"Apple atheist HTC has been particularly busy. We've already seen its take on the touch-sensitive iPhone in the shape of the somewhat disappointing Touch, we've since reviewed its business-focussed PDA phone, the P6300, and we have the much-awaited (but not quite as much as the iPhone) P4550 Kaiser in our hands."
Sonos has integrated Sirius radio playback into its Linux-powered whole-house audio equipment. The commercial-free service can be trialed for 30 days by selecting a menu option on the Sonos Digital Music System's PDA-like controller (pictured at left), the company said.
Geeks.com sent us in for a review the Albatron GeForce 6200A 128MB PCI Video Card w/DVI TV-Out, 15' HDMI to HDMI (Male) Cable and a 12' Samsung Axession D5064 HDMI to DVI-D Single Link Cable. Read more for our experience with the products in conjunction to a 32" TV and a GeForce 8600GTS card.
Your first thought is possibly "what? A plain PCI card?". Believe it or not, plain PCI graphics cards still have their usage for motherboards that only have a single PCI-e slot. When you want to drive more than 2 monitors at the same time and your motherboard only has a single PCI-e or AGP slot, you have no alternative but to use a PCI card. And this is how we used the GeForce 6200A card. The card has 128 MB/64-bit memory, support for NVidia's CineFX 3.0, IntelliSample 3.0, UltraShadow II technology and it also supports DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.5. It comes with a 15-pin VGA, an S-Video TV-Out and a DVI-I connector. The package includes a CD with drivers (although there is a newer version available online) and an S-Video to composite converter cable. If you want to connect your TV via S-Video directly, you will need to buy your own cable, but it's handy for the card to come with a composite converter too. Installation was a breeze. The card does not consume much power, its fan is mostly noiseless and it was recognized immediately by our Windows XP and used as a "second" graphics card. We used the card in a video station, where the main card is driving two DVI high-res monitors and this PCI card driving a SXGA VGA monitor and a 32" TV via DVI. We had fears that driving HD content to the TV would over-saturate the PCI bandwidth, but thankfully this never happened. Apparently the PCI bandwidth is enough for HD playback! Overall, this is a great buy if you need such a multi-monitor system!
HDMI cables are traditionally over-priced. But not at Geeks.com. Here you got a 15 foot length HDMI cable and it's selling for under ten bucks! We used this cable from our HDV camcorder to the 32" TV mentioned above and quality bloomed to higher standards compared to when using the component cable that comes with the camcorder. Colors were presented correctly and we observed no visual noise or artifacts. A must-have cable, especially if your TV and your HDMI devices are quite far apart.
As we wrote above, we connected the 32" TV in the PCI card via the DVI port instead of the lower quality signal of S-Video. To achieve this, your TV must support either DVI or HDMI, and this TV only has 1 HDMI. Thankfully, exactly because the HDMI specification is very close to DVI creating a converter cable is easy. This 12 foot converter cable was able to connect our PC and the TV perfectly and achieve a near-PC monitor clarity.
The outsider has given PDAStreet BlackBerry lovers a lot of information to take in on Pinstack today. For all the Curve lovers out there hoping for GPS and Wi-Fi in one I am afraid to say there is nothing showing up on the horizon at the moment.
In recent months, a great deal of attention has been paid to Palm, Inc.'s plans to release a new Linux-based operating system for its handhelds and smartphones. But what shouldn't be forgotten is that Access Systems -- the company formerly known as PalmSource -- is developing a rival operating system.
Has Apple succeeded in setting a new mobile Web-browsing paradigm? InformationWeek examines how the Palm Treo, BlackBerry Curve, and HTC Wing stack up against the iPhone. Unfortunately, this article completely snobs the UIQ and S60 Symbian smartphones.
It's finally happened. Motorola last month quietly shipped its first Linux-based mobile phone "bound for North America," in its words. Additionally, the world's third-largest handset vendor (Mot was passed up by Samsung this year) is offering new "MotoMAGX" tools supporting native Linux third-party apps.
The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.
We got five of the most popular filters from Tiffen, a company well known for their very popular video/photography filters, and we put them to the test. Read on for more info and samples on the Star, Warm-soft/fx, FLD, ultra contrast, and "85" filters, mounted on our Canon HV20 HD camera with a 52mm step-up ring.
The Ultra Contrast #3 filter is an important filter for many cases while shooting either digital or film. It is able to capture more detail on places where normally are not captured. It lower the contrast throughout the image evenly and that's why is one of the most important filters for the quest of the "film look". While some digital users will argue that changing contrast withing an editing application will do the job, we hold the opinion that when you apply the effect in the earliest of the 3 compression stages, the better the quality will be. The three stages are: analog capture, camera compression, editing application compression. Tiffen's Ultra Contrast filter delivers what it promises in a reasonable retail price.
One of my favorite "looks" from the '70 commercial ads and pictures is the "dreamy" one. This look can be achieved easily today by using the Tiffen Warm-Soft/FX filter. It is best used to capture portraits and skin in a glowing effect. However, I found that applying the same filter with flowers worked equally well. It brings a new soft-to-the-eyes look, a refreshing change from today's ultra-realistic digital photography and video.
This is one of most important filters an artist can use when the shooting environment varies too much. The FLD filter removes the unnatural color cast caused by fluorescent bulbs. It adds more red tones to compensate for the green and blue fluorescent colors. This filter is a great tool, but it also must be used with care because if used in places where it's not really needed, it will cast an also unnatural red tone.
This filter is a life saver for film shooters who can't control easily their white balance. It allows to correct tungsten lighting by producing a warming effect. In today's digital world correcting white balance is very easy and so this filter does not immediately scores home with digital users in particular, but it can still be used as a color effects filter. Nevertheless, the filter does what it promises and in our test, where we deliberately used our camera in tungsten mode, the filter auto-corrected the colors as it should have. Check the video below to view the colors the filter delivered to correct the tungsten colors.
This is by far the most breathtaking and impressive filter of all. Possibly not everyone's cup of tea, but for those who like impressive lights (especially if they are shooting music video clips), it is a must-have. It extrapolates the light from its source and creates "stars" effects all over the picture. Even better, the filter sports a rotating control where it makes these stars to rotate in the picture allowing for more control on your picture and more impressive effects on your video. If you are shooting at night, get this filter to add a more dramatic effect to your work.
Check the YouTube video we uploaded to showcase the effect:
Download here (right click and "save as") our 720p test video (30 MB, in .wmv format) with and without the filters tested.
