liquid lens company, announced that it has developed its first liquid lens.
The Varioptic A316S offering Optical Image Stabilization functionality to camera phones. Varioptics Autofocus (AF) liquid lenses are used in consumer, medical and industrial devices ranging from full HD DV camcorders, bar code readers, security cameras, dental cameras to machine vision cameras.
Liquid lenses have been in production since January 2007 and more recently, ramping mass production, with Japanese partner Seiko Instruments Inc. Varioptic has finalized the next generation of Optical Image Stabilization liquid lenses, correcting handshake.

Discover the HD difference. With the classically stylish PowerShot SX20 IS, you can produce magnificent HD movies and dazzling photos. Loaded with features, its got a high-powered 20x wide-angle optical zoom with Optical Image Stabilizer, 12.1 megapixels, a big 2.5-inch Vari-Angle LCD, Blink Detection and more.

The PowerShot SX20 IS is equipped with many of the same features as a higher-end camera: an ultra-powerful zoom, eye-popping resolution and advanced picture-improving technology. 12.1 megapixels of resolution gives your photography incomparable depth and ensures that any section of any shot can be enlarged and cropped with no loss in quality when you edit the image even if you choose to print the image. It can create crisp, clear 13 x 19-inch posters.

Since digital cameras were first developed in the late 1980s, sensor resolution has increased continuously every year, and almost every new camera or update of an existing model has featured a more powerful sensor.
However there's a point at which simply adding more megapixels ceases to have any real benefit, and in fact can have a negative effect.
Cramming more photocells onto a tiny compact camera sensor means those photocells have to be smaller, and are therefore less efficient at capturing light, especially at low light levels, leading to reduced dynamic range and more noise at higher ISO settings.

3x optical zoom lens with Optical Image Stabilizer
Canons commitment to innovation defines the excitement of the PowerShot SD780 IS Digital ELPH. 12.1-megapixel resolution is more than a number, its your cutting-edge link to the outstanding clarity and quality youve always wanted in your images. Think bold and big, because razor-sharp oversized prints are a breeze.
Get the picture? Its absolutely brilliant.

Dye-sensitized cells get a double boost from nanowires and optical fiber.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are flexible and cheap to make, but they tend to be inefficient at converting light into electricity. One way to boost the performance of any solar cell is to increase the surface area available to incoming light. So a group of researchers at Georgia Tech has made dye-sensitized solar cells with a much higher effective surface area by wrapping the cells around optical fibers. These fiber solar cells are six times more efficient than a zinc oxide solar cell with the same surface area, and if they can be built using cheap polymer fibers, they shouldn't be significantly more expensive to make.