Inkless Photo Printers Coming Sunday

This Sunday, Polaroid will introduce its new inkless printer that uses technology from Zink Imaging, according to the VentureBeat blog:

Zink, whose name means “zero ink,” has talked about its innovative technology for some time. It basically embeds chemical dyes inside paper. It passes the paper through a heater, which melts the dyes in the right places to create images on a piece of paper.

The advantages seem clear. Printers could be smaller, because you wouldn't need to have an ink delivery system in the machine. You also wouldn't run out of ink.

However, the cons also seem obvious. The paper will be more expensive and, for the time being, you won't have a choice of supplier. That is likely to reduce the flexibility you can have in interpreting images by using the paper whose characteristics seem closest to what you envisioned.

Memory Chip Field Test in the News

A woman who had forgotten her camera only to find it stolen when she went back to look for it found that the memory chip inside phoned home. According to the Associated Press story, Alison DeLauzon was on vacation in Florida when the camera went missing. But she had used an Eye-Fi SD memory chip that was Wi-Fi enabled. When the thieves walked by an unencrypted Wi-Fi connection, the chip sent back the pictures she had taken - and the ones the criminal duo, both employees at the restaurant where she had left the camera, took of one another. She did get the camera back. Talk about a lucky break for her ... and an unexpected marketing boost for Eye-Fi.

Minimal Lighting Blog

I just heard about this - Strobist is a blog by a pro photographer about how to make due with small flash units instead of investing in studio-type units that are big and heavy. It's worth checking out.

DIY High-Speed Photography

I came across DIYPhotography.net, which focuses on how to create your own equipment for photography. Here's a post, with links to information on pulling it off, on how to take high-speed photos. Might as well pick up a few points and then see what else you can learn.

Eyeglass Camera

Boingboing posted about $100 remote controlled 1.3 megapixel camera that fits onto a regular pair of glasses. It's going to get hard to keep people from snapping pictures in all sorts of restricted areas.

Book Review: Low Budget Shooting

When I requested a review copy of Low Budget Shooting: Do It Yourself Solutions to Professional Photo Gear by German photographer and designer Cyrill Harnischmacher, I was hoping to see something useful. I was first taken aback by the thinness of the volume - 72 pages with a hardback cover and paper thickness that only seemed to emphasize the lack of wider content. And yet when I flipped through, I realized that the $19.95 price was something a photographer could recoup multiple times in a single project. Just learning to create a custom soft box out of maybe $10 or $20 worth of material - without needing much in the way of skills or tools - is a money saver. You can learn to pretty easily make reflectors of all sizes, diffusers for a hand-held flash unit, even a table with continuous background for shooting products. There seems to be a bias toward table-top and close-up work, but the techniques he suggests are actually a jumping-off point. For example, you could adapt the soft box construction to a studio flash, or even series of flashes, or create large area reflectors using thin PVC pipes instead of fiberglass tubing. If you have the slightest inclination toward do-it-yourself projects, then this will give you great suggestions for building and improvising a lot of your own equipment without going broke in the process.