Saturday, April 08, 2006

ViewFinder

In photography a ViewFinder is what the photographer looks through to compose, and in many cases to focus, the picture.

Viewfinders are widely used in cameras of different types: still and movie, film, analog and digital.

Viewfinders can be optical and electronic. An optical viewfinder is simply a reversed telescope. It has many drawbacks, but one advantage: it consumes no power. An electronic viewfinder is a CRT, LCD or OLED based display device. In addition to its primary purpose, an electronic viewfinder can be used to replay previously captured material and usually has on-screen display.

It is not uncommon for a camera to have two viewfinders. Here are two examples:

1. A digital still camera may have an optical viewfinder and an electronic (usually LCD or OLED based) one. The latter can be used to replay previously captured material, has on-screen display, and can be switched off to save power.

2. A camcorder may have two viewfinders, both are electronic. One of them is monochrome, CRT-based and has an ocular. The other viewfinder is color, LCD-based and is much larger. Both can be used to replay previously captured material, have on-screen display, but the second, large viewfinder is more power hungry, so it is made possible to turn it off to save power.

Some special purpose cameras do not have viewfinders at all. These are, for example, web cameras and video surveillance cameras. They use external monitors as their viewfinders
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posted at 10:25 AM links to this post

Monday, April 03, 2006

Autostitch - panorama pictures without any user input

Autostitchâ„¢ is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).


Autostitch is now available in the following commercial products:

* Autopano Pro www.autopano.net
* Serif PanoramaPlus2 www.serif.com
* Calico www.kekus.com (Mac OS X)
The University of British Columbia has also granted a commercial license to Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) www.ilm.com, a Lucasfilm Ltd. company, to use Autostitch software to produce panoramas for film production

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
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posted at 9:58 AM links to this post