Panasonic officially prices Lumix G1, lens

Panasonic on Thursday announced more details regarding its Lumix DMC-G1 digital camera, first introduced last month. The Lumix G1 is the world’s first Micro Four Thirds System camera, meaning it offers interchangeable lenses and certain functions that are similar to digital SLR cameras. The electronics maker revealed the camera will cost nearly $800 bundled with a 14-45mm Lumix G Vario lens when it ships to stores in mid-November. Around the same time, Panasonic will release a telephoto lens for the camera, in the form of a 45-200mm Lumix G Vario, which will be priced at about $350.

The Lumix G1 will be available in black, blue and red and tip the scales at just under 1.3lbs. The 12.1-megapixel shooter will feature a live electronic viewfinder along with a three-inch swiveling LCD. Users will be able to make manual adjustments to the Lumix G1′s settings, or rely on Panasonic’s Intelligent Auto mode that has settings for maximizing exposure, film speed, face detection, auto focus and zoom shooting, among others.

Panasonic promises to add more cameras and lenses for its Micro Four Thirds System in 2009, including a camera that is able to shoot HD video in addition to capturing still photos.

Source: Electonista

NVIDIA makes GeForce 9400M official for all

NVIDIA makes GeForce 9400M official for all

Following an introduction along with Apple’s new MacBook range, NVIDIA this morning formally announced the GeForce 9400M for all notebook manufacturers. The chipset is one of the first to merge both a full mainboard chipset, including memory and bus controllers, with a truly modern graphics core: it includes 16 graphics processors, or twice that of the GeForce 9300M and other dedicated mobile GPUs that also consume double the space on size-sensitive notebook mainboards.

The video hardware maker additionally transfers Apple’s claims of 5X speed gains over Intel graphics to the Windows environment. Running the synthetic benchmark 3D Mark Vantage delivers a similar five-fold performance gain even over the GMA 4500MHD video used in many pure Centrino 2 notebooks, NVIDIA claims.

As part of the 9-series family, it further supports all of the company’s in-house feature list, including Shader Model 4 visual effects, full hardware HD video decoding, CUDA general-purpose computing and related features such as PhysX. Hybrid SLI, which switches to and from the 9400M and a discrete graphics chip to manage battery life, is likewise key and forms an essential feature of the MacBook Pro.

The 9400M should be available immediately in all of Apple’s new MacBook models, but significantly hasn’t been attached to other notebook makers through the NVIDIA announcement. Apple isn’t believed to have exclusive access to the 9400M but is also thought to have enforced NVIDIA’s secrecy up until Tuesday’s MacBook launch, preventing other companies from launching their own notebooks until now.

Source: Electronista