Epson announces improved piezo print head

- TOKYO, Japan, March 27, 2007 -

Seiko Epson Corporation ("Epson") has succeeded in developing a thin-film piezo element that boasts the world's highest* degree of distortion. Volume production of next-generation Micro Piezo print heads that feature these elements as actuators will be launched in April 2007.

The Micro Piezo print head is an inkjet print head which utilizes Epson's original Micro Piezo technology. This technology uses electrical signals to change the shape of piezo elements and then fires ink droplets according to the physical force generated by the change in shape of these elements. Epson's Stylus Photo and Stylus Pro inkjet printers, which utilize Micro Piezo print head technology, are photo-quality printers that have consistently played leading roles in the Japanese inkjet printer market and earned high approval and trust from customers.

Epson Press Release

Distant Relations

Collier Schorr’s photographs and collages question what we look at – and why

by Dominic Eichler @ Frieze

Collier Schorr’s immersion in the photographic – not just as an artist but also, during the 1990s, as an art writer and occasional curator – could perhaps be construed as being about a desire to make difference visible, possible and appealing. No stranger to the art of photographing people not like her, Schorr seems unabashedly fixated on the idea of what might constitute a compelling image, and doesn’t shy from implicating herself in the process. Her images tempt us to share what we might surmise to be her emotions, opinions, motives, reservations, internal debates and sensibilities. And given those preliminaries and fruitful doubts, I imagine pictures come to her as a relief.

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World’s Cruelty and Pain, Seen in an Unblinking Lens

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

If this were a perfect world, everybody would see the photographer James Nachtwey’s astonishing shows at the United Nations and at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Sadly, as Mr. Nachtwey knows, this isn’t a perfect world, a point he brings home in the work shown here. “Inferno,” the title of a 1999 book of the photographs he shot in Kosovo, Rwanda and other hellholes, aptly describes the horror in these two exhibitions.

For years, in Time magazine and elsewhere, he has demonstrated the good uses to which art can be put. Since 2000, he has crisscrossed Southeast Asia and Africa, documenting the resurgence of tuberculosis related to the global AIDS epidemic. (The show at the Visitors Center at the United Nations was timed to coincide with World TB Day last Saturday.) He has also photographed the war wounded in Iraq, where he himself was injured by a grenade a few years ago, and traveled with Medevac units to field hospitals and emergency rooms.

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Aperture Users Professional Forum

"Dedicated to providing information, education, training and support for Apple-based photographers."

Visit the site

Joel Peter Witkin Imagines Bush's "Ship of Fools"

"The Raft of George W. Bush" © Joel Peter Witkin, 2007
by David Schonauer @ PopPhoto.com

The art world has come to expect any number of grotesqueries in the work of Joel Peter Witkin. The Albuquerque-based fine-art photographer built his reputation with images containing cadavers, hermaphrodites, and various human and animal organs, all of which, somehow, were transformed into profoundly beautiful (if shocking) compositions. So the Witkin image here may come as a kind of revelation. As far as we know, this is the first time it’s been seen in the United States. I present the image with a warning, however: Supporters of George W. Bush may want to look away. Witkin’s image is one-sided and ruthless in its sarcasm. But, while Tony Snow might disagree, we think it is brilliant political allegory. It’s also informed by art history, so perhaps it’s not as much of a departure for Witkin as one might think.

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Jim Johnson responds

Memjet Printing Technology

There seems to be a new player in town, and it's a speedster! Silverbrook Research of Australia has perhaps made a huge improvement in digital printing. Memjet Technologies, a division of Silverbrook has announced this new technology which apparently employs a huge print head that covers the full width of the print area and lays down ink at a superfast rate.

Read the LYRA press report

Read the TechnaBob report

Memjet media files

Update :PC Magazine has picked this up now

Photography is no snap decision for collectors

James Bond Island III by Andreas Gursky. Photograph: © The artist/courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

By Ana Finel Honigman @ Gaurdian Art Blog

Collectors are still shying away from investing in photography, reflecting the medium's ambivalent status in the contemporary art world.

Susan Sontag's seminal essay On Photography famously asserted that "To collect photographs is to collect the world." Yet within the world of collecting, photography is too often set apart from other forms of art.

The existence of the newly conjoined photo fairs, Photo-London and Paris Photo, raises an interesting question - is photography being spotlighted or ghettoized?

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Color Space Extravaganza

From the British Journal of Photography:
Hewlett-Packard has linked with DreamWorks Animation to deliver a new cross-platform colour standard. Simon Bainbridge reports

Hewlett-Packard is calling on the industry to back its DreamColor technology initiative, claimed to deliver unparalleled colour consistency across multiple devices such as home printers, minilabs and display screens.

In a keynote speech last week at the Photo Marketing Association's annual trade show, Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, called for the abandonment of complex calibration systems in favour of its new system, developed in collaboration with DreamWorks Animation in Hollywood, and first publicly unveiled on the first day of the event in Las Vegas.

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From Creative Pro:
Microsoft Corp. formally announced HD Photo, a new file format for end-to-end digital photography that offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today's digital-imaging applications.
This new, next-generation digital image format offers the best solution for digital image editing and storage and unlocks the potential for digital photography on devices, applications and services. Microsoft also announced that it intends to standardize the technology and will be submitting HD Photo to an appropriate standards organization shortly.

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The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White

by CHARLOTTE COTTON @ Tip of the Tongue

The way I look at and think about black-and-white photography has shifted profoundly since the early 2000s. The words to describe my changing perspective are on the tip of my tongue. Let me set the scene for you.

I was living in London, researching a book about contemporary art photography and, given the climate of the time, looking mainly at color and increasingly larger-sized photographs. I was working as a curator for a national collection of photography, curating exhibitions on the history of photography for a dedicated photo gallery, and thrilled that we were going to be a tour venue for the Diane Arbus exhibition. Over at the Tate Modern, their first exhibition dedicated to photography, Cruel and Tender, had opened up a series of debates about the nature and genealogy of contemporary photography. New market heights for photography both old and new were just beginning to be set - and readily broken.

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Coming soon: Two editions of Photoshop CS3

Adobe® Photoshop® has always been at the forefront of digital imaging innovation, and we've given you a taste of things to come with the Photoshop CS3 beta. Today, we want to share the news that spring 2007 will bring not just one, but two editions of Adobe Photoshop CS3 software: Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Adobe announcement

Celebrating the Views That Others Looked Past

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — In its quiet way, the Henry Wessel show here at the Museum of Modern Art is a revelation, one of the season’s sleepers.

For the last 30 years or so, Mr. Wessel has been photographing the American West. Not the mountains and redwoods, but the parking lots, body builders, nude beaches and absurdly trimmed shrubbery. And the light.

He is having his moment. There have been shows lately at the Robert Mann and Charles Cowles galleries in New York. The exhibition here has about 80 mostly black-and-white prints that cover his whole career, one whose arc may make you scratch your head yet again at how distracted and fickle the art world can sometimes be.

He’s a photographer’s photographer. Born in 1942, he grew up in suburban New Jersey, then studied psychology at Penn State, borrowing a Leica one day from his girlfriend’s brother. “It really knocked me out,” he has recalled. “I had never really seen how a camera could describe something."

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Scientists and Photography

Sean McHugh is a chemical engineer from Cambridge University (UK) and very knowledgeable about the intricacies of digital image making. He has written many tutorials on everything from colour perception to high dynamic range post processing of images.

"As a scientist by training, I am fascinated by the interaction between technological developments and the range of creative options available to photographers. Improvements in sensitivity, ex post facto white balance control and real-time feedback from digital imaging are providing photographers with unprecedented low-light capabilities. Much of this fascination has been channelled into finding unique times, perspectives and techniques for capturing many of these low-light scenes in Cambridge."

Visit Cambridge in Colour

Nash Editions—The Evolution of Digital Printing

by Lynne Eodice @ Double Exposure

"I was the tour manager for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young for many years,” Holbert begins. “In that job, I became very involved with utilizing computers during the late 1970s—everything from word processing to spread sheets for financial management of the tours and projecting profits.” Then in the ’80s, Holbert began experimenting with early imaging software, which he used in conjunction with scanners to create covers for tour itineraries. Nash saw what Holbert was doing and wanted to utilize some of this technology for his photography. “We both share a love of taking pictures and probably spent the better part of the 1970s in a darkroom at his house in San Francisco,” Holbert states. “We were heavily steeped in photographic processes.” Graham Nash says that to this day, “I’m always taking pictures. I want to document my world from the way I see it.” He advises, “Always carry your camera around. You never know when the world is going to change right before your eyes.”

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