Lots of big news for digital photographers coming up next month.

The Photokina "World of Imaging" Trade Show is a digital photography show that happens every two years in Germany. This big event is held at the Cologne Exhibition Center. The last show (in 2004) had over 160,000 visitors and had over 1,500 exhibitors. The 2006 Photokina will start September 26 and end October 1.

The Photokina is important partly because it is one of the year's mass unveiling of new photography products. Even though the event won't be until next month, the slow and steady build-up started this past July with the announcements of new products (like the snazzy Ergo-Tech bags from KATA). Here's a list of some of the products announced since July:

• Digicams
• Casio EXILIM EX-Z770
• Casio EXILIM EX-Z700
• Fujifilm FinePix S6500fd
• Fujifilm FinePix F20 Zoom
• Kodak EasyShare V705
• Kodak EasyShare C875
• Kodak EasyShare C743
• Kodak EasyShare C433
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX3
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX07
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX50
• Pentax Optio S7
• Pentax Optio W20
• Samsung NV10
• Samsung NV7 OPS
• Samsung NV3
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10
• Digital SLR
• Nikon D80
• Lenses
• Nikon AF-S DX 18-135 mm
• Nikon AF-S DX 70-300 mm VR

Digital photography continues to advance, as does the general field of photography. Remember those "how did they do that?" shots that used to make our jaws drop when we saw them in National Geographic? Quite a lot of those are now common and within the reach of amateurs, so who knows what great things will be revealed at this Photokina?

So to our European readers who manage to get in, send us an email or two, will you?

Soon, you won't have to delete your blurry pictures, thanks to a new process of deblurring images revealed by MIT and University of Toronto researchers. This is good news because as mobile phones and digital cameras become smaller and lighter, even the smallest hand jitters will distort your pictures.

The MIT-U of Toronto team unveiled their technique for "Removing Camera Shake from a Single Photograph" at the 33rd Annual Siggraph Conference in Boston. They did it in a seminar called "Removing Camera Shake from a Single Photograph" (don't you love how scientific papers have such creative titles?).

Research papers are not exactly light reading, so if esoteric mathematics makes you break out in rashes, then you can just look at the pretty picture below from DigitalCameraInfo.com:

How is this possible? Well, a motion-blurred picture is actually (deep down inside) a clear picture, but the camera lens moved while the picture was being taken, so a blur got "overlapped" on the sharp picture (math geniuses would get all excited about this and call it a "convolution," but we'll spare you the details). To make a long story short: the MIT-U of Toronto researchers created a "deconvolution" technique. By calculating the blur, they can sort of subtract it to reveal a clear picture.

This is great because not everybody wants to carry around a huge tripod just to take pictures using a mobile phone. Unfortunately, it will take a while (maybe two years) before the technique is ready for software for the general market. Also, the process does not correct other kinds of blur (like when the lens is out of focus, when an object is moving too fast for the camera's shutter speed, or when trying to capture motion in pictures). That said, this nifty new process is a most welcome solution to a bothersome problem.