Posts Tagged ‘samsung galaxy’
Story-Review-Gallery Combo
Story
Thank heavens we’re not ‘fanboys’ and thank heavens we don’t do reviews anyway! DPReview has a short story about bogus online reviews that ‘dis’ one or another product. These fake reviews are attributed to fanboys gone bad. This news story is actually based on a bona fide academic study, Deceptive Reviews: The Influential Tail (40 pages) by Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester.
It’s an open secret that some small-time brands and sellers purchase review writers’ ‘services.’ Anderson and Simester have uncovered a dual reverse phenomenon: some self-appointed reviewers post negative reviews . . . gratis!
Briefly, the authors began with a set of reviews that were known to be genuine and another set that was known to be fake. They used syntactic and linguistic analysis over these different sets to determine whether any patterns could be found, and voila! These findings allow one to infer which review has a good chance of being a fake.
Electoral candidates well know the value of negative advertising during elections. Clearly, some ‘fanboys’ are learning well from them.
Review
Having written what we have above, we’d better not sound negative about the Samsung Galaxy S4. Fortunately, all we’re doing is concisely presenting what Daniel Bell has to say on ePHOTOzine about this android gadget.
This 13 MP smartphone camera has Full HD video and goodies like Panorama and HDR modes. Notably, it has an AMOLED display – a Samsung-LG innovation from last year.
Image quality in all its facets is not something to get too excited about; then again, there’s nothing particularly poor about it. Bell politely uses the word ‘good’ throughout this part of his review.
It edges the iPhone 5 on one score: high-res panoramas but in portraits it’s “not ideal” – they “aren’t great.” Bell awards the Galaxy S4 two 3-1/2 stars and two 4 stars in ePHOTOzine’s four essential review criteria.
Gallery
Masters of Vision is a British biennale that is due to open next month to “showcase the work of legendary master landscape photographer Joe Cornish and eight other inspirational UK landscape photographers,” reports Photography Blog.
Judging from the images on the website’s main page this exhibition is much about Ethereal Nature.
In truth this gallery is deserving of a full-length post, comprising as it does of some of the finest work of some of the country’s finest photographic artists.
Take, for instance, Joe Cornish’s incredibly captured ‘God Beams’ bathing a hilly Northern landscape, making for an image that is quite transfixing. Or David Baker’s minimalistic study of sky, waves and spume, radiating both beauty and menace.
Come to think of it, with the amazing variety and sheer number of gorgeous photographs in this gallery, why not dedicate a post exclusively to it . . . .
If this Story-Review-Gallery combo doesn’t do it for you, head over to today’s equivalent on our sister blog!
The Camera Brands’ Melting-Pot
The camera market is in a bit of a tumult – credit (or blame) Leica and Fuji for having started all the ruckus. Indeed, it’s become like a melting point with new brands arriving and old brands blending and melting into one another.
How about Samsung and Google (with its Android O.S.) entering the camera market? Samsung announced a Galaxy camera (to go with its Galaxy tablet and smartphone) at photokina.
Actually, the Galaxy camera is not a camera but a hybrid camera-smartphone device that is conceived with wireless technology and the Cloud from the ground up. Look at it from the front and it’s a camera; look at it from the back and it’s a smartphone! Samsung’s Sun Hong Lim says, “We combined the best bits of a smartphone with the best bits of a compact camera together.”
The Galaxy camera probably won’t be the finished article and may not go anywhere but it may well herald a new day for cameras – think of the applications (of this kind of ‘connected’ camera) in photojournalism, war zones, and live sports events.
Seems like the good folks at Hasselblad are feeling a bit prickly. The overwhelmingly negative reaction from industry watchers to Hassy getting hitched with Sony (which we blogged about) has provoked a defensive reaction.
Briefly, their new Lunar is basically a spruced up Sony NEX 7 but neither Hassy nor Sony want you to believe that. In a lengthy defence (published in the BJP!) that would cause any American superlawyer to roll his eyes, Luca Alessandrini and Peter Stig-Nielsen of Hasselblad make a precarious situation downright perilous. The most insightful comment is from one Simon Burgess who commented: “Shame but with the demise of Kodak it’s clear to see that no brand, no matter how iconic, is safe and hasselblad are clearly on the same slippery slope that Kodak were on a few years ago.”
Unlike Hasselblad, fellow elite brand Leica definitely has the right partner in mind. It wants to tap up Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, to design a new Leica M. The project is a little lah-de-dah, what with charity auctions and Bono involved; nevertheless, an ideas-and-design interflow between Apple and Leica has none of the discordant notes of a Hassy-Sony marriage.
P.S. Stay tuned to know more about the iCamera, coming from you-know-who.
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