Printaholics is a promising new project to be established in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an online printing service and a photo sharing community, the first website of its kind in the Gulf area. Upon its launch in August, Printaholics will provide its customers with various printing services including t-shirt, mug, and card printing. The service of Printaholics will be fully online as the user would be able to make payment online to receive his prints via delivery, however it is still unknown if the website will feature any international services.

Even before its official launch, Pintaholics started its first photography competition titled ‘Faces from the Gulf’ which could entitle you to win a Canon EOS 350D SLR. The deadline for submitting entries for this competition is July 30th. You can learn more about the competition from this page.

We are excited to hear about such a project in the area and we do wish our dear neighbours in the UAE the best of luck with Printaholics. You can visit the Printaholics website at http://www.printaholics.ae.

Sony unveiled its first DSLR earlier this week the alpha DSLR-A100. The camera is based on Konica Minolta’s DSLR Camera’s the Maxxum 5D and 7D which is not surprising as Sony acquired Konica Minolta’s camera business last year. The alpha DSLR-A100 boasts a 10-megapixed CCD, a ‘Super SteadyShot’ image stabilization system, 2.5″ LCD display with 230,000 pixels, and uses Compact Flash memory cards, Sony Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Pro Duo. The alpha is to be shipped in July. You can read more about it at DCResource.com.

ACDSee is giving out a trip to World Cup 2006 at its new photography competition. The participants are simply required to upload their photographs to the contest’s website to qualify for the grand prize and some other weekly and monthly prizes as well. You can learn more about this competition from here.

Apple today upgraded its professional photo editing application ‘Aperture’ from 1.0 to 1.1 and reduced its price from $500 to $300. You can learn more about it from Apple’s website.

[via Download Squad]

Sony announced today a new ultra-compact T-series camera the DSC-T30 which features a 7.2 megapixel CCD, 3 inch LCD display, 3x optical zoom, optical image stabilisation, 58MB of internal memory and a Memory Stick Duo slot. The DSC-T30 will ship in May for $500 (RO 190). You can read more details at this link.

Adobe recently released the beta version of its new image management tool named Lightroom. The beta version of it that is currently available for the Mac OS only should let you view, zoom in, and compare photos quickly and easily.

You can read more about it at this link.

[via The Unofficial Photoshop Blog]

Kodak has recently announced the dual Scheneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon lenses camera Kodak EasyShare V570. The first lens of the V570 is a 23mm ultra-wide lens and the other is a 5x zoom lens, and the camera switches between the two lenses automatically as the user zooms in and out. The camera also has a 5 megapixel CCD, a 2.5 LCD display, and uses SD cards for memory in addition to the built-in 32MBs of internal memory.

You can read more about it at the following links: Engadget, PCMAG, dpreview.com, dcresource.com.

Sony announced earlier on this week the Cyber-shot DSC T9, a credit card sized slim digital camera with image stablisation. The 6 megapixel camera also features 3x optical zoom, 2.5 LCD display, 58MB of internal memory and support for MS duo for external memory. The T9 will ship this month in Japan for ¥47,000 (RO 153) , the European release will follow before the end of this year, and the American release will be in January.

You can read more about it at this link.

Google released version 2.1 of its free imaging tool which now features support for RAW files from a collection of a camera manufacturers including Sony, Canon, Olympus, Nikon, Kodak, and Fuji. You can download Picasa from this link.

[via Digital Photography Review]

Sony announced a new consumer digital camera that doubles as a portable photo display unit. In addition to the usage of Memory Stick Duo for storage, the camera has internal memory that stores VGA copies of each image taken that remain on the camera even after the removal of the high res copies of the original images to be displayed on the big 3″ touch colour display at any time. These stored photos could also be arranged into albums or be used to make slides. The DSC-N1 has an 8.1 megapixel CCD, 3x optical zoom, 26 MB of internal memory, USB 2.0, and will ship in mid-November for about $500.

You can read more about it at this link.