FujiFilm E500 - Manual (Page 8)

What’s New?
What’s Next?
With technology evolving at a break-
neck pace, yesterday’s cutting-edge
enhancement is today’s standard
equipment, and features only available
now in top-of-the-line products will
appear in affordably-priced models in
just a few months. What can you look
forward to in the next year as digital
hardware and software get ever more
powerful and less expensive? Here are a
few exciting developments to watch for.
More megapixels, less money. Eight-
megapixel cameras costing thousands
of dollars as recently as a year ago are
finally dipping below the thousand-
dollar mark, as in the extremely
popular Canon D-Rebel. Look for
competition to drive prices on these
high-resolution cameras lower as pro-
level cameras increase their power (as
in Fujifilm’s FinePix S3 Pro with a
dazzling 12.3 MP sensor). And as these
cameras make high-quality but
memory-gobbling images available to
more shooters, look for memory card
prices to drop precipitously as well.
Already, a 32-megabyte card that might
have cost $75 a year ago can be had for
$10 or less.
New color-improving technologies. The
latest development in digital camera
sensors: a three-layered system that
captures the red, green and blue
components of an image separately (as
color film does) rather than in a
mosaic of color sensors (as most
digital cameras currently do). The
result? Cleaner, more true-to-life color
and less “fringing,” or color distortion
in high-contrast areas of a photo.
Home-printed photos that outlast
prints from a lab.
All major printer
manufacturers now offer inks that,
when stored in an acid-free album,
resist damage from moisture, fading,
and color-shifting for up to twice as
long as lab-printed photos. Look for
names such as Epson DuraBrite and HP
Pigmented UV Inks when choosing
printer inks to guarantee high-quality
prints and matchless longevity.
Fixing photos in a flash. Not only do
today’s photo editing programs come
with more built-in fixes for common
problems (such as red eye, “pet eye”
and imperfect exposure), but many
new cameras and printers are getting
in on the act. Hewlett-Packard’s
PhotoSmart R707 camera (see Product
Picks chart for more information)
offers red-eye removal when a photo is
taken or processed, or at any time after
you’ve gotten the shot. Look for more
cameras and printers to get in on the
act, especially as direct camera-to-
printer printing becomes more
popular. Photo editing software won’t
be left behind, though. Check out
powerful new retouching features like
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3’s Healing
Brush. And many new scanners now
automatically detect and repair
damage to scanned images; Epson’s
Perfection 4870, featuring Digital ICE
technology, is just one that makes
fixing heritage photos as simple as
pressing a button.
simplescr apbooksmag.com 29
picture this
Kristie Wickland