Imaging

Petri dish culture soaps

We covered these clever Petri dish soaps from Cleaner Science back in March. Now, we’re very pleased to have her on board as a Makers Market seller. Her soaps are available in many colors and varieties, including some with glow-in-the-dark “colonies,” and none of them will set you back more than $10.

DIY shoulder rig for DSLR video, with clever focus puller

DIY shoulder rig for DSLR video, with clever focus puller

In this video and at this site, annoyingly good-looking Swedish videographer Jonathan Bergqvist details the construction of this clever shoulder-mount device for shooting video with a DSLR. Designed by Jonathan and his father Erik, the rig itself is made out of birch and includes a manual focus puller, actuated by twisting the left handle, that is hacked together from R/C control rod parts and a hose clamp.

Bob’s 3D birdhouse webcam

MAKE subscriber Bob Alexander sent us info about his bird house with a 3D webcam inside: At the this URL, I describe how my bird house with an adjustable 3D web camera works. On the main site, http://bobsbirdblog.com, I post 3D videos (and 2D for those without glasses) of what’s happening inside the bird house. […]

Quantum dot image sensors set to change camera industry

Quantum dot image sensors set to change camera industry

Those of you who, like me, just recently managed to score the digital camera of your dreams will be very excited to learn that it’s possibly going to be obsolete real soon. Based on technology developed by University of Toronto professor Ted Sargent, who is now CTO at start-up InVisage, the new image sensor uses a matrix of nanoparticles embedded in a polymer film which can be simply “painted” onto the top of a low-cost wafer at room temperature. If the hype is to be believed, the new sensor offers four times the sensitivity of conventional CMOS image sensors at a dramatically reduced cost per chip. [Thanks, Glen!]