Now you see itÂ…
It can't be much of a challenge creating a camera that simply disappears. The real fun is to create a disappearing camera that has features like a 10-megapixel CCD, optical zoom and image stabiliser, motion and face-detection technology, all housed in a 'perpetual curve' design that would possibly excite even James Bond.
The Canon IXUS 970 IS is the latest flagship in the IXUS range of cameras that through sheer ubiquity, when you can slip the camera into a pocket or purse, you tend to take it everywhere, has dramatically increased the world's stock of digital images. The new range has better autofocus in darker conditions, enhanced image stabilisation to reduce blur, and better colour contrast, anti-glare and menu navigation through its 2.5-inch PureColor LCD II screen, on top of boosting the zoom from 3x to 5x.
Price: $549.00
The future is here
If you've escaped the shackles of TV network schedules and are busily downloading BitTorrent files of your favourite programs from the US, UK and elsewhere, you'll have noticed three impediments: the sheer size of the files, the need to get them from your download point to the playing medium, a DVD player perhaps, or a media centre, and its occasional refusal to play the files, because it doesn't support all the video compression codecs, like MPG, MPEG, AVI, M2V, DAT, VOB, and Xvid.
The MediaGate MG450HD wireless multimedia player solves all those problems. It has HDMI, Composite, Component and S-Video outputs to your amplifier or TV, and it handles 1920x1080p high definition resolution and full 5.1 surround sound. It also supports SATA hard drives. And while it's designed to have an internal hard drive fitted, it works perfectly well without one, allowing users to hook up a USB external drive. That could be a good strategy: leave it wired to your amp or TV, and transport the files in a smaller external disk. Alternatively, you can connect to your multimedia storage via its inbuilt WiFi or 10x100 Ethernet. It's distributed by Anyware Computer Accessories.
Price: $379.00
Start spreadin' the news
It's impossible to calculate the esteem you will gather from having arguably the world's greatest source of wit, wisdom and information in your pocket. That is, if the contents of your pocket include the complete archives of the New Yorker magazine , 4164 issues published between February 1925 and April 2006, etched on a brushed aluminium 80GB Fujitsu USB hard drive roughly the size of a wallet.
Inspector Gadget did the due diligence on the Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive for you. We can report (having bought our personal copy from newyorkerstore.com) that the half-million pages, every painstakingly researched, beautifully written article, poem, short story, cartoon, illustration, and advertisement exactly as it appeared in print, include 43 cartoons and one comic strip on accountants, plus several articles on celebrated accounting professionals. For example, there's an entry in New Yorker's 'Annals of Crime' for 1939 detailing the activities of Raymond Marien. 'The greatest accountant in the world', Marien juggled the books of a hosiery company to show $1.9 million in non-existent assets, and for almost four years sustained the firm's salaries, dividends, bonuses and general financial policy on balance sheets he'd totally fabricated. The archive is searchable and printable and in the Inspector's opinion, in-comparable. The archive, which used to be US$299, includes a free update DVD due in December.
Price US$179.00
For further information visit The New York Store.
On ya, Omar
One can't help but wonder if Omar Khayyam had a presentiment about digital cameras when he came up with that line: 'the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on'. If you've set your camera up to use the increasingly popular, highest-quality RAW format, you couldn't be blamed for wondering if the process involves more of a finger-type of digit than those other ones.
It all speeds up with the Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB Card Reader. UDMA stands for ultra direct memory access, a technology designed to accelerate read / write operations to storage media. Stick a Lexar 300x UDMA Compact Flash, SD-RAM or SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) flash memory card into the pop-up slots of this elegant little reader, and you'll save precious seconds transferring images from card to computer. You'll save a lot more time, however, if you buy the Firewire 800 version. It takes less than half the time of a standard USB 2.0 transfer. Unfortunately, it will cost about double the price, and if your PC doesn't have Firewire 800 built in (some Macs do), you'll need to buy a Firewire 800 PCI or CardBus card.
Price $67.00
Reference: May 2008, volume 78:04, p. 78 - 79
