SHORTS & BRIEFS: July 25

A concise round-up of new product updates, international snippets and other interesting stuff from the wonderful world of photography: Kodak’s kardboard film scanner…Edelkrone to Blonde Robot…Product photography robots…

Kodak’s Kardboard film scanner

In its constant search for relevancy and the holy dollar Kodak has made some weird moves lately. KodakCoin, KodakOne and Kodakit come to mind. Oh, and that Kodak ‘KashMiner’ machine – that was a doozy.

Now Kodak has slapped together a black, red and yellow cardboard box and an LED light, called it a film scanner and is looking for people happy to part with US$4o for it.

Users place their phone on top of the, um ‘device’ and film in a slot on the bottom. An LED light illuminates the film or slide, which is then snapped using the phone’s camera. Image quality is just about acceptable for Instagram, according to one review.

The accompanying app saves the image to the phone and offers tools for rotating and cropping the image, making adjustments, and applying filters. Direct sharing across social platforms is also available in the app.

How the mighty have fallen.

Edelkrone to Blonde Robot
Blonde Robot has announced it is now exclusive distributor for US-based Edelkrone ‘motorised motion control systems’. These include sliders, heads and dollys.

That’s about all we can tell you, really. The humans at Blonde Robot were a bit light-on with further details.

Product photography robots

A US mobile payment company, Square, is offering Square Photo Studio,  a robotic product photography service starting at just US$9.95 per subject. The Photo Studio, service promises professional quality multi-angle product images at a cost of $9.95 and $29.95 per 360-degree ‘interactive’ photoshoot.

The US$9.95 Photo Pack includes three images per product from different angles with professional retouching and optimisation for online selling.

Images are captured using a ‘cutting edge robotic camera’ and the service is presented as a cheaper alternative to hiring an on-site product photographer.

The good news for product photographers is that there’s a 14-day turnaround, and that’s after paying for the products to be shipped to Square to be photographed. The other bit of good news is that while Square is in Australia, it s so far not offering this service.

Square says its great for images for Instagram, websites, online marketplaces, Pinterest etc.