SED – or Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display – had a lot of hype back in 2004. The technology worked by using a network of tiny cathode ray tubes, with each tube representing one sub-pixel on the screen. It promised the benefits of CRT TVs, like high contrast levels, brightness and fast response times, while offering large, flat screen sizes like an LCD and drawing a lot less power than LCDs as well.

In other words, Canon and Toshiba would smash together plasma, CRT and LCD technologies, and after ditching all the crappy bits of each one, they would be left with SED.

But it was not to be. Originally slated to begin production in 2005, that date got pushed back to 2007. Both companies showed off prototypes at CES in 2006, which were lauded for their amazing picture quality. But then in December of 2006, a company called Applied Nanotech – which holds several patents for SED production – claimed that Canon had violated its licencing agreement by entering a partnership with Toshiba to build SEDs. To counteract the lawsuit, Canon bought out Toshiba’s half of their partnership company.

The court case raged on until December last year, at which point Applied Nanotech decided the legal costs weren’t worth the effort. But by that stage, the economy had changed. The GFC was in full swing, and the chances of SED TVs going into production had reduced to almost zero. Sure, there’s still a chance that one day we’ll all play Duke Nukem Forever on our glorious SED displays, but it’s not a bet I’d be willing to put money on…

History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.

Maximum PC’s how-to uses 3D picture synchronisation software called StereoData Maker, a non-volatile firmware update based on the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK).

You’ll then need to build a mounting rig and use a small enclosure (such as an Altoids tin) to build a simple USB switch remote. Free software called StereoPhoto Maker is used for post-processing. And yeah, you’ll still need a pair of red/cyan glasses. Still, it looks like fun. Full instructions at: [Maximum PC]

The app will launch tomorrow as a free download, and will work with the PIXMA MP990, MP640 and MP560 wireless all-in-one printers, letting you print photos wirelessly on your home network.

[Canon]

Boy, have zombies made a comeback lately, right along with teenage vampires. Regardless, indie zombie flick Dead Season is the self-proclaimed first film shooting on the $US1700 Canon 7D. (Warning, gore ahead.)

The camera quality is sort of a mixed bag for the bloody independent film. High-resolution coupled with gorgeous depth-of-field tricks emulate Hollywood (or at least, TV-level) production. But, while you can call me old-fashioned, blood and guts only look better in low-fi. Best of luck to the group finishing the film. These dailies from week one have some nice moments. [Thanks Super Greene!]

The hybrid IS system works best at long ranges, delivering all four stops of stabilisation Canon claims, though it ironically — given we’re talking about a macro lens here — falls short at close-ups. But more than that, “this is one of the very finest lenses we’ve seen — optically it’s superb, and operationally it works very well too, with fast and positive autofocus, and one of the most effective image-stabilisation systems currently available.” In other words, it kills the current non-L F2.8 100mm Macro.

It’ll be interesting to see this new system migrate over to other non-macro lenses. Check the full review: [DP Review]

What’s New and Dandy

What makes it my favourite Canon so far is actually everything that’s completely new to Canon — DP Review has a nice summary here in pictures. But in short, while this might sound weird, it shoots more like a Nikon than any Canon DSLR I’ve used. This is primarily because of the new 19-point autofocus system and the colour-metering system that goes with it. You’re able to select AF zones — clusters of AF points — while in the past with Canon you’ve been limited to a full AF blast or picking out a single point. The system is also more customisable, so it can be locked with different default focus points depending on whether you’re holding the camera horizontally or vertically. Against Nikon’s D300s, Canon’s new AF system mostly kept up and definitely performs better than autofocus on the 5D Mark II.

The new viewfinder now provides 100 per cent coverage, unlike previous Canons in this range, and it uses a new polymer LCD network for the graphical overlay to display AF points, grids and other displays, so it’s more flexible and feels more fluid. (It also just looks swankier, and again, more Nikon-like.) Your other viewfinder (when you’re shooting video, anyway), the LCD screen, is a 3-inch, 920k dot display like the 5D Mark II and it’s still excellent, with a wide viewing angle, nice colour and the right amount of crispness.

Sensor and Image Quality

Truthfully, I’ve been mildly surprised at the quality of photos that’ve come out of the 7D, which uses an absolutely stuffed 18-megapixel, APS-C sized sensor. (So there is a 1.6x crop factor.) For comparison, the D300s has a 12-megapixel sensor that’s the same physical size, while the D3 only goes for 12 megapixels on its bigger full-frame (35mm-equivalent) sensor. The 5D Mark II has a 21-megapixel full-frame sensor. And typically, the more pixels you try to cram on a sensor of a given size, the more the image quality degrades, especially when it comes to low light, high ISO shots.

I was expecting a noisefest, or at best, seriously noticeable noise reduction employed by the camera’s software. It is clear that Canon’s using incredibly sophisticated noise reduction algorithms with the dual Digic IV processors on board, though the effects are less drastic than I expected. It’s most apparent, actually, when you directly compare photos taken with the D300s. Looking at photos taken with the 7D and D300s at 100 per cent crops, the D300s’s images are noisier, but they also preserve more detail. For web-sized images, the 7D’s images look better, with less noise and more smoothness.

Video

You can get sense of Canon and Nikon’s philosophical differences with the difference in their buttons for video: Canon makes a distinction between Live View and video mode, while Nikon is ready to start shooting video as soon you tap the live view button on the D300s. Creating video is a separate, dedicated event for Canon, in other words, and there is a semi-serious video camera that happens to be built into a DSLR. Nikon’s D300s, on the other hand, is a DSLR that happens to shoot video.

With video, the 7D simply has the upper hand — video is very much a legitimised use of this camera, not a secondary one like the D300s. (As expected from a company with an entire wing dedicated to camcorders for pros and consumers.) Not only does it have full manual controls, I find that it’s slightly easier to use the D300s while shooting video — not to mention the whole shooting in a real video codec at 1080p, yadda yadda. Three clips here: A melange of video above, and then by two videos, one from the 7D, one of the D300s, that mirror each other. Both were shot at ISO 6400, and you should be able to catch them at full res if you click over to Vimeo.

Build and Controls

The 7D is heavy, heavier than the 5D, but it’s also slightly sturdier, with a build quality and weatherproofing that’s slightly in between the 5D and Canon’s definitely pro 1D. It feels about the same in your hand, though. And it’s roughly comparable to the D300s.

Controls aren’t radically different from other Canon DSLRs of this calibre — that is, it’s what you’d mostly expect from a DSLR that sits in between the lower end 50D and the higher end 5D MK II, though it’s a bit closer to the latter. While the menu system feels completely unchanged — leaving more advanced features, like the orientation autofocus a bit inscrutable — a few things are new on the outside: The power switch is up on the top left, under the mode dial; there’s a dedicated button for switching to RAW/JPEG; a quick action button; and a new toggle switch for Live View and video, which you engage by pressing a start button in the centre.

You Already Know If You’re Going to Buy This

The real question for Canon users who want something more than the lower end 50D is whether they go for the 7D, at $US1700, or full bore to full-frame with the $US2700 5D Mark II. The 7D has a 1.6x crop factor which is useful for sports, a better autofocusing system, shoots faster, is slightly more rugged, and is $US1000 cheaper. The 5D is full frame — which I suspect is the real consideration for folks — and takes slightly better photos at higher resolutions.

Obviously, if you’re locked into Nikon, with thousands of dollars in lenses, you’re not going to jump to Canon, or vice versa. But Canon’s dedication to DSLR video is proving formidable in carving out a new kind of market that Nikon might have some trouble competing in, since they’re a dedicated still-camera company, not a video company, too, like Canon. Really, both the D300s and 7D deliver for the money, though I think the 7D delivers more, since it’s packed full of newer technology and for the people who want it, the video component is truly killer. Either way, it’s proof that competition is good — it clearly wouldn’t exist without the D300, and the D400 will be that much better because of it.

New 19-point autofocus and metering systems plus the new viewfinder rock

Excellent 1080p video with full manual controls

Not full-frame, which might put off some people

I’d like a secondary SD card slot, like the D300s

Noise reduction can get pretty aggressive at higher ISO speeds, obscuring detail

Sex and Brains

It’s got the same spacious image sensor as the G11—1/1.7-inch as opposed to 1/2.5-inch like most point-and-shoots. But instead of being built into a Panzer tank, it’s in the body of a hot German model. It’s an actual point-and-shoot: It fits in the pocket of your skinny jeans, but delivers, for the most part, the same wow image quality.

I wish it was slightly more square with sharper angles for an even more classic aesthetic, but it’s still pretty classy looking. The texture, which makes for half of the appeal, makes it a little slippery. The control ring around the lens is like the perfect scarf that ties it altogether. And despite being a bantam-weight shooter, it feels more solid than most cameras its size.

Lord of the Ring

What makes the camera really work is that control ring wrapped around the lens. By default, when you turn it, it adjusts the main setting for each mode — aperture in aperture priority, shutter speed in shutter priority, you get the idea. Using the ring function button on top of the camera, you can set the ring to adjust almost whatever parameter you want though, like white balance, ISO, exposure, even specific zoom intervals.

Truthfully, using the dial never feels completely seamless, because of way you’re forced to hold the camera. As a result of its pint size, there’s no completely natural hand or finger posture for spinning the ring. But, the control it manages to put at your fingertips is remarkable: In manual mode, I had aperture mapped to the main ring, exposure set to the control ring on the back (which, like the G11, is a little too small to have a settings d-pad stuffed in the centre of it) and ISO speed mapped to the shortcut button. The only real issue with that setup is that the ISO setting interface lags behind your input occasionally, so you sometimes overshoot the ISO speed you wanted.

Just a Little More Hardware Talk

There’s no viewfinder, so you’re stuck using the screen exclusively. The LCD is a little bigger than the G11’s, at three inches, though it uses the same number of pixels and obviously doesn’t swivel out. It too is easily viewable in sunlight, though I found a more of a difference, exposure-wise, between what I thought I shot according to the display and what I later saw on my computer, than I noticed with the G11. Also, there’s no flash hot shoe, like you get with the G11.

The battery’s small, obviously, so your picture taking is capped at a little over 200 shots, according to Canon. My days of shooting didn’t contradict that, for better or for worse—I’d get to half battery after around 100 shots and a couple video clips.

Finally the Photos (and Video)

Since it’s the same 10-megapixel image sensor as the G11, yes, you do get just about the same fantastic image quality, solid low-light performance (noise doesn’t start really kicking in til ISO 800, and even that’s totally usable for most stuff) and ability to shoot in RAW. The main difference is in the lens. The S90 has a faster lens that’ll shoot at F/2 wide open, meaning you rely less on that high ISO—up to 3200—to compensate for the lack of light. The oh-so-small price for this incredibly fast lens is that you lose a bit of zoom, since it goes out to 105mm, vs. the G11’s 140mm, but who cares? I can’t reiterate how big of a deal a lens like this is on this kind of point-and-shoot. That said, I seemed to get photos that were a touch less sharp than what I got on the G11.

Here’s a gallery of some stuff I shot, which you can compare to G11 sample photos and ISO tests (spoiler, they look great):

The video’s still 640×480, and still quite good too:

Buy If You Need a Tiny-But-Great Camera

I know, it’s $US430 — way more than most point-and-shoots cost in this day and age. But the amount of picture power this literally slips into your pocket is almost unbelievable: Outstanding low-light performance for a camera this size; a speedy lens; full control rings, plural; and yep, RAW. It’s the soul of what makes the $US500 behemoth G11 great, packaged in a true point-and-shoot. You lose some power and some pro tools, like the swivel screen, a (shitty) viewfinder, faster burst shooting, hot shoe, some zoom and a custom mode or two, but you’re also shedding a ton of bulk, meaning you’ll actually take it everywhere. And the best camera’s always the one you have with you—for me, that’s this camera, which just happens to be an excellent one all by itself.

G11’s awesome image sensor plus a fastfastfast lens means awesome photos

Looks like a serious little camera (it is)

Did I mention I love this camera?

Control ring can feel awkward

More battery life and 720p video would be nice

[Canon]

Hurlbut is shooting a project based on Navy SEALs, and the trailer (of sorts; it’s mostly an awful lot of bikini’d ladies) is shot with a mix of digital and film photography, using the digital Canon 5D MKII and Sony 950 as well as the Arri 235 film camera. He created kind of a contest to see who could pick out the digital shots from the film in the trailer (most is digital, shot with the 5D MKII) — it’s way harder than you’d think, not least because the dude is clearly an expert. His wide-angle shots of a yacht and close-ups of bikini-clad ladies may look like the intro to a Puff Daddy music video (sing it with me: BEEN AROUND THE WORLD AND AYAYAY), but it is shockingly gorgeous and I’m hard-pressed to be able to tell the difference between digital and film. Check out the video here, and enter his contest here. [Shane Hurlbut via Vincent LaForet]

The G11 is Canon’s top-of-the-line point-and-shoot. It occupies a sorta strange spot, towering over the average point-and-shoot in basically every metric—image quality, size, weight and price—but sits just below entry-level DSLRs and more recently, micro four thirds cameras.

So, there are two ways to look at the G11: It’s an amazing street camera. More discreet than a DSLR, but more powerful than a run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot. You can’t stuff it in your jeans pocket, but that’s fine, because you want to sling it over your shoulder anyways. The other way is that you can buy a more versatile entry-level DSLR that’s not much larger for around the same price, especially if you step back a generation or so.

It’s all about your priorities.

H-h-h-h-hardware

Everything about this camera is just — solid. The full-metal jacket makes it feel indestructible, while the shape evokes the classic cameras you feel like you’re supposed to be taking photos with. It’s thick, remarkably so, in part because of the flip-out swivel LCD screen. And it’s definitely more along the lines of a rangefinder-style camera than a typical point-and-shoot.

The real magic of this camera lies in the dedicated control dials. You’ll find three on top — exposure compensation, ISO speed and shooting mode. They feel cramped and tiny at first, but the snap they make as as you rotate them is surprisingly deep and satisfying. Having these settings at your fingers at all times is so much of why the G11 feels like a camera that’s a step above point-and-shoots, a tool for creating photographs.

The back dial is the most frustrating part of controlling the camera — a ring surrounds a four-way d-pad with a button in the centre. Ultimately, you wind up pressing buttons on the d-pad when you’re trying to rotate the dial to adjust shutter speed or aperture, or simply pressing the wrong button because it’s so small. The menu system, otherwise, is a pretty standard Canon setup, which looks a lot like the G10’s — it’s not dead simple, but it’s not overly complicated either, and a couple minutes of fiddling will reveal all of its secrets.

The viewfinder is utterly depressing. I want to use it, badly. It just feels intrinsically wrong to hold a camera of this calibre out in front of me to shoot, not up to my eyeball. Meanwhile, the G11’s viewfinder is so small, and the coverage is so bad (you can see the lens through it!), that it’s nigh useless, like trying to compose through a pinhole.

One of the shooting modes, quickshot, sounds like a good idea on paper, but is ruined by this viewfinder. The camera constantly adjusts parameters while waiting for you to take the photo, so you can fire off instantly without worrying about missing the shot. Unfortunately, you have to use the minuscule viewfinder in quickshot, and I wound up botching far more photos than I did nailing them.

So, you’re pretty trapped to using the decent flip-out swivel LCD display. Honestly, I probably would’ve preferred the static-but-larger 3-inch version on the G10, to the 2.8-inch, 461,000-dot display on the G11.

The LCD is really bright, though, and perfectly usable in direct sunlight with a wide viewing angle to boot. But the video feed is not quite crisp enough on it to use it for manual focusing — in this mode, a zoomed in box appears in the centre of the display as you spin the back dial to bring it into focus. The experience of focusing becomes a bad iPhone game.

Can we talk about the photos please?

With the G11, Canon pulled the bold manoeuvre of cutting megapixels—to 10, from 14 on the G10—in order to get better quality and low-light performance. It was the right move. Low-light images are definitely improved, and more detail is preserved up through ISO 800. Shots at ISO 1600 are definitely usable at web resolutions, which is pretty impressive for a compact camera. You should stay away from the special “low light” shooting mode though, which cuts the size of pictures in half to try to extract every ounce of light possible — it produced uniformly bad pictures.

The G11 has a wide-angle zoom lens with the same basic specs as the G10, starting at 28mm and going up to 140mm, which is versatile enough to shoot just about anything you’d want. I’m not sure, however, if it corrects some of the problems at the wide-end with the macro mode, though, since I didn’t have a G10 to compare it with.

G11 ISO Test Shots

The runthrough of the ISO range goes a couple ways — on programmed auto, letting the camera figure out what to make of the ISO setting I picked, and then another set where I dictated shutter speed, so you can see how much you gain (or lose, depending on your point of view) as you ratchet up the ISO setting.

G11 Sample Photos

Like past G series cameras, you can shoot in RAW, but if you do, you’re stuck with using Canon’s software to process it for the time being.

In a world where phones and gadgets the size of a jumbo pack of Juicy Fruit gum shoot 720p, the fact that video’s limited to 640×480 resolution on such a stacked camera gets a big frowny face. But, the video the G11 produces at that resolution is generally excellent (just compare to the video-shootin’ iPod nano). That’s because it’s packed with data — the bitrate averages around 10Mbps, which is more than the Flip Mino HD, at 9Mbps for 720p video. Sure, 720p out of this would be nice, but I’d take VGA video that looks great over HD video that looks like crap.

OK, but do I buy it?

I like this camera a lot. It’s what I’d reach for whenever I wouldn’t feel like tugging along a honkin’ DSLR, and I’d feel like I wasn’t sacrificing too much. The real question, I think, is how it stacks up against Panasonic’s Lumix LX3, which is in the same demographic—a lauded $US500 point-and-shoot—and outgunned the G10 in many respects (though the G10 tried to cram 14 megapixels onto the same-sized sensor the G11 only squeezes 10 megapixels onto). The slightly cheaper S90 offers the same sensor as the G11 as well, and inside of a pocketable body — though you lose perks like the dedicated control dials and a viewfinder, as far as that’s a perk on the G11.

If you do buy the G11, you won’t regret it — you’ll be too busy taking pictures.

Photographs are top-notch for a compact camera

Solid low-light performance

Built to smash into people’s spaces and live to smash again

It’s huge

The viewfinder is basically useless