Remember this amazing travel mug shaped like a camera lens that Canon handed out to press at the Olympics? Well, now you can pre-order one for yourself for a mere $30 CAD. Sweet! [ Vistek via DoobyBrain via The Daily What ] More

We had a hunch that Pentax was readying a 645 Digital , and sure enough, the company has come clean with that very camera today. The May-bound 40 megapixel 645D is a medium format beast, but unlike similar options from Hasselblad , this one won’t actually destroy your hopes of sending four generations of offspring to college. Boasting a 44mm x 33mm sensor, a 3-inch rear LCD and a virtually indestructible chassis, this monster promises high res images that only pros can appreciate, and there’s a pair of SD / SDHC card slots for those who love to surround themselves with options. You’ll also get a newly designed 11-point AF sensor, a fresh dust removal system, 77-segment multi-pattern metering system and a battery good for around 800 images when fully charged. ‘Course, with a retail price of

Those press covering the Olympics sure do have a plum life. They bundle off to Vancouver for 16 days of watching ice-skaters embarrassing themselves , and ruthless Russian bobsledders showing their dark sides. Oh, and they get lens-shaped thermoses. The story goes that a Microsoft employee by the name of Josh Weisberg wandered into the Canon press tent at the Olympic Press Center, and got given a 70-200mm Canon L-series lens. Or so he thought, probably tucking it safely in his backpack before Canon realized they had gifted him a lens instead of a branded pen or hat.

Implanted lenses may be old hat compared to newfangled sight restoration techniques involving radiation beams and teeth , but it looks like some eye surgeons in the UK have now come up with a few new tricks that promise to let patients see better than ever. The new process apparently starts out like a standard procedure for cataracts, but makes use of lenses made from light-sensitive silicone that can be fine tuned several times after the surgery, eventually giving the patient “HD vision” that’s said to be better than 20/20. The lenses can apparently even be adjusted for either bifocal or varifocal use, eliminating the need for some patients to wear glasses at all. Head on past the break for a video. [Thanks, Esevila] Continue reading Artificial lens implant promises to give patients ‘HD vision’ Artificial lens implant promises to give patients ‘HD vision’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:37:00 EST

We’ve thought before how nice it might be to have some powers of magnification on the iPhone’s cam… but are we going to go out and mod our unit? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t admire someone else’s work. Taking various lenses and attaching them to the lid of a jar, the modder quite carefully built a contraption that looks a little “hobo Steampunk” to us, but we’re still fairly impressed with this little gadget.

Bokeh, which is the out-of-focus light distortion in the background of a photo, is more and more seen as an aesthetic element of photography. This lens brings it more attention by shaping those blurs into stars, hearts, and more. The Bokeh Filter is a physical lens that attaches to any mainstream DSLR and blocks out small pieces of light to create the desired patterns. Changing the cool blurry streetlights behind your ladyfriend into hearts? Cheesetastic

Here’s a potentially cheap, but ugly, way to make a macro lens for your cellphone camera. Step 1: take your DVD player apart. You’ll want to use the lens in there, along with some kind of cardboard holder, and mount it onto your cellphone camera. It won’t be pretty, but the shots that come out will (provided everything you’re shooting from now on is within an inch of your camera). [ Flickr via DIY Photography via MAKE ]

Sony’s a850 DSLR, which looks exactly like the a900, was found lurking in a European online shop both by itself and with a lens kit. The bad part? It might be quite a bit more than the suspected $2,000. Photorumors, who caught the camera, isn’t releasing the name of the shop in hopes of wringing some more information out of them, but the a805 was priced at EUR 2,000, which means about $2,860—much more than the $2,000 we all thought the DSLR would cost.

Over at Instructables, user Banjomaster shows how to make a fisheye lens for his Nikon D90 for just $16, with the help of one of those wide-angle doorway peephole lenses. The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. It looks like a pretty simple mod, both in materials required and construction method: It only needs a couple pieces of particle board, the aforementioned peephole lens, the spare lens shield that came with his camera, and of course some duct tape. The only possible caveat: The replacement wide-angle lens is significantly smaller than the camera’s lens, so there’s a circle around all of the shots. On the other hand, it’s sort of cool; it makes everything look like you shot it through a hotel door.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute — partnered with project HYPOLED — have created an OLED mini projector prototype for mobile phones. Unlike many previous iterations of similar technologies, this new prototype doesn’t need an additional illumination system, instead relying on a lens system to project images produced by an OLED onto a screen or wall — making it both smaller and more energy efficient. The prototype currently displays a monochrome image with a brightness of 10,000 candelas per square meter, and color images with a brightness of about half of that. The lenses are also made of glass at this point, though cheaper and simpler plastic ones are in the works. No word on when we might see these prototypes hitting the streets in actual projector phones, though. [Via Gizmag ] Filed under: Displays OLED mini projector prototype for mobile phones using a series of lenses developed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:19:00 EST