Digital Camera News: Enthusiast camera round up, Nikon encryptng RAW files, Cell phone images as evidence

[Ben Stafford]

Ways to use your tax refund

According to PC Mag, one of the best things to do with your tax refund is to take advantage of dropping prices on "enthusiast" cameras.  They round up of five of these cameras, each high-quality cameras that have their own strengths. 

Canon PowerShot G6 - "...will provide top-notch images and features while leaving you with enough room in your bag for plenty of stuff..."

Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 - "...check out the long 7X optical zoom lens and anti-shake feature on the Konica Minolta DiMage A2..."

Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom - "...top choice for serious shooters, it offers excellent picture quality and good feature depth."

Nikon Coolpix 8400 - "...if you do a lot of landscape or architecture shooting, the Nikon Coolpix 8400 offers the widest-angle lens we've seen on a digital camera..."

Fujifilm Finepix S7000 Zoom - "...lets you capture images at up to 12 megapixels (interpolated)..."

Full Article

Nikon encrypting white balance data in RAW files

Reported at PhotoshopNews.com, Nikon has started encrypting the white balance data that the D2X stores when shooting in RAW mode.  In a forum posting, Thomas Knoll, chief engineer and the original author of Photoshop explained the consequences of encrypted data - third party data readers are now not able to reverse engineer the file format without fear of legal repercussions under the DMCA.

Full Article

Camera phone pictures as criminal evidence

A Supreme Court judge in North Carolina must rule on the admissability of pictures taken with a cell phone in a criminal case.  Police obtained images from Sprint taken by the cell phone of a man charged with indecent behavior (Sprint stores all images taken by phone users on their servers).  The man used the cell phone to take some pictures that the police hope to use as evidence.

This ruling may set a precedent about the use of camera phone pictures as evidence since up until now, there have been no criminal cases that have included such evidence.

[Eliwood]

Unfortunately for PC Mag, 3 of those cameras are discontinued (or about to be) and have been dropped from mainstream retailers. They should keep things more up to date than that.

[Brian]

That's the problem with print, their lead times are so far out many times the article is not relevant by the time it hits paper.