Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!среда, 30 декабря 2009 г.
четверг, 10 декабря 2009 г.
Anything3D News!
Hello and good day to you!
Christmas is coming and the companies set discounts for their products. Anything 3D Corp. sets the unbelievable discounts for their software!
Please, feel free to visit the home website www.Anything3D.com and see the great discounts of the A3D Christmas Sale!
Christmas is coming and the companies set discounts for their products. Anything 3D Corp. sets the unbelievable discounts for their software!
Please, feel free to visit the home website www.Anything3D.com and see the great discounts of the A3D Christmas Sale!
вторник, 24 ноября 2009 г.
Vail Tech: Stitch panoramas with free software
Hi, World!
VAIL, Colorado — While Colorado's state motto, Nil Sine Numine (nothing without the Deity), may have been appropriate back in the 1860s when it was first adopted, my personal motto for Colorado has always been “Photographer's Paradise,” and for good reason.
With the majestic vistas and beautiful people that make up Colorado, you don't need to look far to find a tourist (or local) with their camera in hand, snapping off a few photos.
Colorado is so filled with beautiful landscapes and scenery that, while it's never difficult to find something worthy of being photographed, it can often be challenging to capture entire scenes within one camera frame. In the week's Tech Bytes, I'm going to show you how to make breathtaking panoramas in six easy steps with your digital camera and a free software program called AutoStitch.
1. Shoot
The first step in creating a panorama is to start shooting. All of my panoramas have been made with a simple, point-and-shoot digital camera set on the panorama scene mode. I prefer that mode because it remembers the aperture and ISO settings of the first photograph in the sequence, which helps keep the lighting of the photos balanced. Digital SLR cameras are even better, when used at the same manual settings for each frame in the sequence.
2. Rotate
When taking the photos to be stitched, be sure there is quite a bit of overlap from one photo to the next and try to keep all of the photos rotated around the same axis. To do this, I recommend using a tripod, hiking pole, fence post, or anything stable that you can rest the camera on. Also note that with AutoStitch you are not limited to one row of photos, so feel free to angle up and down from the fixed point as well, and capture as many rows of photos as you'd like.
3. Download
After you've shot the photos and downloaded them to your computer, you'll want to download the AutoStitch software. It can be found by going online, and then clicking on the link at the top to “Download (Windows demo).”
Don't be put off by the word demo, it's an amazing piece of software, and the demo designation keeps it free for now. As a side note, there is currently no Mac version available, so you will need to run this software on a PC with Windows. There is, however, an iPhone app of AutoStitch available.
4. Organize
It's easiest if you make a new folder for each panorama somewhere on your computer, and copy just the photos that are going to make up each panorama into those folders.
5. Set up Autostitch
Each time you launch AutoStitch, the first thing you'll want to do is open the Edit > Options menu. In this menu, there are only two options that I change. The first is to select the “Scale” button under Output Size, and set your output size in percent. If you ever receive an “out of memory” error while stitching, reduce this number.
The second change is to the very last option in the bottom-right corner, the one marked “JPEG Quality.” I put this at 100 for full quality. Everything else I leave the same.
6. Stitch
To get started stitching, go to the File menu and select “Open.” From the browser window, select the folder that you made in step four. Select all of the photos in the folder by hitting Control and the letter A. Once all the photos for the panorama are selected, hit the open button.
Viola, that's all there is to it. AutoStitch will create and name the new panorama pano.jpg and places it in the same folder that you selected earlier. Now, using your favorite photo editing tool, you can crop the overlap off the photo, or leave it on for a neat effect. Enjoy.
As for me - I use A3D Stitcher and A3D Panorama Assistant. I'm fully satisfied with it.
VAIL, Colorado — While Colorado's state motto, Nil Sine Numine (nothing without the Deity), may have been appropriate back in the 1860s when it was first adopted, my personal motto for Colorado has always been “Photographer's Paradise,” and for good reason.
With the majestic vistas and beautiful people that make up Colorado, you don't need to look far to find a tourist (or local) with their camera in hand, snapping off a few photos.
Colorado is so filled with beautiful landscapes and scenery that, while it's never difficult to find something worthy of being photographed, it can often be challenging to capture entire scenes within one camera frame. In the week's Tech Bytes, I'm going to show you how to make breathtaking panoramas in six easy steps with your digital camera and a free software program called AutoStitch.
1. Shoot
The first step in creating a panorama is to start shooting. All of my panoramas have been made with a simple, point-and-shoot digital camera set on the panorama scene mode. I prefer that mode because it remembers the aperture and ISO settings of the first photograph in the sequence, which helps keep the lighting of the photos balanced. Digital SLR cameras are even better, when used at the same manual settings for each frame in the sequence.
2. Rotate
When taking the photos to be stitched, be sure there is quite a bit of overlap from one photo to the next and try to keep all of the photos rotated around the same axis. To do this, I recommend using a tripod, hiking pole, fence post, or anything stable that you can rest the camera on. Also note that with AutoStitch you are not limited to one row of photos, so feel free to angle up and down from the fixed point as well, and capture as many rows of photos as you'd like.
3. Download
After you've shot the photos and downloaded them to your computer, you'll want to download the AutoStitch software. It can be found by going online, and then clicking on the link at the top to “Download (Windows demo).”
Don't be put off by the word demo, it's an amazing piece of software, and the demo designation keeps it free for now. As a side note, there is currently no Mac version available, so you will need to run this software on a PC with Windows. There is, however, an iPhone app of AutoStitch available.
4. Organize
It's easiest if you make a new folder for each panorama somewhere on your computer, and copy just the photos that are going to make up each panorama into those folders.
5. Set up Autostitch
Each time you launch AutoStitch, the first thing you'll want to do is open the Edit > Options menu. In this menu, there are only two options that I change. The first is to select the “Scale” button under Output Size, and set your output size in percent. If you ever receive an “out of memory” error while stitching, reduce this number.
The second change is to the very last option in the bottom-right corner, the one marked “JPEG Quality.” I put this at 100 for full quality. Everything else I leave the same.
6. Stitch
To get started stitching, go to the File menu and select “Open.” From the browser window, select the folder that you made in step four. Select all of the photos in the folder by hitting Control and the letter A. Once all the photos for the panorama are selected, hit the open button.
Viola, that's all there is to it. AutoStitch will create and name the new panorama pano.jpg and places it in the same folder that you selected earlier. Now, using your favorite photo editing tool, you can crop the overlap off the photo, or leave it on for a neat effect. Enjoy.
As for me - I use A3D Stitcher and A3D Panorama Assistant. I'm fully satisfied with it.
понедельник, 16 ноября 2009 г.
Book Review: Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography
That's it! The article about the book for the photographers by the photographer, hope it will be interesting for you.
In photography, a panorama is generally considered to be an image that shows a field of view that is greater than that of the human eye. Many times this means that there is an aspect ratio of 2:1 or greater; the width of the image being two times the height. If done skillfully, the panorama can create much more drama and show much more visual depth than a regular photo.
Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography is intended for professionals and serious hobbyist photographers who want to create high-quality digital panoramas. Its goal is to systematically take you through the basics and open up the possibilities that are available from modern digital panoramic techniques. The book is 160 pages in length and is divided into 5 chapters and 4 projects.
Chapter 1, "Basics," begin with looking at the first panoramas and at the history of their development. Then you take a look at how panoramas have been used in contemporary art, the choices that you have when shooting, what a panoramic camera has been in the past, what it is today, as well as what the challenges are when taking a panoramic shot.
Chapter 2, "Shooting," examines the equipment that you will want to have when taking the images for you panorama. The one ideal piece of equipment is a Virtual Reality Panoramic Head (VR Head) for your tripod. This specialized head will help you avoid parallax errors in your images. This chapter along with detailing the head, also explores the lenses and other equipment you may want or need.
Chapter 3, "Stitching," is the process of putting together the separate images into a single one. Depending on how you do this there could be challenges to deal with. The first issue is the optical corrections that may need to be made. Then you have to align your images to make sure that everything is straight. Finally you need to render your images and blend the seams. In the old days this was much more tedious, but today with modern software that has become much easier.
Chapter 4, "Output," looks at taking the master file that was created in the prior chapter and turning it into, not only printed output, but also an interactive format, as well as for the internet. Here you will examine how to create an interactive panorama; one that you can navigate around. You will also discuss the three types of projections: flat, cylindrical, and spherical.
Chapter 5, "Stitching Software," describes the different software products that you can use to stitch your images together. These include Quicktime VR, PTGui Pro, REALVIZ, Photoshop, and Kolor Autopano pro. The pros and cons of each are discussed as well as forums that you can look to for more information.
Project 1, "Fine Art Limited Print," examines the creation of a pano of the Namib Desert which was a long term art project. This was actually done with an analog camera and therefore the images had to be digitized before stitching. The projection type was cylindrical 360° x 50°
Project 2 conerns "Documenting an Exhibition Using 40 Separate Panoramas," for the "Albert Einstein" Chief Engineer of the Universe" exhibition. This covered a number of rooms and was done in digital. The projection type was spherical 360° x 125°.
Project 3, "Advertising Shoot," was done for the Berlin Clubtheater as an illustration for an advertising brochure. The challenge was to include multiple appearances of the subject within the image. The projection type was spherical 360° x 130°.
Project 4, "High Dynamic Range Calendar Shoot," is a car-based wall calendar shoot. Because wall calendars have a short shelf life, they must have new material each year especially when the subject is a car; in this case the Land Rover vehicles. The challenges here are a wide range of brightness using bracketing sequences. The projection type is Mercator Projection: 200° x 100°.
Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography is a good book in the sense that it brings you through the history of the panorama, the equipment used to take professional quality images, and the techniques used to create them. The strokes painted are sometimes rather broad and there is not much step-by-step tracking on the process.
Where it does shine is that Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography gives you a much broader overview of professional grade panos and what it takes to create them. It also gives you the insight, through the projects, about how a professional addresses his or her work.
The bottom line is that if you have never done a panorama and want to get into doing them, then for the time being you should probably look to playing with Photoshop's merging features and find some tutorials to see if this is what you want to get into. But if you have tinkered with doing panoramas and want to expand your horizons by getting a broader, more professional view than I can easily recommend Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography.
In photography, a panorama is generally considered to be an image that shows a field of view that is greater than that of the human eye. Many times this means that there is an aspect ratio of 2:1 or greater; the width of the image being two times the height. If done skillfully, the panorama can create much more drama and show much more visual depth than a regular photo.
Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography is intended for professionals and serious hobbyist photographers who want to create high-quality digital panoramas. Its goal is to systematically take you through the basics and open up the possibilities that are available from modern digital panoramic techniques. The book is 160 pages in length and is divided into 5 chapters and 4 projects.
Chapter 1, "Basics," begin with looking at the first panoramas and at the history of their development. Then you take a look at how panoramas have been used in contemporary art, the choices that you have when shooting, what a panoramic camera has been in the past, what it is today, as well as what the challenges are when taking a panoramic shot.
Chapter 2, "Shooting," examines the equipment that you will want to have when taking the images for you panorama. The one ideal piece of equipment is a Virtual Reality Panoramic Head (VR Head) for your tripod. This specialized head will help you avoid parallax errors in your images. This chapter along with detailing the head, also explores the lenses and other equipment you may want or need.
Chapter 3, "Stitching," is the process of putting together the separate images into a single one. Depending on how you do this there could be challenges to deal with. The first issue is the optical corrections that may need to be made. Then you have to align your images to make sure that everything is straight. Finally you need to render your images and blend the seams. In the old days this was much more tedious, but today with modern software that has become much easier.
Chapter 4, "Output," looks at taking the master file that was created in the prior chapter and turning it into, not only printed output, but also an interactive format, as well as for the internet. Here you will examine how to create an interactive panorama; one that you can navigate around. You will also discuss the three types of projections: flat, cylindrical, and spherical.
Chapter 5, "Stitching Software," describes the different software products that you can use to stitch your images together. These include Quicktime VR, PTGui Pro, REALVIZ, Photoshop, and Kolor Autopano pro. The pros and cons of each are discussed as well as forums that you can look to for more information.
Project 1, "Fine Art Limited Print," examines the creation of a pano of the Namib Desert which was a long term art project. This was actually done with an analog camera and therefore the images had to be digitized before stitching. The projection type was cylindrical 360° x 50°
Project 2 conerns "Documenting an Exhibition Using 40 Separate Panoramas," for the "Albert Einstein" Chief Engineer of the Universe" exhibition. This covered a number of rooms and was done in digital. The projection type was spherical 360° x 125°.
Project 3, "Advertising Shoot," was done for the Berlin Clubtheater as an illustration for an advertising brochure. The challenge was to include multiple appearances of the subject within the image. The projection type was spherical 360° x 130°.
Project 4, "High Dynamic Range Calendar Shoot," is a car-based wall calendar shoot. Because wall calendars have a short shelf life, they must have new material each year especially when the subject is a car; in this case the Land Rover vehicles. The challenges here are a wide range of brightness using bracketing sequences. The projection type is Mercator Projection: 200° x 100°.
Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography is a good book in the sense that it brings you through the history of the panorama, the equipment used to take professional quality images, and the techniques used to create them. The strokes painted are sometimes rather broad and there is not much step-by-step tracking on the process.
Where it does shine is that Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography gives you a much broader overview of professional grade panos and what it takes to create them. It also gives you the insight, through the projects, about how a professional addresses his or her work.
The bottom line is that if you have never done a panorama and want to get into doing them, then for the time being you should probably look to playing with Photoshop's merging features and find some tutorials to see if this is what you want to get into. But if you have tinkered with doing panoramas and want to expand your horizons by getting a broader, more professional view than I can easily recommend Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography.
вторник, 10 ноября 2009 г.
Full Samsung Instinct HD Review
Hello.
For today I've found the preview for the Samsung Instinct HD. May be I will change my phone.
Look and Feel – Good
Sprint's new Samsung Instinct HD is a slick, slim tablet phone with a nicely rounded shell. It's a very light phone, even with the battery installed. The overall look is simple and classy, without being too grown-up. Underneath the colorful, 3.2-inch touchscreen are a trio of touch sensitive buttons, and we're never fans of touch buttons versus real hardware keys, though the few problems we had with unresponsive control on the Samsung Instinct HD came from the capacitive screen and not the buttons beneath. On the sides of the phone you'll find a 2-stage camera button, great for lining up the auto focus before you fire a shot, as well as ports for microUSB and even high definition video output. The video cable costs extra, but for another $30 you can show high def movies, shot with the Samsung Instinct HD's eponymous HD camcorder, on your own HDTV.
The interface on the Samsung Instinct HD is touch friendly, but it hasn't advanced much since the original Samsung Instinct was released in the run-up to the launch of the Apple iPhone 3G. The phone now uses a capacitive screen, which means it should be more sensitive to fingers than the pressure-sensitive resistive technology found on the older devices, but in our time with the Instinct HD, it didn't feel more responsive than its predecessors. There were plenty of times we'd press a button onscreen and nothing would happen. Or, we'd get a haptic vibration and a little ding telling us the phone had registered a hit, but the interface wouldn't take action. It was frustrating, and the phone never approached the great look and responsive speed of a better touchscreen device, like the Sprint HTC Hero.
The Samsung Instinct HD does have some cool tricks up its sleeve. If you want to silence an incoming call quickly, or snooze the phone when the alarm clock goes off, you can flip the phone onto its face instead of fumbling for buttons. Press the shutter button quickly and the still camera pops up; or hold down the button to activate the camcorder. Of course, there are some serious complaints. The software keyboards on the phone are awful. In portrait mode, the keyboard is arranged alphabetically, instead of in a QWERTY layout, as if Samsung's designers had never used a real keyboard before. In landscape mode, the keys were nice and wide, but the keyboard couldn't keep up with fast typing, and we ended up missing quite a few letters if we didn't slow down. The keyboard also wasn't smart enough to keep up with the latest tricks. It won't capitalize the first word in a sentence automatically, it won't fill in the apostrophe in a contraction, and it didn't correct our errors on the fly, like a touchscreen smartphone will do.
Calling and Contacts - Good
We had serious reception issues with the Samsung Instinct HD, but this never seemed to affect calls or call quality. Calls sounded generally good. We heard some fuzziness at times, and our callers reported a metallic quality to our voices, but this never hurt our conversations. Battery life was also pretty good. We got more than 5.5 hours of talk time out of the phone, and if we didn't use the camera features extensively, the Samsung Instinct HD could last a couple days without needing a charge. But you won't want to record much HD video in the morning if you won't be near a charger later in the day. Reception was the biggest problem of all. Service never reached above 3 bars, and usually dipped so low we wondered if the phone got any data reception at all. Some features, like the Web browser and Sprint Music Store access, had lots of trouble opening when reception dipped, though as we said, voice calls weren't affected.
Getting contacts onto the phone could be a big pain. The phone can synchronize with Sprint's backup services, but it wasn't able to draw our address book off the Internet. There is a Work E-mail feature that will connect to a Microsoft Exchange server, but this won't synchronize your address book. You have to manually move contacts one-by-one from the Work E-mail app to the phonebook, which seemed barely worth the trouble. The poor keyboard options on the Samsung Instinct HD only made matters worse. If you have a lot of friends in your address book online, better to buy a phone that can handle serious sync duties.
For calling features, the Samsung Instinct HD comes nicely loaded. There's a dedicated button on the side of the phone for speaker-independent voice calling from Nuance, and this worked perfectly every time we tried it. It was easy to add a third person for a conference call, though the phone can't split the 3-way up again once they've been joined. The speakerphone was nice and clear, though it could have been louder. For voice messages, the Samsung Instinct HD uses Sprint's visual voicemail service, and this worked very nicely on the phone. The Instinct HD makes it easy for you to listen to messages without calling into Sprint's voice mail, even out of order.
Camera – Very Good
The Samsung Instinct HD is the only phone on the U.S. carrier market that can shoot HD video. You can shoot lower quality footage as well, for multimedia messages (MMS) or DVD-resolution, VGA footage, but the real star of the show is the 1280 by 720, or 720p, video capture. There aren't many settings or options to improve video quality, but in the best conditions videos looked very good. They couldn't quite compete with our dedicated HD camcorder, but it was certainly on par with one of the miniature HD camcorders on the market. Most importantly, in broad daylight the Samsung Instinct HD takes the best video we've seen on a cell phone, and this might be enough to convince you it's the phone you want. Under difficult lighting conditions, we see plenty of noise and blocking, and the picture looks decidedly standard; it doesn't look like good high definition content, though the pixels are all there. The still camera on the Samsung Instinct HD is also solid. It wasn't the best we've seen, but it did a great job with most of our shots. Colors were vibrant and accurate, especially outdoors on a sunny day, but the camera also balanced well when we were shooting in complete darkness, using only the built-in LED flash for lighting. The Instinct HD uses auto focus, but not touch focus, like you'll find on more advanced smartphone cameras, and it lacks a few other shooting modes we like, especially panorama stitching. Macro mode wasn't very effective, either, and the camera couldn't focus on fine details when we got too close. Still, pics from the Samsung Instinct HD would be perfect for social network sharing and sending as MMS, and we even printed a few good looking pics on quality photo paper, a feat few cameraphones can pull off with such skill.
Social Networking - Good
For a feature phone without a genuine smartphone OS, Samsung has gone to great lengths to connect the Samsung Instinct HD with the most popular social networks. There are preloaded apps for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on the phone. Unfortunately, these apps just didn't work very well on the Instinct HD. Sometimes they were simply unresponsive to our touch or slow to update with new info. Other times we found them lacking features, especially the Twitter app. The Facebook app was constantly forgetting us, which was annoying the first time we had to reenter our sign-on info, and worse every subsequent time. You can't sync contacts or calendar entries from these services to your phone, like you can with a BlackBerry Tour or other advanced smartphones. You can upload pics and videos easily from within the apps, but things got much more complicated when we tried uploading from out photo gallery, as these images have to bounce through Sprint's own online upload service. These apps are still an improvement over the simple, mobile Web versions that you might get if you tried a more basic phone, but against the smartphone set, the social networking experience on the Samsung Instinct HD doesn't quite compare.
The Samsung Instinct HD can also handle e-mail, including work e-mail for corporate Microsoft Exchange users, but the e-mail experience all around seems half-baked. The phone was constantly reporting the wrong number of new messages until we forced a manual sync. There were few advanced options for organizing or searching our mail, and for our corporate account, the e-mail app couldn't check our Inbox subfolders. We like that you can see a bit of the new messages incoming from the main menu screen without having to open the e-mail apps, but the mail feature was just unreliable enough that we still kept opening and synchronizing our mailboxes to be sure we weren't missing anything.
For text messaging, the Samsung Instinct HD uses a threaded format, which presents all incoming and outgoing messages together to form a conversation, instead of individually. Multimedia messages (MMS) were easy to send from the phone, whether we were browsing the photo gallery, taking shots with the camera or simply responding to an incoming message with a new picture attachment.
Multimedia - Good
Music and video playback on the Samsung Instinct HD are a mixed bag. For the most part, everything works the way it should, so with little effort you'll be able to sideload your music onto the included 4GB microSD card and listen to your tunes how you like. That also means a 3.5mm headphone jack right up top, so you can plug in your favorite earbuds. There aren't many features built into the player, no equalizer controls and, strangely, about half our album artwork didn't sync properly. Creating playlists was more difficult than it needed to be, and the player was sometimes buggy or unresponsive. We were also never able to access the Sprint Music Store on this phone, as it always complained of network trouble, even after some software updates and restarts.
Video fared a little better, thanks to a robust player, though only a little. All our videos played on the device, even some very large files that were sized beyond the 480 by 320 pixel resolution of the Samsung Instinct HD's display. Larger videos were a bit choppy as the phone chewed through them, but most phones just spit those files back at us. Videos sized properly for the Instinct HD's crisp screen looked great on the phone and played through smoothly with no trouble. Again, there was a dearth of extra features, but with some advanced file preparation and proper sideloading, the Samsung Instinct HD makes a very nice video player.
Besides your own files, the Samsung Instinct HD is also capable of playing back streaming media from Sprint's 3G services. These are mostly streaming clips, and in terms of video these weren't worth the effort. The menus to control the streaming Sprint TV service were sluggish and confusing, and the end result wasn't compelling enough to pay extra for the content. The Samsung Instinct HD also gets streaming radio from Sirius XM, but this doesn't include best premium content available on the satellite radio service, like the live sports broadcasts or the Howard Stern show. For music, the streaming radio features don't compete with similar services available free on smartphones, like Slacker radio on BlackBerry devices or Pandora, available on most smartphones.
Traveling - Mediocre
The turn-by-turn navigation features on the Samsung Instinct HD were perhaps the biggest disappointment on the device. The phone ships with Sprint Navigator onboard, a TeleNav app, and usually we're big fans of TeleNav's software. But the Samsung Instinct HD did a poor job tracking us on our trips. As we sat motionless at a traffic light, we watched the phone constantly reroute our trip, as if we were not only moving, but jumping all over the map. Occasionally, this would happen just before an important turn, and we missed crucial directions. After a few frustrating trips, we decided to pass on navigating with the Samsung Instinct HD, and if navigation is truly important to you, you'll want to pass on this phone.
The phone isn't really made for serious travelers, anyway. The Instinct HD comes with Google Maps, but it's a version that lacks necessary features. Google Maps can't even tie into the phone's GPS receiver to find your location, you have to manually enter a starting point. If you're in a country that doesn't support Sprint's network standard, you can still use Wi-Fi for data, but there aren't any other travel tools built in.
Fun - Good
The Samsung Instinct HD tries to have fun, it really does. You can tell by the "Fun" menu tab on the main screen (though we think the "Fun" and "My Stuff" tabs should be swapped). The phone comes preloaded with a few game demos, a few Web-based apps and a Shopping link to download more content. Most of the content available will be simpler, mobile-type gaming, but good enough to pass the time. There's a YouTube app to watch videos from the streaming service, as well as Sprint's own NASCAR and NFL Mobile apps to help you track your favorite drivers and teams. Still, almost every Sprint phone comes with similar apps installed, including much less expensive feature phones, and the Samsung Instinct HD offers nothing special here, when it truly needs a special experience to set it apart and justify the high price tag. If you're a fan of Uno or Tetris, the Samsung Instinct HD has you covered, but we wish the phone offered something more unique.
Staying Informed - Good
One of the strong points of all the preloaded apps on the Samsung Instinct HD is the wide selection to keep you up to date on business, sports and World news. Though the phone uses the Opera Mobile browser, we were less impressed with the Web browsing software on this phone, and most users will be content to get their information from the preloaded Web apps. There's an app for ESPN, Bloomberg, CNN and even Weather.com. These didn't look great, not even as good as their respective Web pages on a desktop-grade browser, but they did a nice job collecting information in a way that was easy to read on a mobile device. A few times during our test run, the software would get an upgrade, and the process could be convoluted and confusing, but we never managed to delete any important apps accidentally.
The Web browser should have been much better, but it didn't live up to our expectations. The Opera Mobile browser opens pages full screen, but text is a jumble and illegible until you zoom in. At full zoom, text still looked lanky and thin on screen, thanks to the poor font choice, and the Opera Mobile interface was not very friendly or intuitive. Once we got the hang of it, though, we managed to open multiple pages in a slick-looking tabbed view, though typing new addresses could be a pain thanks to the Samsung Instinct HD's keyboard problems. You can flick through pages for so-called kinetic scrolling, but once again the capacitive screen was surprisingly sluggish and unresponsive, and we felt a delay against our actions.
The Opera Mobile browser did a nice job with Google Reader, but the browser also comes with one of the best RSS readers we've seen on a mobile device. In fact, this was probably the best way to keep up to date with our favorite sites, as the RSS reader did a better job feeding us information than checking the page in its entirety.
For today I've found the preview for the Samsung Instinct HD. May be I will change my phone.
Look and Feel – Good
Sprint's new Samsung Instinct HD is a slick, slim tablet phone with a nicely rounded shell. It's a very light phone, even with the battery installed. The overall look is simple and classy, without being too grown-up. Underneath the colorful, 3.2-inch touchscreen are a trio of touch sensitive buttons, and we're never fans of touch buttons versus real hardware keys, though the few problems we had with unresponsive control on the Samsung Instinct HD came from the capacitive screen and not the buttons beneath. On the sides of the phone you'll find a 2-stage camera button, great for lining up the auto focus before you fire a shot, as well as ports for microUSB and even high definition video output. The video cable costs extra, but for another $30 you can show high def movies, shot with the Samsung Instinct HD's eponymous HD camcorder, on your own HDTV.
The interface on the Samsung Instinct HD is touch friendly, but it hasn't advanced much since the original Samsung Instinct was released in the run-up to the launch of the Apple iPhone 3G. The phone now uses a capacitive screen, which means it should be more sensitive to fingers than the pressure-sensitive resistive technology found on the older devices, but in our time with the Instinct HD, it didn't feel more responsive than its predecessors. There were plenty of times we'd press a button onscreen and nothing would happen. Or, we'd get a haptic vibration and a little ding telling us the phone had registered a hit, but the interface wouldn't take action. It was frustrating, and the phone never approached the great look and responsive speed of a better touchscreen device, like the Sprint HTC Hero.
The Samsung Instinct HD does have some cool tricks up its sleeve. If you want to silence an incoming call quickly, or snooze the phone when the alarm clock goes off, you can flip the phone onto its face instead of fumbling for buttons. Press the shutter button quickly and the still camera pops up; or hold down the button to activate the camcorder. Of course, there are some serious complaints. The software keyboards on the phone are awful. In portrait mode, the keyboard is arranged alphabetically, instead of in a QWERTY layout, as if Samsung's designers had never used a real keyboard before. In landscape mode, the keys were nice and wide, but the keyboard couldn't keep up with fast typing, and we ended up missing quite a few letters if we didn't slow down. The keyboard also wasn't smart enough to keep up with the latest tricks. It won't capitalize the first word in a sentence automatically, it won't fill in the apostrophe in a contraction, and it didn't correct our errors on the fly, like a touchscreen smartphone will do.
Calling and Contacts - Good
We had serious reception issues with the Samsung Instinct HD, but this never seemed to affect calls or call quality. Calls sounded generally good. We heard some fuzziness at times, and our callers reported a metallic quality to our voices, but this never hurt our conversations. Battery life was also pretty good. We got more than 5.5 hours of talk time out of the phone, and if we didn't use the camera features extensively, the Samsung Instinct HD could last a couple days without needing a charge. But you won't want to record much HD video in the morning if you won't be near a charger later in the day. Reception was the biggest problem of all. Service never reached above 3 bars, and usually dipped so low we wondered if the phone got any data reception at all. Some features, like the Web browser and Sprint Music Store access, had lots of trouble opening when reception dipped, though as we said, voice calls weren't affected.
Getting contacts onto the phone could be a big pain. The phone can synchronize with Sprint's backup services, but it wasn't able to draw our address book off the Internet. There is a Work E-mail feature that will connect to a Microsoft Exchange server, but this won't synchronize your address book. You have to manually move contacts one-by-one from the Work E-mail app to the phonebook, which seemed barely worth the trouble. The poor keyboard options on the Samsung Instinct HD only made matters worse. If you have a lot of friends in your address book online, better to buy a phone that can handle serious sync duties.
For calling features, the Samsung Instinct HD comes nicely loaded. There's a dedicated button on the side of the phone for speaker-independent voice calling from Nuance, and this worked perfectly every time we tried it. It was easy to add a third person for a conference call, though the phone can't split the 3-way up again once they've been joined. The speakerphone was nice and clear, though it could have been louder. For voice messages, the Samsung Instinct HD uses Sprint's visual voicemail service, and this worked very nicely on the phone. The Instinct HD makes it easy for you to listen to messages without calling into Sprint's voice mail, even out of order.
Camera – Very Good
The Samsung Instinct HD is the only phone on the U.S. carrier market that can shoot HD video. You can shoot lower quality footage as well, for multimedia messages (MMS) or DVD-resolution, VGA footage, but the real star of the show is the 1280 by 720, or 720p, video capture. There aren't many settings or options to improve video quality, but in the best conditions videos looked very good. They couldn't quite compete with our dedicated HD camcorder, but it was certainly on par with one of the miniature HD camcorders on the market. Most importantly, in broad daylight the Samsung Instinct HD takes the best video we've seen on a cell phone, and this might be enough to convince you it's the phone you want. Under difficult lighting conditions, we see plenty of noise and blocking, and the picture looks decidedly standard; it doesn't look like good high definition content, though the pixels are all there. The still camera on the Samsung Instinct HD is also solid. It wasn't the best we've seen, but it did a great job with most of our shots. Colors were vibrant and accurate, especially outdoors on a sunny day, but the camera also balanced well when we were shooting in complete darkness, using only the built-in LED flash for lighting. The Instinct HD uses auto focus, but not touch focus, like you'll find on more advanced smartphone cameras, and it lacks a few other shooting modes we like, especially panorama stitching. Macro mode wasn't very effective, either, and the camera couldn't focus on fine details when we got too close. Still, pics from the Samsung Instinct HD would be perfect for social network sharing and sending as MMS, and we even printed a few good looking pics on quality photo paper, a feat few cameraphones can pull off with such skill.
Social Networking - Good
For a feature phone without a genuine smartphone OS, Samsung has gone to great lengths to connect the Samsung Instinct HD with the most popular social networks. There are preloaded apps for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on the phone. Unfortunately, these apps just didn't work very well on the Instinct HD. Sometimes they were simply unresponsive to our touch or slow to update with new info. Other times we found them lacking features, especially the Twitter app. The Facebook app was constantly forgetting us, which was annoying the first time we had to reenter our sign-on info, and worse every subsequent time. You can't sync contacts or calendar entries from these services to your phone, like you can with a BlackBerry Tour or other advanced smartphones. You can upload pics and videos easily from within the apps, but things got much more complicated when we tried uploading from out photo gallery, as these images have to bounce through Sprint's own online upload service. These apps are still an improvement over the simple, mobile Web versions that you might get if you tried a more basic phone, but against the smartphone set, the social networking experience on the Samsung Instinct HD doesn't quite compare.
The Samsung Instinct HD can also handle e-mail, including work e-mail for corporate Microsoft Exchange users, but the e-mail experience all around seems half-baked. The phone was constantly reporting the wrong number of new messages until we forced a manual sync. There were few advanced options for organizing or searching our mail, and for our corporate account, the e-mail app couldn't check our Inbox subfolders. We like that you can see a bit of the new messages incoming from the main menu screen without having to open the e-mail apps, but the mail feature was just unreliable enough that we still kept opening and synchronizing our mailboxes to be sure we weren't missing anything.
For text messaging, the Samsung Instinct HD uses a threaded format, which presents all incoming and outgoing messages together to form a conversation, instead of individually. Multimedia messages (MMS) were easy to send from the phone, whether we were browsing the photo gallery, taking shots with the camera or simply responding to an incoming message with a new picture attachment.
Multimedia - Good
Music and video playback on the Samsung Instinct HD are a mixed bag. For the most part, everything works the way it should, so with little effort you'll be able to sideload your music onto the included 4GB microSD card and listen to your tunes how you like. That also means a 3.5mm headphone jack right up top, so you can plug in your favorite earbuds. There aren't many features built into the player, no equalizer controls and, strangely, about half our album artwork didn't sync properly. Creating playlists was more difficult than it needed to be, and the player was sometimes buggy or unresponsive. We were also never able to access the Sprint Music Store on this phone, as it always complained of network trouble, even after some software updates and restarts.
Video fared a little better, thanks to a robust player, though only a little. All our videos played on the device, even some very large files that were sized beyond the 480 by 320 pixel resolution of the Samsung Instinct HD's display. Larger videos were a bit choppy as the phone chewed through them, but most phones just spit those files back at us. Videos sized properly for the Instinct HD's crisp screen looked great on the phone and played through smoothly with no trouble. Again, there was a dearth of extra features, but with some advanced file preparation and proper sideloading, the Samsung Instinct HD makes a very nice video player.
Besides your own files, the Samsung Instinct HD is also capable of playing back streaming media from Sprint's 3G services. These are mostly streaming clips, and in terms of video these weren't worth the effort. The menus to control the streaming Sprint TV service were sluggish and confusing, and the end result wasn't compelling enough to pay extra for the content. The Samsung Instinct HD also gets streaming radio from Sirius XM, but this doesn't include best premium content available on the satellite radio service, like the live sports broadcasts or the Howard Stern show. For music, the streaming radio features don't compete with similar services available free on smartphones, like Slacker radio on BlackBerry devices or Pandora, available on most smartphones.
Traveling - Mediocre
The turn-by-turn navigation features on the Samsung Instinct HD were perhaps the biggest disappointment on the device. The phone ships with Sprint Navigator onboard, a TeleNav app, and usually we're big fans of TeleNav's software. But the Samsung Instinct HD did a poor job tracking us on our trips. As we sat motionless at a traffic light, we watched the phone constantly reroute our trip, as if we were not only moving, but jumping all over the map. Occasionally, this would happen just before an important turn, and we missed crucial directions. After a few frustrating trips, we decided to pass on navigating with the Samsung Instinct HD, and if navigation is truly important to you, you'll want to pass on this phone.
The phone isn't really made for serious travelers, anyway. The Instinct HD comes with Google Maps, but it's a version that lacks necessary features. Google Maps can't even tie into the phone's GPS receiver to find your location, you have to manually enter a starting point. If you're in a country that doesn't support Sprint's network standard, you can still use Wi-Fi for data, but there aren't any other travel tools built in.
Fun - Good
The Samsung Instinct HD tries to have fun, it really does. You can tell by the "Fun" menu tab on the main screen (though we think the "Fun" and "My Stuff" tabs should be swapped). The phone comes preloaded with a few game demos, a few Web-based apps and a Shopping link to download more content. Most of the content available will be simpler, mobile-type gaming, but good enough to pass the time. There's a YouTube app to watch videos from the streaming service, as well as Sprint's own NASCAR and NFL Mobile apps to help you track your favorite drivers and teams. Still, almost every Sprint phone comes with similar apps installed, including much less expensive feature phones, and the Samsung Instinct HD offers nothing special here, when it truly needs a special experience to set it apart and justify the high price tag. If you're a fan of Uno or Tetris, the Samsung Instinct HD has you covered, but we wish the phone offered something more unique.
Staying Informed - Good
One of the strong points of all the preloaded apps on the Samsung Instinct HD is the wide selection to keep you up to date on business, sports and World news. Though the phone uses the Opera Mobile browser, we were less impressed with the Web browsing software on this phone, and most users will be content to get their information from the preloaded Web apps. There's an app for ESPN, Bloomberg, CNN and even Weather.com. These didn't look great, not even as good as their respective Web pages on a desktop-grade browser, but they did a nice job collecting information in a way that was easy to read on a mobile device. A few times during our test run, the software would get an upgrade, and the process could be convoluted and confusing, but we never managed to delete any important apps accidentally.
The Web browser should have been much better, but it didn't live up to our expectations. The Opera Mobile browser opens pages full screen, but text is a jumble and illegible until you zoom in. At full zoom, text still looked lanky and thin on screen, thanks to the poor font choice, and the Opera Mobile interface was not very friendly or intuitive. Once we got the hang of it, though, we managed to open multiple pages in a slick-looking tabbed view, though typing new addresses could be a pain thanks to the Samsung Instinct HD's keyboard problems. You can flick through pages for so-called kinetic scrolling, but once again the capacitive screen was surprisingly sluggish and unresponsive, and we felt a delay against our actions.
The Opera Mobile browser did a nice job with Google Reader, but the browser also comes with one of the best RSS readers we've seen on a mobile device. In fact, this was probably the best way to keep up to date with our favorite sites, as the RSS reader did a better job feeding us information than checking the page in its entirety.
среда, 4 ноября 2009 г.
A second look at Apple's Snow Leopard
It's now been almost two months since I reviewed Apple's Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X -- enough time for Apple to have shipped its first major patch to that operating system, and enough time for any new-release shininess to have dulled.
Granted, Snow Leopard (aka, Mac OS X 10.6) wasn't that shiny in the first place, as I wrote here at the time. Apple itself calls this version "refined, not reinvented" and sells it for the low, low price of $29.
But after two months of using Snow Leopard every day on a roughly three-year-old iMac, how do I appreciate this update? Not all that much, honestly. Some of its improvements have grown less noticeable over time, one problem has become a little more objectionable and one promised improvement has yet to surface.
Take Snow Leopard's changes to the Dock: While I find its scrollable "Grid Stack" pop-up listings of the Documents, Applications and Downloads folders' contents a big upgrade over Leopard's less flexible interface, I never use its "Dock Expose" preview -- clicking and holding an application's Dock icon to see thumbnail images of its open windows just takes too long.
The Quick Time X video player has also been somewhat of a non-entity, perhaps because most of the time I don't do anything with a video clip but watch it inside a browser window -- and that works about the same as ever in this new software.
Since my review ran, I've discovered another weird conflict with a third-party program: the PhotoStitch panorama-assembly tool included with Canon's cameras no longer works. Canon deserves most of the blame -- this application, which looks like a refugee from Mac OS 9, should have been updated long ago -- but the Snow Leopard installer offered no warning about this problem, and Apple's list of incompatible software has yet to mention it.
My biggest Snow Leopard disappointment, though, has to be the crash protection allegedly built into its Safari Web browser. Apple's site brags:
Apple engineers redesigned Safari to make plug-ins run separately from the browser. If a plug-in crashes on a web page, Safari keeps running. Just refresh the page and get going again.
I have yet to see this happen. Safari crashes about as often as it did before and also seems just as vulnerable to slowdowns and stalls once I have too many pages open. Just like in Leopard, Safari will stop responding to any input a second or two before the cursor changes into the dreaded "spinning beach ball of death," and then the only thing I can do is wait for the browser to snap out of it.
At least Snow Leopard's Activity Monitor utility now breaks out the processor and memory footprint of each plug-in, so I can accurately condemn Adobe's Flash plug-in for its appetites.
A few Snow Leopard users have discovered a much more serious problem: a rare but gruesome bug, still fixed, that caused Snow Leopard to wipe out all of their data after somebody else logged into the Mac using its Guest Account option.
I still consider Mac OS X a more pleasant software environment than Windows. I also still think Snow Leopard will bring worthwhile changes over time, both as successive bug fixes address its flaws (the next big one is supposedly due this month) and as third-party developers write new software to take advantage of its foundation-level improvements. But two months in, my not-all-that-glowing review looks a little too positive.
Were you an early adopter of Snow Leopard? What's your assessment, now that you've had some time to get accustomed to the software?
Granted, Snow Leopard (aka, Mac OS X 10.6) wasn't that shiny in the first place, as I wrote here at the time. Apple itself calls this version "refined, not reinvented" and sells it for the low, low price of $29.
But after two months of using Snow Leopard every day on a roughly three-year-old iMac, how do I appreciate this update? Not all that much, honestly. Some of its improvements have grown less noticeable over time, one problem has become a little more objectionable and one promised improvement has yet to surface.
Take Snow Leopard's changes to the Dock: While I find its scrollable "Grid Stack" pop-up listings of the Documents, Applications and Downloads folders' contents a big upgrade over Leopard's less flexible interface, I never use its "Dock Expose" preview -- clicking and holding an application's Dock icon to see thumbnail images of its open windows just takes too long.
The Quick Time X video player has also been somewhat of a non-entity, perhaps because most of the time I don't do anything with a video clip but watch it inside a browser window -- and that works about the same as ever in this new software.
Since my review ran, I've discovered another weird conflict with a third-party program: the PhotoStitch panorama-assembly tool included with Canon's cameras no longer works. Canon deserves most of the blame -- this application, which looks like a refugee from Mac OS 9, should have been updated long ago -- but the Snow Leopard installer offered no warning about this problem, and Apple's list of incompatible software has yet to mention it.
My biggest Snow Leopard disappointment, though, has to be the crash protection allegedly built into its Safari Web browser. Apple's site brags:
Apple engineers redesigned Safari to make plug-ins run separately from the browser. If a plug-in crashes on a web page, Safari keeps running. Just refresh the page and get going again.
I have yet to see this happen. Safari crashes about as often as it did before and also seems just as vulnerable to slowdowns and stalls once I have too many pages open. Just like in Leopard, Safari will stop responding to any input a second or two before the cursor changes into the dreaded "spinning beach ball of death," and then the only thing I can do is wait for the browser to snap out of it.
At least Snow Leopard's Activity Monitor utility now breaks out the processor and memory footprint of each plug-in, so I can accurately condemn Adobe's Flash plug-in for its appetites.
A few Snow Leopard users have discovered a much more serious problem: a rare but gruesome bug, still fixed, that caused Snow Leopard to wipe out all of their data after somebody else logged into the Mac using its Guest Account option.
I still consider Mac OS X a more pleasant software environment than Windows. I also still think Snow Leopard will bring worthwhile changes over time, both as successive bug fixes address its flaws (the next big one is supposedly due this month) and as third-party developers write new software to take advantage of its foundation-level improvements. But two months in, my not-all-that-glowing review looks a little too positive.
Were you an early adopter of Snow Leopard? What's your assessment, now that you've had some time to get accustomed to the software?
вторник, 20 октября 2009 г.
Quick on the draw
By Joyce Kam
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Like many animation fans, John Chan Yu-fung was taken with Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky when it first appeared in 1986. He kept thinking to himself: "Wouldn't it be great to create an animated world of my own?"
He did. And one of his works swept the animation category at the 11th Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards in 2005.
Another, a 12-minute collaboration with Postgal Workshop on the social problems faced by the elderly, scooped the top prize at the DigiCon6 Awards 2008 Hong Kong Regional Competition and the grand prize at the finals in Japan in March.
"Technology has made animation easier to create and distribute. There's growing demand from advertising, music and film industries, especially from China. Hong Kong has lots of youths who are creative but they do need a chance to show off their work," said Chan.
Eddy Hui Shun, chairman of the Hong Kong Maya User Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes and cultivates professionalism in digital content creation, concurs.
That's why he has organized Panorama - Asia Pacific Animation Challenge and Animation Camp 2009 with Hong Kong Cyberport IncuTrain Centre. Sponsored by Autodesk, winners go home with products from the world leader in design software, cash prizes and trophies. The competition is open to works by students aged over 18 and fresh graduates from Hong Kong, the mainland, Australia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore until November 1. Finalists from each country
and region are invited to the Animation Challenge Bootcamp while their work will be aired on Animax network.
In the four-day bootcamp, finalists get rare direction from well-known studios such as Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, which helped create the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series as well as some of the visual effects for Transformers, and Imagi Studio from Hong Kong, developers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Astro Boy.
"We deliberately excluded Japan and Korea because their animation productions are mature," said Hui. "We're hoping students can get a big picture of how their counterparts are doing in other emerging countries."
Hui, who is also deputy program leader of multimedia design at City University, believes Hong Kong's edge lies in a dynamic student community that is constantly stimulated to break new ground by the local film industry.
"We need to focus on our strengths to stay ahead of the pack because countries like Singapore are catching up really fast with their government providing strong support," he added.
Besides City University, the only others offering multimedia studies that include a strong animation component are Polytechnic University and the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education.
Hui said around 60 to 70 percent of his students can get a job in the industry.
"The animation market has huge potential. For instance, local movie McDull Kung Fu Kindergarten, launched a few months ago, was a great success in Hong Kong and the mainland. We hope to serve as a seedbed to foster interest in digital arts among the next generation," he said.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Like many animation fans, John Chan Yu-fung was taken with Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky when it first appeared in 1986. He kept thinking to himself: "Wouldn't it be great to create an animated world of my own?"
He did. And one of his works swept the animation category at the 11th Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards in 2005.
Another, a 12-minute collaboration with Postgal Workshop on the social problems faced by the elderly, scooped the top prize at the DigiCon6 Awards 2008 Hong Kong Regional Competition and the grand prize at the finals in Japan in March.
"Technology has made animation easier to create and distribute. There's growing demand from advertising, music and film industries, especially from China. Hong Kong has lots of youths who are creative but they do need a chance to show off their work," said Chan.
Eddy Hui Shun, chairman of the Hong Kong Maya User Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes and cultivates professionalism in digital content creation, concurs.
That's why he has organized Panorama - Asia Pacific Animation Challenge and Animation Camp 2009 with Hong Kong Cyberport IncuTrain Centre. Sponsored by Autodesk, winners go home with products from the world leader in design software, cash prizes and trophies. The competition is open to works by students aged over 18 and fresh graduates from Hong Kong, the mainland, Australia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore until November 1. Finalists from each country
and region are invited to the Animation Challenge Bootcamp while their work will be aired on Animax network.
In the four-day bootcamp, finalists get rare direction from well-known studios such as Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, which helped create the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series as well as some of the visual effects for Transformers, and Imagi Studio from Hong Kong, developers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Astro Boy.
"We deliberately excluded Japan and Korea because their animation productions are mature," said Hui. "We're hoping students can get a big picture of how their counterparts are doing in other emerging countries."
Hui, who is also deputy program leader of multimedia design at City University, believes Hong Kong's edge lies in a dynamic student community that is constantly stimulated to break new ground by the local film industry.
"We need to focus on our strengths to stay ahead of the pack because countries like Singapore are catching up really fast with their government providing strong support," he added.
Besides City University, the only others offering multimedia studies that include a strong animation component are Polytechnic University and the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education.
Hui said around 60 to 70 percent of his students can get a job in the industry.
"The animation market has huge potential. For instance, local movie McDull Kung Fu Kindergarten, launched a few months ago, was a great success in Hong Kong and the mainland. We hope to serve as a seedbed to foster interest in digital arts among the next generation," he said.
вторник, 13 октября 2009 г.
Easypano Launches Online Panoramic Virtual Tour Service
Hey, guys! New services from Easypano are released.
NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Shanghai, China, 10/13/2009 - Tour Hosting is an online virtual tour service from Easypano Holdings, helps realtors and tour providers to create 360 virtual home tour online. Tour Hosting platform also provides free panorama software for stitching 360 photos.
Easypano Holdings, a leader in panorama and virtual reality technology, is pleased to announce the availability of new site for virtual home tour online creating and hosting tour-hosting.com.
Tour Hosting platform enables real estate agents and brokers to easily create and host professional real estate virtual tours online! Both panoramic photos and still digital photos can be used to create a virtual home tour in Tour Hosting platform. You may use our free panorama stitching software Instant Pano to stitch your digital photos to panoramas.
Advantages of Tour Hosting Platform
With Tour Hosting service, you can build professional virtual home tours for your real estate property with unlimited 360 panoramas and digital photos. The virtual home tours contain many great features, including full screen display, branded with your own company logos and whole virtual tour download option.
Panoramic images can make your virtual tours more professional and attractive. With Easypano Tour Hosting, to get 360 panoramas can be quite easy! In order to make panorama stitching process the most convenient and effective, we have developed Instant Pano (download at tour-hosting.com) especially for real estate agents to get panoramas quickly with normal digital camera, and it is totally FREE!
Registration is free. Simply upload your panoramas and still photos to tour hosting platform to create professional virtual home tours with free templates.
We offer online video tutorial guiding you through tour creating process, and also live help and free training.
Subscription fee:
Monthly $29.95; Save more on annual subscription.
By subscribing to Tour Hosting Service, you can create and host unlimited virtual tours within your subscription period. For any subscription:
• No limitation on quantity of virtual home tours;
• No limitation on number of photos and panoramas in a single virtual tour.
How to Use Tour Hosting Service?
To create your own online virtual home tours, simply sign up Tour Hosting User Panel. Three steps to create your first professional virtual home tour:
Enter property information->Upload digital images and panoramas of the property->Choose a template and preview your tour!
Then the virtual tour is completed and saved in your user panel. After subscribing, you will be able to publish the tours online. You can create unlimited virtual tours in your user panel account.
After publishing all your virtual home tours online, you can post the virtual tour link to your MLS listings, and download the whole tour.
About Easypano
Founded in November 2001, in Shanghai, China, Easypano (easypano.com) has been developing and marketing panorama software, virtual tour software and solutions, which enable real estate agents and virtual tour providers to create interactive features tours for real estate properties.
As for me - I use A3D PanoStitcher and am fully satisfied with it. Ouh, I think that to find your soft you have to try everything of the kind ;)
NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Shanghai, China, 10/13/2009 - Tour Hosting is an online virtual tour service from Easypano Holdings, helps realtors and tour providers to create 360 virtual home tour online. Tour Hosting platform also provides free panorama software for stitching 360 photos.
Easypano Holdings, a leader in panorama and virtual reality technology, is pleased to announce the availability of new site for virtual home tour online creating and hosting tour-hosting.com.
Tour Hosting platform enables real estate agents and brokers to easily create and host professional real estate virtual tours online! Both panoramic photos and still digital photos can be used to create a virtual home tour in Tour Hosting platform. You may use our free panorama stitching software Instant Pano to stitch your digital photos to panoramas.
Advantages of Tour Hosting Platform
With Tour Hosting service, you can build professional virtual home tours for your real estate property with unlimited 360 panoramas and digital photos. The virtual home tours contain many great features, including full screen display, branded with your own company logos and whole virtual tour download option.
Panoramic images can make your virtual tours more professional and attractive. With Easypano Tour Hosting, to get 360 panoramas can be quite easy! In order to make panorama stitching process the most convenient and effective, we have developed Instant Pano (download at tour-hosting.com) especially for real estate agents to get panoramas quickly with normal digital camera, and it is totally FREE!
Registration is free. Simply upload your panoramas and still photos to tour hosting platform to create professional virtual home tours with free templates.
We offer online video tutorial guiding you through tour creating process, and also live help and free training.
Subscription fee:
Monthly $29.95; Save more on annual subscription.
By subscribing to Tour Hosting Service, you can create and host unlimited virtual tours within your subscription period. For any subscription:
• No limitation on quantity of virtual home tours;
• No limitation on number of photos and panoramas in a single virtual tour.
How to Use Tour Hosting Service?
To create your own online virtual home tours, simply sign up Tour Hosting User Panel. Three steps to create your first professional virtual home tour:
Enter property information->Upload digital images and panoramas of the property->Choose a template and preview your tour!
Then the virtual tour is completed and saved in your user panel. After subscribing, you will be able to publish the tours online. You can create unlimited virtual tours in your user panel account.
After publishing all your virtual home tours online, you can post the virtual tour link to your MLS listings, and download the whole tour.
About Easypano
Founded in November 2001, in Shanghai, China, Easypano (easypano.com) has been developing and marketing panorama software, virtual tour software and solutions, which enable real estate agents and virtual tour providers to create interactive features tours for real estate properties.
As for me - I use A3D PanoStitcher and am fully satisfied with it. Ouh, I think that to find your soft you have to try everything of the kind ;)
среда, 7 октября 2009 г.
Industry’s Only End-to-End Solution for Collecting, Processing, Hosting and Delivering Street Level 3D Data and Imagery
Little review for iPhone holders:
BERKELEY, Calif.-- earthmine today announced the immediate availability of two additions to its software suite; the earthmine SDK for iPhone for integrating street level 3D data into iPhone applications, and earthmine Server which enables organizations to host and manage the earthmine platform on their own servers. With these new products, earthmine now delivers a complete solution for working with street-level 3D and image data with flexibility and mobility unmatched in the industry.
“These two additions to our software suite mark a significant expansion of earthmine’s offering and customer base,” said Anthony Fassero, earthmine’s co-Chief Executive Officer. “The earthmine SDK for iPhone brings immersive and accurate street level data to the world’s fastest growing mobile platform, and the earthmine Server puts the entire earthmine platform within the customer managed computing environment. Now, earthmine supports any application, large or small, public or private.”
earthmine SDK for iPhone Puts earthmine’s 3D Data in Your Hand
The new earthmine SDK for iPhone brings earthmine’s rich street-level 3D experience to the large user base of iPhone and iPod Touch users. The earthmine SDK for iPhone provides developers with core functionality to retrieve and display earthmine’s panoramic imagery and provides an extensive set of tools to create immersive applications and unique experiences on the iPhone. Users of the earthmine SDK for iPhone can access the entire earthmine data set from their mobile device, putting immersive street level imagery right in their pocket, enabling customers to use their iPhone or iPod Touch to map features, take measurements, and display relevant geo-contextual content from assets in a geospatial database to billboards displaying movie trailers and advertising.
The earthmine SDK for iPhone joins the earthmine SDK for Flash as part of the toolkit for client application development. The earthmine SDK for Flash allows for the rapid development of Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR applications, delivering earthmine data to both browser-based and desktop applications. The component exposes a wide variety of overlays including tags, billboards and polylines, allowing developers to integrate diverse data sets with earthmine’s immersive 3D environment. The earthmine API is also available to users of earthmine’s platform and provides full flexibility in deploying client applications across different platforms and environments.
earthmine Server Provides Expanded Hosting Options
With its new earthmine Server the company greatly expands the earthmine audience by now offering two hosting options for its visually impressive and spatially accurate street level 3D data. For organizations that require full control over their hosting solution, including intranet only access and customized network security, earthmine Server allows customers to run the entire earthmine platform within an enterprise’s own computing infrastructure. When an application demands massive scalability, the earthmine Server can scale horizontally simply by adding more servers in a load balanced configuration, offering a simple solution to both small enterprises delivering solutions across their local intranet, and to large consumer facing applications.
earthmine continues to offer the earthmine Cloud Service, as a fully managed and scalable option. The earthmine Cloud Service gives enterprises the opportunity to focus on building applications without the overhead of managing servers, storing large data sets and maintaining up-time. “We firmly believe the earthmine Server and earthmine Cloud Service together meet the needs of earthmine’s wide variety of customers,” said Anthony Fassero. “From local government and intelligence agencies to local search portals, earthmine delivers a full suite of products and solutions for both public and private facing applications.”
Pricing and Availability
The earthmine SDK for iPhone and earthmine Server are available immediately as part of the earthmine solution. Customers have the choice of utilizing data within earthmine’s data library or scheduling data collection through the earthmine Project Partner Program to meet specific data needs. Platform users have the choice of further customizing their package by choosing an appropriate hosting option and client application SDKs to build a fully customized solution. Pricing is dependent on customization options.
BERKELEY, Calif.-- earthmine today announced the immediate availability of two additions to its software suite; the earthmine SDK for iPhone for integrating street level 3D data into iPhone applications, and earthmine Server which enables organizations to host and manage the earthmine platform on their own servers. With these new products, earthmine now delivers a complete solution for working with street-level 3D and image data with flexibility and mobility unmatched in the industry.
“These two additions to our software suite mark a significant expansion of earthmine’s offering and customer base,” said Anthony Fassero, earthmine’s co-Chief Executive Officer. “The earthmine SDK for iPhone brings immersive and accurate street level data to the world’s fastest growing mobile platform, and the earthmine Server puts the entire earthmine platform within the customer managed computing environment. Now, earthmine supports any application, large or small, public or private.”
earthmine SDK for iPhone Puts earthmine’s 3D Data in Your Hand
The new earthmine SDK for iPhone brings earthmine’s rich street-level 3D experience to the large user base of iPhone and iPod Touch users. The earthmine SDK for iPhone provides developers with core functionality to retrieve and display earthmine’s panoramic imagery and provides an extensive set of tools to create immersive applications and unique experiences on the iPhone. Users of the earthmine SDK for iPhone can access the entire earthmine data set from their mobile device, putting immersive street level imagery right in their pocket, enabling customers to use their iPhone or iPod Touch to map features, take measurements, and display relevant geo-contextual content from assets in a geospatial database to billboards displaying movie trailers and advertising.
The earthmine SDK for iPhone joins the earthmine SDK for Flash as part of the toolkit for client application development. The earthmine SDK for Flash allows for the rapid development of Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR applications, delivering earthmine data to both browser-based and desktop applications. The component exposes a wide variety of overlays including tags, billboards and polylines, allowing developers to integrate diverse data sets with earthmine’s immersive 3D environment. The earthmine API is also available to users of earthmine’s platform and provides full flexibility in deploying client applications across different platforms and environments.
earthmine Server Provides Expanded Hosting Options
With its new earthmine Server the company greatly expands the earthmine audience by now offering two hosting options for its visually impressive and spatially accurate street level 3D data. For organizations that require full control over their hosting solution, including intranet only access and customized network security, earthmine Server allows customers to run the entire earthmine platform within an enterprise’s own computing infrastructure. When an application demands massive scalability, the earthmine Server can scale horizontally simply by adding more servers in a load balanced configuration, offering a simple solution to both small enterprises delivering solutions across their local intranet, and to large consumer facing applications.
earthmine continues to offer the earthmine Cloud Service, as a fully managed and scalable option. The earthmine Cloud Service gives enterprises the opportunity to focus on building applications without the overhead of managing servers, storing large data sets and maintaining up-time. “We firmly believe the earthmine Server and earthmine Cloud Service together meet the needs of earthmine’s wide variety of customers,” said Anthony Fassero. “From local government and intelligence agencies to local search portals, earthmine delivers a full suite of products and solutions for both public and private facing applications.”
Pricing and Availability
The earthmine SDK for iPhone and earthmine Server are available immediately as part of the earthmine solution. Customers have the choice of utilizing data within earthmine’s data library or scheduling data collection through the earthmine Project Partner Program to meet specific data needs. Platform users have the choice of further customizing their package by choosing an appropriate hosting option and client application SDKs to build a fully customized solution. Pricing is dependent on customization options.
пятница, 14 августа 2009 г.
A3D Panorama Assistant
Anything3D provides set of tools for creating, managing and publishing interactive panoramas and interactive 3D images. There is many ways to bring an interactive landscape to end user. One designers prefer Java, other - QuickTime. Flash sites are also popular. Sometimes interactivity is not necessary and just a movie is preferable.
Please click here to see how panorama technology works.
All our products are able to export panoramas into various formats. And now we release our export engine as a separate product.
A3D Panorama Assistant does not stitch panorama images by itself. But it will bring to a user all power of A3D export engine. User can export a panorama and just send it to a friend by email. On the other hand export result can be immediately published on the web or saved for additional editing or embedding into a larger project.
We hope A3D Panorama Assistant will helpful for both: digital photo amateurs and professional web designers.
вторник, 11 августа 2009 г.
3D Photo Builder Features
Rich set of data processing tools. The built-in tools allow carrying out both manual and automatic interactive processing of the initial images. There are two unique interactive automatic 3D processings presented in the software: 3D Pano Stitcher for creating 360°/Partial 3D Panoramas and
Also there are more specialized tools, like A3D PanoAssistant
Progressive storage format of the graphical data and auxiliary information. We have developed the specialized format of the graphic information storage which allows to keep graphic files holding out quality and taking minimum place on your hard drive. The format is optimized for storage of high resolution images and has the raised stability on errors and failures of file system. The built-in automatic backup/restore system allows guarantee complete safety of your information. Graphic information is accompanied by the detailed information (name, comments, statistics), that gives additional convenience in searching and sorting the stored information.
Easy-to-use hierarchical form of stored information representation. The graphic images, placed in the system are submitted as elements of Explorer-Style tree. You can group elements in the way you want, organizing directories of various level of an enclosure, using Drag-and-drop technology and specialized clipboard. The extensive and evident icons set for the elements simplifies guiding in your directories system. Built-in recycle bin reliably protects data from casual removal. The graphic data are automatically grouped with results of processing in one element of a tree that gives additional convenience.
Variety of stored data types. The data can be stored in the system as a 3D Panorama, 3D Image, Slide Show or images set. Such set of the predetermined types of the stored data gives an opportunity to connect your initial series with the appropriate tools for processing, viewing and exporting.
Powerful system of data export. Wide set of additional image formats (Flash, QTVR, AGIF, AVI and much more) is available in the professional version. Also export of your 3D graphics for show with A3D Screensaver is available.Batch Stitching. Availability to stitch several packages of pictures at once. When the a series of source images for 360°/Partial 3D Panoramas and the parameters for their stitching are the same they can be placed in a folder and stitched automatically.
Direct FTP and Email publishing with publishing history. Powerful built-in system for direct uploading to the FTP makes easy creating/updating the WebPages. Direct Email system allows sending the processing results directly to email addresses.
Effective built-in viewing data tools. The wide set of viewing graphic data tools enables easy navigation in system, supervision of quality of processing, looking through results in any form, convenient to the client. There are built-in previews of the different sizes, slideshows as thumbnails and external as web-browsers viewing tools.
Remote graphic packages processing. 3D Photo Builder presents the unique possibility of remote graphic packages processing by A3D Processing Center. You can trace all stages of processed of your order with special tools in the interface of the program.
Extended system of the web-publications. It allows generating web-presentation of a graphic image interactively, reviewing of results of configuration with tools of the program in a web-browser window as well and also publishing. 
The special edition of high-speed 3D Presentation Applet and 3D Pano Viewer Applet are new interactive tools for viewing 3D Images and 360°/Partial 3D Panoramas over the internet without requiring the use of plug-ins which takes forever to download. 3D Photo Builder software automatically generates HTML pages with your 3D Images or 3D Panoramas, which includes these applets. If you want to have additional features, replace Anything3D logo, you need to purchase
Complete and convenient help system.
Professional Technical Support. The highly skilled software experts will help you to solve any problem and give advice on the most effective use of the program.
пятница, 7 августа 2009 г.
A3D PanoStitcher
3D Pano Stitcher is the integrated part of the 3D Photo Builder Software.
3D Pano Stitcher allows to create of full 360°Panoramas and Partial Panoramas (less than 360°) out of one row of separate shots without any efforts.
Stitching module represents an amazing combination of user-friendly interface and operational features for professional images processing.
Universal set of pano types. Program generates two types of panoramas as Spherical (equirectangular) and Cylindrical types. Also you can create 3D 360°/Partial Panorama out of pictures made up with the help of fisheye (one, two, three fisheye images). It automatically matches lens properties (Focal Length and Barrel Distortion). Installation-specific settings of Yaw, Pitch, Roll, HFOV, VFOV are manual.
Different types of results optimization. Ready panoramas can be saved in formats Flash, QTVR, AGIF, AVI and adjusted either for local preview or for WEB publishing.
Fully automated stitching process. Stitching process does not require any special knowledge to proceed it. All preferences for stitching can be set either automatically or manually, moreover you can preview all changes when using manual mode.
Batch Stitching. Availability to stitch several packages of pictures at once. If a series of source images for 360°/Partial 3D Panoramas and the parameters for their stitching are the same they can be placed in a folder and stitched automatically.
Original alignment algorithm. Program makes shots alignment interactively. This algorithm is not influenced by shots of poor quality or ones having distortions.
Automated hue saturation. Stitching can help to avoid time and energy consuming process of brightness/contrast setting for separate shots and automatically compensate parameters difference for all shots.
Progressive "image warping" technology. For solving problem of "Parallax Error" and for complete elements' combination on shots' borders the program uses progressive "image warping" technology, which directly changes images and combines conform elements. For transformations the program algorithms, which don't bring noise into the image and don't decrease its quality is used.
среда, 5 августа 2009 г.
Welcome to the 3D World™
Welcome to Anything3D Corporation, the world's leading provider of 3D Imaging, 3D Panorama stitching and Virtual Tour Solutions!
This company presents the huge amount of software tools to create your own 3D Panoramas. All products are very simple and initiative in use. It is not hard to create the 3D panorama the first day you use this programm. All that you need is the buch of photos and the programm to stitch them.
This company presents the huge amount of software tools to create your own 3D Panoramas. All products are very simple and initiative in use. It is not hard to create the 3D panorama the first day you use this programm. All that you need is the buch of photos and the programm to stitch them.
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