2006/08/03

Canon announces compact HD camera

Canon's HV10 is smaller than Sony's HDR-HC3. It only weighs 500g including battery and tape (normal MiniDV type tapes, though data is stored in HDV format).

It supports 1080i at 1,920 pixels by 1,080 resolution.

It's expected to ship n September in the UK, though no UK pricing has been announced. In Japan it will cost £700.

nVidia launches beta program for Gelato

Gelato is nVidia's high end rendering package. The new version will plug into Maya and 3D Studio Max.

It off-loads rendering directly to nVidia graphics cards (which are optimised to do that kind of work anyway) rather than running on the hosts general purpose CPU.

If anyone has used the MAXtreme plugin for 3DS, the realtime rendering is pretty well real-time, compared to the output renderer which can take hours. Gelato will offer the same sort of speeds for final rendering.

Gelato has been speeded-up while using less memory than earlier versions.

Sony introduces GPS unit

Sony's GPS-CS1 is a portable 7cm unit that the user is expected to wear. It tracks their location and timestamps it every 15 minutes into memory (31MB i..e about 15 days worth). The unit runs of a single AA battery which lasts about 10 hours.

When using's Sony software on the PC, it then matches the GPS data to the timestamp taken from the EXIF data with the photo so can store the location.

It will cost about $150 in the US and Japan when launched in September, no European plans have been announced.

Monotype acquires Linotype

The two largest font foundries have combined forces, though they'll still maintain their seperate identities for now.

Linotype brings 6,000 fonts including Helvetica, Frutiger and Optima to the Monotype stable. They will keep all the independent designers working through their sites.

2006/07/31

NUKE is free

D2 have released a free version of the NUKE compositing tool. It only supports output of up to 640 x 480 and it's watermarked.

This is definately a trend whereby companies are releasing cut-down or even complete systems based on their very expensive commercial counterparts.

HP goes Duo

HP has introduced a workstation (xw4400) which is based around the Intel 975X Express chipset.

It can utilise the Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme CPUs. The Due goes to 2.66GHz and the Extgreme 2.93GHz.

The workstations support up to 8GB of RAM, PCI Express graphics and serial attached SCSI.

Pricing from £700+ +VAT