If you go outside on August 22^nd and start waving at the sky for a few consecutive months*, chances are you might be able to spot yourself on Google Maps in the near future.

On that date, Virginia-based company GeoEye will launch the GeoEye-1 satellite from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. When it reaches its orbit, GeoEye-1 will start snapping photos of Earth - and it will do so fast.  The satellite can take high-resolution photos of an area the size of Texas within a day.

GeoEye-1, holding an ultra high-resolution digital camera attached to a massive telescope, will be able to take clear images of objects just 20 inches across - a huge improvement over Google Earth’s current 3-foot resolution. At this resolution, we should soon be able to see the shapes of people in online maps - but still not license plates. Read more »

Samsung has announced an 8 MP CMOS camera module that it claims to be the thinnest of its kind, measuring a tiny 8.5 mm thin.

Notable features of the new module include anti-shake, a 1 cm macro, face tracking technology, and a smile shutter feature that knows to snap a picture when it detects people smiling.

The company expects the new module to replace the 5 MP cameras found in today’s high-end camera phones by the end of the year.

Cell phone cameras are quickly catching up to today’s digital cameras, which will probably become extinct in a matter of years. It seems that putting all sorts of gadgets in one box is the way to go these days, so if you are thinking of buying a new camera hold off for a few months and buy one of the 8 MP cell phones when they are released.

Researchers at Stanford University have invented a chip which can take pictures in 3D. Besides being able to reassemble the 3D image into a normal 2D photograph that we all know and love, the researchers can also figure out distances of objects in the photo.

The chip works by overlapping small 16×16-pixel patches, called subarrays, each hiding under its own lens. After a photo is taken, special software then analyzes it looking for small location differences for the same element in different patches. Based on this information the software is able to extrapolate the distance from one object to another at the time the photo was taken. Read more »

Polaroid has announced their Zero Ink mini-printer device, meant for printing digital camera issues quickly on the fly via USB or Bluetooth. The printer uses no ink whatsoever, and prints out borderless 2×3 images with a sticky backing, so you can gleefully put them up on walls and anywhere else.

The Zero Ink technology, dubbed ZINK, uses heat to produce an image on special paper, which Polaroid describes as “an advanced composite material with embedded yellow, magenta and cyan dye crystals, activated with 200 million heat pulses, in 30 seconds, in a single pass…With 100 billion crystals in a 2×3in print, the paper is 100% inkless.”

The printer has a scheduled release date of June in the UK, but no mention of a US release date yet.

According to Canon’s new patent application, we could be seeing cameras that automatically watermark images soon.

The filing details a “Registration” mode on cameras that would take a snapshot of your iris and use that unique information as a watermark. The photographer would select this mode, look into the viewfinder for a moment so that the camera can scan his eye, and then take photos as usual. Up to five users would be supported.

The system would embed the metadata in batches to avoid slowing down the camera. It could also be modified to set up a verification code instead of a watermark, keeping the image quality intact.

It sounds like professional photographers could benefit from a system like this, but for the average Joe it probably wouldn’t do much good.

[Via Engadget, Photography Bay]

Canon and Casio have been looking into Microsoft’s JPEG XR format recently, and have decided that it makes a good middle ground between regular JPEG and camera RAW. The format has a much higher quality than JPEG, in addition to better compression. It allows a camera to fire off a lot of high quality shots quickly, without needing the horsepower to handle large RAW images.

This will undoubtedly create a generaton of cheaper, better cameras, and we love to see cheaper and better in the same sentence.