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Nikon Coolpix S9100 Review

Nikon Coolpix S9100 is the latest addition to its Coolpix range. The 12.1-megapixel camera carries all the goodies from its predecessor S8100 but the addition of 18x optical zoom is what makes it class apart. Such zooming capability is something found only in bulky shooters but Nikon has managed to pack it in a portable pocket friendly device. The addition of CMOS sensor promises to retain god image quality in low light conditions ass well. Nikon Coolpix S9100 price in India is Rs.18,950. 

The 3-inch, 920k-dot rear-mounted display of S9100 gives you great satisfaction and pleasure when viewing images or HD videos. The Nikkor ED glass lens combined with 19 scene and 7 shooting modes to choose from, produces highly detailed and razor sharp pictures. When you choose the night portrait, night landscape or backlighting shooting mode several shots are taken one after the other with varying sensitivity and shutter speed to minimize the effect of low light and noise. These shots are combined to produce high quality final image.

Where the Nikon Coolpix S9100 can capture thousand of high quality still images its video recording is no exception. Just with a touch of a button you can record HD videos at 1080p with stereo sound recording ticking at 30fps. The increased zooming and auto focus features will take you even closer to the happenings. You can take still pictures when recording a video and also add fast forwarding and slow mo effects. Other features and specifications include:

·                     Easy Panorama mode to automatically detect, combine and assemble photos in one panoramic shot while  you turn  the camera in any direction

·                     The Motion Detection feature to identify moving objects and automatically adjust shutter speed and ISO to take sharp and blur free pictures.

·                     1050mah battery capable of shooting 270 images.

·                     Macro shooting mode for capturing from as close as 1.6 inches.

·                     Best Shot Selector to automatically capture ten images and save the best one.

·                     Dimensions of approx. 104.8 x 62.0 x 34.6 mm

·                     Weighs approx. 214g .

·                     Digital Zoom up to 4x.

·                     Support for SD memory card.

·                     Available in three different colors; red, black, silver, and golden.

Nikon’s S9100 has retained the features of its predecessor but the boosting up the zoom from 10x to 18x while keeping the camera still slim, is a great move from Nikon. The camera is expected to hit the markets any time from now.

Care for Camera

If you take reasonable care of your camera you can look forward to many trouble – free years of use. Remember the following rules :-

1.         Dust, grease and finger prints are the principle enemies.

2.         In dusty, sandy or wet conditions carry your camera in a clean plastic bag, and replace it in the plastic bag after use.

3.         If your camera gets wet, wipe it dry immediately with a soft cloth. Sea water is very harmful, so be careful when at the beach.

4.         Store your camera in a dry, cool place at home and if not using it for some time, remove the batteries.

5.         Never leave your camera on the back window shelf or in the glove box of a car. The camera and film will become very hot and this could affect the film emulsion.

6.         Dust can be removed from the lens with a blower brush, and then the lens can be wiped with a clean lens cloth or lens tissue.

Never touch the interior of the camera. If shutter jams or if you have any other problems, take the camera to a recommended camera mechanic.

Common mistakes and what to do

Mistake - The film has not been loaded correctly onto the take-up spool, so the film has not moved at all

How to Fix - happens to everyone at least once! Kick yourself-then load the film correctly and start all over again. You should always check that film has been loaded. Correctly by gently turning the re-wind knob (do not touch the re-wind button). If you meet with resistance then the film has been loaded correctly.

Mistake - Blank transport negatives with no detail of film.

            

How to Fix - Forgot to remove lens cap; or mixed up used and unused film and sent unused film for processing; or camera shutter jammed. You can check this by opening the back of the empty camera and checking whether the shutter opens and closes when you pres the release button. If the shutter stays closed, do not try to release it. Take the camera to be repaired.

Google Nexus One

Google began selling its own mobile phone a much-anticipated move aimed at protecting its online advertising empire as people increasingly surf the Web on handsets instead of personal computers.

The Nexus One joins about 20 other mobile devices that already run on Android, the mobile operating system that Google introduced in 2007 to make it easier to connect to its services and other Web sites away from home or the office.

Google designed the touch-screen phone in partnership with Taiwan's HTC Corp., which made the first Android-powered phone and will manufacture this one, too. Google will handle all sales online and has no plans to let consumers check out the Nexus One in retail stores.

The Nexus One has been in the hands of Google employees for the past three weeks, triggering media speculation and anticipation for the company's first attempt to peddle a consumer electronics device.

Given the hype, the Nexus One could be a bit of a letdown because it only takes a few incremental steps beyond what's already possible on handheld devices.

The Nexus One's $529 price tag is more than twice as much as the most powerful iPhone sold in conjunction with a two-year service plan from AT&T Inc.

Google is billing the Nexus One as the first "super" phone in an effort to position the device as a cut above the iPhone and other smart phones such as Research In Motion Ltd.'s more utilitarian BlackBerry.

It appears to be sleeker than other phones, as thin as a pencil at 11.5 millimeters and as light as a keychain-sized Swiss army knife at just 130 grams. Among other things, the Nexus One will offer more ways to customize the phone's home page and use voice recognition technology to perform more tasks, including composing e-mails and navigating Google's mobile mapping products.

But most of the features on the Nexus One are already on other Android-powered phones, and it probably will be a long time before it can offer as many different tools as the iPhone, which boasts more than 100,000 applications compared with Android's 18,000.

For the first few months at least, the Nexus One will only work on GSM networks — a limitation that means buyers in the US will have to use T-Mobile USA if they want the handset for high-speed Web surfing.

Consumers willing to enter into a two-year data plan with T-Mobile will be able to buy the Nexus One for $179, $20 less than the top-of-the-line iPhone with an AT&T subsidy.

The Nexus One should work with many carriers abroad, as GSM is the predominant technology used. Vodafone's wireless service in Europe also will begin to subsidize the Nexus One in the spring.

Specifications:

Size and weight

- Height: 119mm
- Width: 59.8mm
- Depth: 11.5mm
- Weight: 130 grams w/battery; 100g w/o battery Display

- 3.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen
- 800 x 480 pixels
- 100,000:1 typical contrast ratio
- 1ms typical response rate

Camera & Flash

- 5 megapixels
- Autofocus from 6cm to infinity
- 2X digital zoom
- LED flash
- User can include location of photos from phone's AGPS receiver
- Video captured at 720x480 pixels at 20 frames per second or higher, depending on lighting conditions

Power and battery

Removable 1400 mAH battery
Charges at 480mA from USB, at 980mA from supplied charger

Talk time
- Up to 10 hours on 2G
- Up to 7 hours on 3G

Standby time
- Up to 290 hours on 2G Up to 250 hours on 3G

Internet use
- Up to 5 hours on 3G
- Up to 6.5 hours on Wi-Fi

Video playback
- Up to 7 hours

Audio playback
- Up to 20 hours

Processor

- Qualcomm QSD 8250 1 GHz

Operating system
- Android Mobile Technology Platform 2.1 (Eclair)

Capacity
- 512MB Flash
- 512MB RAM
- 4GB Micro SD Card (Expandable to 32 GB)

Cellular & Wireless

- UMTS Band 1/4/8 (2100/AWS/900)
- HSDPA 7.2Mbps
- HSUPA 2Mbps
- GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
- Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n)
- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
- A2DP stereo Bluetooth

Location
- Assisted global positioning system (AGPS) receiver
- Cell tower and Wi-Fi positioning
- Digital compass
- Accelerometer

Graphics, video and audio

- Image: JPEG (encode and decode), GIF, PNG, BMP
- Video: H.263 (encode and decode) MPEG-4 SP (encode and decode) H.264 AVC (decode)
- Audio encoders: AMR-NB 4.75 to 12.2 kbps sampled @ 8kHz
Audio decoders: AAC LC/LTP, HE-AACv1 (AAC+), HE-AACv2 (enhanced AAC+) Mono/Stereo standard bit rates up to 160 kbps and sampling rates from 8 to 48kHz, AMR-NB 4.75 to 12.2 kbps sampled @ 8kHz, AMR-WB 9 rates from 6.60 kbit/s to 23.85 kbit/s sampled @ 16kHz., MP3 Mono/Stereo 8-320Kbps constant (CBR) or variable bit-rate (VBR), MIDI SMF (Type 0 and 1), DLS Version 1 and 2, XMF/Mobile XMF, RTTTL/RTX, OTA, iMelody, Ogg Vorbis, WAVE (8-bit and 16-bit PCM)

Seagate Momentus Thin Hard Drive Hugely Small

Laptop hard drives have to be small. The form factor dictates it. Now Seagate pushes the envelope with a 7mm drive – shaving around 2.5mm off of the thickness of the drive. What’s next, paper thin?

Though it does spin at 5400rpm, it does maintain very good storage ratios. It comes in 250GB and 160GB versions. It also support SATA connections and even the SATA 3 protocol. All this means very good bandwidth in a small package. The 250GB version will cost $55 when it comes out in January.

Thin is in.

Hitachi Surprises with 7mm 7200RPM 320GB HDD

There are many ways that a new storage solution can cause jaws to be inadvertently dropped. Usually, it is because the read and/or write speed is spectacular, or because some new feature or another is supported. Other times, a device would stand out through being the first of its kind, as it happened with the first SSDs and, later, with the first PCI Express solid state drives. It appears, however, that there might be another way of turning heads.

Toshiba has combined inventiveness with experience in order to come up with a hard disk drive that stands out through being smaller than all of its peers. To be more specific, the SATA 3.0Gbps Travelstar Z7K320 that the hardware maker presented today, though it uses the same 2.5-inch form factor that all compact HDDs come with, is much thinner than one would expect. In fact, it is so thin that it will probably make its way into most ultrathin laptops slated for release during the later parts of 2010.

The actual thickness if of 7 millimeters, a full 2.5mm less than standard units (9.5mm). The performance, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have suffered the same shrinkage effect. The platter still manages to maintain a rotary speed of 7,200RPM (rotations per minute) and, backed by 16MB cache, the maximum transfer rate still gets as high as 1,334Mbps. This is quite significant, especially considering the power draw (1.8 Watts during read/write and 0.8 watts during standby).

As for noise hazards, the humming produced by the storage solution shouldn't go over 23dB when idle and 24dB when seeking. August is the earliest one can expect to see this product, as well a 5,400RPM version, being mass produced, which means that super-thin notebooks will start to show up soon after.

“As a leading personal computing company, we are constantly evaluating and offering new designs and technologies that make computing more enjoyable and affordable for our customers," said Wentao Yang, vice president, Global Procurement, Lenovo Group. "Hitachi's 7mm product family represents important advancements for the industry. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Hitachi and working together to innovate and take the computing landscape to newer smaller heights."

Postage Stamp-Sized SSDs Coming in 2012

End-users are most likely more than aware of the fact that solid state drives are still a way off from becoming mainstream, even though they have significantly higher data-transfer rates when compared to hard drives. This lower popularity is mostly due to the fact that hard disks have larger storage capabilities and are a more mature technology than that of SSDs. Still, SSDs have steadily been filling the gap and it seems that this gap might disappear altogether in the not-so-distant future, if the work of a team of Japanese researchers is anything to go by.

Led by Professor Tadahiro Kuroda, the group created a prototype of a postage stamp-sized SSD.

The Nikkei reports that the research team claims to have put together a technology that allows solid state drives to shrink considerably. The storage unit will supposedly be 90% smaller than current solutions. This would already be noteworthy, but the device will also, supposedly, be able to pack even 1TB of space in this stamp-sized form factor. Not only that, but the storage device will also see an added energy efficiency, namely of 70%.

The research team is made up of people from Toshiba and the Keio University of Tokyo. Under the guidance of Professor Tadahiro Kuroda, they were able to create the aforementioned prototype with 128 NAND flash memory chips and a controller chip. The unit is able to achieve a transfer speed of up to 2Gbps and, the team says, is based on radio communications. According to them, radio communication will ultimately lower the production cost of such SSDs. This means that, in addition to being capacious (1TB) and efficient, the new solid state drives will also be cheaper than competing HDDs.

Unfortunately, even though the researchers were able to patch together a working prototype, it seems that such a product won't become available in the very near future. The team expects the first such device to only come out during 2012.

Bike Concept Turns Into Cart

Green types that like to ride their bike to buy groceries rather than having to drive to the store, but worry that their bike will get stolen will get a kick out of the Urban Folding Bicycle concept. The concept was designed by Hyuk-Jae Chang and won a bronze prize at the IDEA Design Awards 2010.

The basic concept is a normalish looking bike that you can ride around town with a chain and disc brakes. Once you get to the store rather than chain your bike to a post or bike rack, you simply fold it down into your own shopping card.

The cart has a push handle and a pair of baskets for your purchases. Once back outside you unfold the bike again and ride away. The only downside I see is that the baskets are a bit small. You won’t be buying many groceries at once.

Sony Laser Enables 1TB Optical Disks

It was just a short while ago that Sharp announced its first BDXL Blu-ray disks, with a capacity of 100GB and, soon after, TDK revealed its own plans to join this movement. Later, once the first batch of disks starts selling, the two hope to move on to 128GB disks. Needless to say, these capacities are nothing to be frowned upon, but they may not keep their title as greatest for as long as some might think. Sony, in partnership with Tohoku University of Japan, have apparently developed a laser that has a watt output 100 times higher than the currently highest values for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers.

Basically, the new type of laser has an output of 100 watts and supposedly has the ability to scribe up to 20 times more data on a disk, compared to 'regular' Blu-ray. Essentially, this equals about 1TB. Granted, this technology isn't exactly in line with the vision of a future completely free of the need for optical storage, but a technology like this is still a great step forward. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no mention of how long it will take for it to see practical implementations.

“This latest successful development is an all-semiconductor laser picosecond pulse source with a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers (1 nm = one-billionth of a meter) in the blue-violet region,” the Sony/Tohoku University press release reportedly states. “It is capable of generating optical pulses in the ultrafast duration of 3 picoseconds (1 picosecond = one-trillionth of a second), with ultrahigh output peak power of 100 watts and repetition frequency of 1 gigahertz. Advanced control of the newly-developed and proprietarily-constructed GaN-based mode-locked semiconductor laser and semiconductor optical amplifier have enabled peak output power in excess of 100 watts to be achieved, which is more than a hundred times the world’s highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers.”

“There are high expectations that this newly-developed semiconductor laser system, which incorporates semiconductor diodes, will be able to be used in a much wider range of applications in the future thanks to technology such as this, which enables the size of devices such as the light source box to be drastically reduced,” they added.

WikiReader: Entire Wikipedia on your palm

There are few better illustrations of the staggering advance of digital technology than the new WikiReader. It's the size of a thick table coaster, and contains nearly the entire text of the English-language Wikipedia. That's 3.1 million articles, written and edited by volunteers around the globe.

The WikiReader is sold online and made by OpenMoko Inc., a Taiwanese company. The founder, Sean Moss-Pultz, says the inspiration for the gadget comes from the electronic translation dictionaries that are common in Asia.

The fact that the WikiReader carries the text on a memory chip, rather than using an Internet connection, means you can use it anywhere: overseas, on a plane, in the subway. It's also faster and easier to use than most cell phones, and it has a bigger screen. The battery life is, to believe OpenMoko, outstanding. It says two AAA batteries will last in the WikiReader for a year, if you use it 15 minutes per day.

The face of the device is nearly filled by a monochrome LCD touch screen. To search the encyclopedia, you bring up an on-screen keyboard. To select links, you tap on them. To scroll, you move your finger across the glass.

There are four buttons: one for power, one for the search screen, one that lists the pages you just visited, and one that brings up a random article. There's no backlighting, so you can't read in weak light. Because the screen doesn't show color, the WikiReader doesn't even bother to show images.

The online Wikipedia changes every minute, but the WikiReader's content does not. It's a static snapshot. However, the manufacturer plans to provide free updates four times a year. To take advantage of that, you'd have to extract the chip from the WikiReader's battery compartment, stick it in a computer's card reader, and download the entire database.

OpenMoko also plans to provide a subscription service that mails new memory cards with updated content four times per year, for $29.