Craft & Design

Note to all you folks taking pictures of your projects- If you take photos that look too good, Wal-Mart won’t print them. The clerk said the photos looked like a professional had taken them, Helmick said. And no matter how much Helmick protested that she, an amateur, had snapped the shots of her son, she said the clerk wouldn’t budge. Wal-Mart sells high resolution “professional” quality cameras in their stores, just remember to take crummy low res photos! [via] Link.

We’re all hacking the CVS digital cameras, now we can hack $30 videocameras! — the world’s first single-use point-and-shoot digital video camera. CVS/pharmacy, the retail leader in digital photo and image processing, is exclusively offering the world’s first compact, affordable, one-time-use solution for creating and sharing high quality home movies on DVD. For under $30, consumers can now enjoy a DVD home video experience that compares to pricey DVD camcorders, which cost upwards of a thousand dollars. Link.

…a novel, inexpensive, stereoscopic technique for generating 3D images from cellophane on a liquid crystal displays which are most typically used for a laptop screen or a camera phone screen. Stereoscopy requires independent manipulation of the left and right eye views. Our technique takes advantage of two facts; the first is that the light from the liquid crystal display of either a laptop computer or a camera phone is polarized light, and therefore we can easily manipulate its transmission with a polarizer sheet. The second fact is that a cellophane half-waveplate can change the direction of polarization of light. [via] Link.

Flickr gang- congrats on your 17 millionth photo! I never expected to use a photo sharing service so much and for it to be a daily part of work, play and everything in between. The MAKE Flickr photo group has been a great meta for us, thanks again! Lastly, for Flickr fans like me- there’s a new collaborative poster you can order with thousands of others- called the Flickrverse. Link.

Interesting- this new camera from Samsung will come with photo to text software “You can shoot documents such as books, papers and magazines then extract text from the image taken using the “Digimax Reader” text recognition software included in the box”. Kinda handy if it works well, I suspect the software would work with any image from other cameras. Current OCR software might be able to do this now, but not optimized for digital cameras. Would be neat to have this in cell phone cameras to auto-populate text messages. [via] Link.