New photography products from Canon

A quick bit of new products news from Canon, they've got a new entry level consumer camera, the PowerShot A480, a 10MP, 3.3x zoom model that comes in a range of four colours and has a 2.5" LCD. Seems like only yesterday people were asking how would they cope if cameras could reach 6MP, surely that would be enough for almost anyone!

The next product, and this one slipped by unnoticed at the beginning of this month, is the new low cost two thousand + VAT, XEED SX800 projector. We're a fan of XEED projectors in the main, they are just about the best way to show your photos off with a digital projector we know. Professional photographers and The Royal Photographic Society like them too, praise indeed. This new SX800 model is the lowest cost XEED projector with 1400 x 1050 pixels resolution you can get. From reading the specifications it looks like there's no digital connection to the projector, just the old analogue VGA ones. This means you can't plug a camera with a HDMI port straight in to the projector with a DVI to HDMI adapter. Also DVI connections are preferred for picture quality and the possible lengths of cable runs.

1400 x 1050 pixels is termed SXGA+ resolution, and is much higher than a lot of mainstream projectors that only offer 1024 x 768 pixels. The benefit of the higher resolution is your projected images look so much better; fine detail is only part of the story, the colour and smooth transitions of tone are simply amazing.

If you are a professional portrait photographer you might want to consider a XEED; we've all heard that showing clients images projected large encourages larger print sales, now you can show large and with higher detail. As an extraordinary number of visitors here seem to be using Apple MacBook Pro computers with 1440 x 900 pixel displays, it's important to point out that the XEED's resolution almost matches the computer exactly.

Considering the typical DSLR image with it's 3:2 aspect ratio and plenty of megapixels, projection needs high resolution to show images at their best. When projected on a typical 1024 x 768 resolution projector your countless megapixels become 1024 x 683 pixels projected, or about 0.7 megapixels. A higher resolution SXGA+ machine like the XEED SX800 would be 1400 x 933 pixels or almost twice as much resolution with 1.3 megapixels.

If you have vertically oriented images don't do the calculation for a 1024 x 768 pixel projector!

Here's the press release and product information pages on Canon's website

PowerShot A480 : Press release : Website

XEED SX800 : Press release : Website

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