A touchscreen was something only limited to high-end electronics at one point, but now they’re available on just about anything mobile, such as Nintendo DS, all automotive GPS devices, smartphones and so on.

Something that has been very slow to adopt the touchscreen are digital cameras. Canon in particular seemingly refused to do it, however that’s no longer the case as six new PowerShot line cameras will have touchscreens in them; you’ll see these on store shelves very soon.

Part of the reason why touchscreens have been slow to show up on digital cameras is for the fact they wash out easily in bright sunlight. And if your primary menu system can’t be seen while adjusting a camera to take photos, that’s no good to the user.

Camcorders with a touchscreen (Sony has had them for years) get around this by having a screen that flips out and tilts. The tilt eliminates glare instantly so you can get down to business and see what you need to see to make adjustments. This is more or less the exact same thing that will happen on digital cameras. Being that more and more of them have HD video recording capability, this is seen as a natural progression that they act more like camcorders do.

However the question remains as to whether this is actually a good idea or not. The answer is actually yes.

Canon in particular has not always had the friendliest of menu systems in their digital camera line. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but when compared to other makes you can see the differences. Certain features require the pressing of more buttons to get to depending on model, the icon legend is a bit confusing at times, and so on.

If the touchscreen menu Canon uses is on par with how other camera/camcorders are (which is a tabbed/paged layout), this will make for a far easier camera to use overall. You will be able to get to functions faster, easier, and moreover understand your camera better as to what it can actually do.

For those wondering if the PowerShot G11 will have an optical viewfinder in addition to the touchscreen, don’t worry, it does. For many this is an absolute must-have requirement. A camera of this caliber should have no less.

It’s an ever-increasing mobile world, and with it comes all the tech stuff we need to get things done. Being mobile means your tech will run off a battery or two. However there are certain items when you should care and other times when you don’t have to.

Point-And-Shoot Digital Cameras

Should you care? Yes.

I won’t buy a point-and-shoot digital camera unless it runs off AA batteries. It is the best and cheapest way to keep taking pictures. Yes, it does add bulk to the camera for the battery compartment, but that small inconvenience is more than worth it.

Camcorders

Should you care? Yes.

It’s always smart to purchase a secondary battery for your camcorder. If possible, buy the secondary with the camcorder at the same time.

Automotive GPS

Should you care? No.

Battery life for automotive GPS devices such as from Garmin, TomTom, Magellan or any other have always been terrible, and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon. With the screen at full brightness (required for daytime driving use) and the speaker volume at 70% or higher, you’ll get at most 2 hours out of the battery no matter who made the GPS. Furthermore it’s always used in the car, so when the battery dies you just plug in the charger and keep on going.

Battery life on GPS matters for units other than for automotive use, such as for trail or maritime. The Garmin Oregon 550t for example runs off 2 AA batteries, and that matters a lot for a GPS of that type given its particular purpose (it does both trail and maritime).

Cell Phone

Should you care? No.

I know no one that carries around a spare cell phone battery with them. All wireless phones today have a relatively decent talk time concerning battery life. And yes, if you talk for three hours straight, of course the battery will die on you. But for shorter calls and texting, the battery should last for days so it’s not a huge consideration.

What’s more important with a wireless phone purchase is the rated talk talk time and standby time. This doesn’t necessarily depend on battery type, because two phones by two different manufacturers that use the same type of battery will have different talk/standby times.

General rule of thumb: The less features a wireless phone has, the longer the battery will last due to the fact the phone doesn’t have to "think" as much. This is why 10-dollar TracFones have unbelievably good standby times, since the phone has only the most basic of features. It’s also the reason older less-featured cell phones with a new battery in them seem to "last forever".

Laptop Computers

Should you care? Depends on type.

With laptops there are basically three flavors: The netbook, standard and the gamer.

With the netbook (9 to 12-inch screen), yes, battery options definitely count because it’s meant to be ultra-mobile. You should stuff a netbook with longest-lasting battery possible.

With the standard (13 to 15-inch screens), yes it counts. You should stuff that one with a 9-cell. Yes it will cost a pretty penny but it’s more than worth it.

With the gamer laptop (17-inch or higher with a powerful graphics card), no. Gamer laptops are well known to have inferior battery life because of the horsepower required to run them. And even if you stuff in the best battery available, you’d be lucky to get more than 2.5 hours of life before it needs a charge.

Digital cameras by and large are marketed in three flavors, that being point-and-shoot, prosumer and professional.

Point-and-shoot: Basic. Most functions are automatic and cannot be adjusted manually. Entry level, least expensive.

Prosumer: Similar to point-and-shoot but with extra added features such as manual focus. Mid-grade, middle-of-the-road expensive.

Professional: Full-bodied cameras with a detachable lens. High-grade, most expensive.

I’m finding that the more I look at low-end digital cameras, the point-and-shoots really are coming a long way with features and options. It makes one wonder whether there actually is a prosumer category any longer.

Example: The Canon PowerShot A470.

This is a point-and-shoot and under $100 new. It has features that were never available for its price point as little as two years ago, such as fixed focus point, 3.4x optical zoom (doesn’t sound like much but for a small body this is darn good), 7.1 megapixel, and even has continuous shooting at 1.9fps. Not bad at all.

For all intents and purposes, this is a prosumer camera. I honestly could not classify this as a point-and-shoot, even though it is.

What do you think?

Does the prosumer category even exist anymore with digital cameras, or have they all advanced so much that point-and-shoots are all prosumer-grade across the board?

When one thinks of a hard drive, style doesn’t usually come to mind. That’s because most people don’t care about that sort of thing. However when the style is actually functional, that’s a different story and is desirable.

Enter the My Passport portable hard drive from Western Digital. This is a 500GB portable drive that connects via USB 2.0. It also comes in 400, 320 and 250GB sizes as well. And it comes in 9 different colors – but you don’t care about that.

What you do care about is what it looks like and what makes it truly portable.

Here’s a few images of it:

This is certainly better than a larger USB hard drive caddy especially considering it does the same job and is self-powered via the USB. No external power supply needed. That’s a huge plus.

For those using Windows you also get 128-bit encryption.

The price? It’s $149 thru Western Digital or if you shop around you can get one for as low as $109. When I checked the price I honestly thought it was going to cost a whole lot more, but thankfully it stays well within a reasonable price range.

The biggest drawback is that USB 2.0 can be a bit slow. Do not expect it to have blazing fast performance. As long as you remember that, this is very usable tech.

Were you to try to get the same amount of storage with USB sticks you would easily spend over $200. And with a 3.5-inch setup you have to deal with a power supply.

This is probably one of the cheapest, easiest and most useful backup solutions yet. And for those with media center computers this would also serve quite well.

Would you buy one?

Is this tech something that sounds good to you, or would you rather stay with the older 3.5-inch setups? Let us know in the comments.

Over the course of the weekend I finally got around to hooking up my Magnavox DTV Digital to Analog Converter. The model of this particular converter is TB100MG9 for those interested.

For those that just read the above and said, "What’s that for?", it’s the thing used to receive a digital over-the-air signals for an analog TV. Or to be very specific and quote directly what’s stated on the box, it’s "intended for receiving digital terrestrial broadcasts with an antenna (indoor or outdoor)."

Here’s the good and the bad:

The Good

The setup was fairly straightforward. I hooked up the rabbit ears to the box, then let it perform an auto-scan to get whatever channels it could.

I do get more channels compared to when I did on analog.

All channels have crisp clean images. Digital has no "snow" to speak of.

The color is notably better.

Channels have descriptive text boxes appear on-screen whenever you tune to them – a nice touch.

The Bad

(Bear in mind these complaints have everything to do with the box and box alone.)

I have yet another remote control to deal with. And the remote provided is terrible. Yeah, it works but it’s hard to read, the buttons are tiny and it’s a nuisance to use. Hopefully a universal remote control will take care of this.

The setup menu is absolutely infuriating to work with. It’s just not user friendly. Thankfully you don’t have go there that often.

The way this particular box renders close captioned text is just bad. To put this in perspective, imagine you’re watching a DVD with the spoken dialogue text being displayed on screen. Now imagine that text half its size. That’s what DTV closed captioned text is like on this Magnavox.

The audio for whatever reason is way too quiet when coming from the DTV box. I really have to crank up the volume compared to before.

The aspect ratio does not auto-adjust for standard definition or wide. Yes, you can manually change this option, but wow is it buried in the setup menu. And it’s not obvious where to find it either.

My thoughts and recommendations

I want to say first that yes, it works. Yes, TV looks better compared to before. Yes, you will really like DTV compared to over-the-air analog if that’s what you have.

I will however recommend against use of this particular Magnavox box. I’m sure there are DTV converters far superior to this one with a better menu system, more user friendliness, better remote control and so on. Yes, it will cost you more to get a different converter box, but I honestly think the cash would be well spent.

Again, the make/model I have is the Magnavox TB100MG9. I am uncertain whether this is still a current or discontinued model – but if you see it, I’d steer clear of it, and not because it doesn’t work (because it does work), but because of the complaints I outlined above.

A blog I recommend for everything to do with DTV converter boxes:

http://dtvconverterboxes.blogspot.com/

The Magnavox mentioned here is in there with a review as well as many others such as those made by Tivax, Zenith, Philco, RCA and several others. Definitely worth the read if you’re in the market for one.

As everyone (and I mean everyone) has been hearing for about, oh, a year’s time is that analog television will cease transmissions on February 19, 2009 and switch to digital – so if you receive TV via rabbit ears (pictured) you’ll have to throw those out and buy a new set that can receive digital.

But now the soon-to-be CINC is suggesting that this date should be pushed back until summer. The FCC chair disagrees and says the Feb 19 date should go forth as planned to avoid confusing the crap out of people. And to be honest I agree.

Why is the date at this point being suggested to be pushed back?

One reason, money.

The deal is that there was supposed to be some funding provided by the US government in the form of coupons to help people buy new digital antennas (which some of you out there may have received – but many didn’t), and the consensus from the powers the be is that money could be better spent elsewhere at the present time.

Furthermore the plan to bring everyone over to digital has been anything but smooth. Said honestly, it’s all botched up. You can stamp a big ol’ FAIL on the US gov for this one.

Personally I feel the plan should go forward regardless. There isn’t a single person I know who isn’t aware of the switchover date. And in every major department and electronics store there are signs both big and small explaining to people that yes, if you receive via antenna you have to get digital. These signs have been up for over six months.

Concerning the coupons, yeah they’re a nice idea and all that, but digital antennas are as cheap as 15 bucks!

What will the decision be come February? Nobody knows yet. But hopefully we’ll either get a solid YES or NO concerning the switchover to avoid further confusing everybody.

Pictured: The very recently introduced Nikon D3X. Compared to other high-end DSLR cameras, this one is all photo and no video (something I personally agree with – pro photo cameras should just do photos).

So how many megapixels do you get with this one? 24.5 to be exact. And it’s big, as in literally big – and it does the full frame FX format. Camera fans know what that means (and yes it’s important).

And yes, this beast is 8000 US dollars. It is the flagship model, after all.

For that kind of cash, it should not only take the best photos possible but also do my laundry and feed my fish.

And you thought Macs were expensive…

[Source: DVICE]

With most digital cameras there is the ability to store photos in "RAW" format instead of the standard JPG/JPEG.

When you take shots to be stored in RAW, the first thing you notice is that it takes a really long time for the cam to finish storing the photo after taking the shot.

The second thing you notice is that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to work with if you don’t have the proper software to read the RAW format.

The third thing you notice is that it takes seemingly forever to get RAW format imagery off the camera because it’s just so honkin’ huge in file size.

Is there any particular advantage to using RAW?

Yes and no. More on that in a moment.

What does RAW mean?

RAW is a "minimally processed" digital image stored on your digital camera when the shot is taken. You can think of them as "unprocessed" photos.

Is RAW the same on all digital cameras?

NO. This is because digital cameras of different makes have different ways of producing an unprocessed image.

Yes, this is confusing but it’s the truth. When you take a photo "in RAW", the actual data of the image is different per make. Canon is different from Pentax is different from Casio is different from Nikon is different from Olympus, etc. You get the idea. RAW is not a universal format.

How do I work with a RAW image?

Typically you need the software that came provided with your digital camera to work with them at all.

Granted, Picasa does support many RAW formats from different manufacturers, however its editing capabilities are very limited. Better to use the software that came with the camera.

What is the reason I would want a RAW image?

Best possible quality and most editing capability. The RAW file gives you more control over the final image – particularly for print purposes.

When would be a bad time to use RAW?

When shooting/storing in RAW it takes the camera a long time to save the file because each one is humongous. If you’re doing fast-style photography, RAW is a bad idea.

When would be a good time to use RAW?

Portraits, i.e. shots where you can take your time, RAW may serve a good advantage to you.

If you want to learn more about the technical stuff concerning RAW, see the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

A debate in the world of digital photography that has been around for a while now is the question of whether more megapixels really make a difference or not.

Before answering that, let’s define megapixels first.

A megapixel is 1 million pixels, and no it is not in reference to the number of pixels in an image, but rather the number of image sensor elements.

The simple math: Multiply pixel width by height and you’ve got the megapixel rating.

Example: 3000×2000 = 6,000,000. 6 million pixels = 6 megapixels.

One assumes that the more megapixels you have, the more crisp and clear your photography will be.

Is this true?

The answer is no for the following reason:

Point-and-shoot digital cameras have inferior lenses compared to full-bodied cameras. And as any photographer will tell you, it’s all about the lenses (in reference to quality and choice). So even if you have a point-and-shoot that has 8MP or more, it’s still got a built-in lens you can’t change.

Does this mean a full-bodied digital camera with 6MP takes better shots than a 10MP point-and-shoot?

YES.

For example, if you have a full-bodied Nikon digital camera with a high-quality Nikon 35mm NIKKOR lens attached, you will get better quality photos.

You can have all the megapixels in the world in a point-and-shoot but the blunt honest truth is that it’s still a point-and-shoot, and cannot go beyond what’s built-in.

If the intent is to take digital photos for print use later, the full-bodied with good lens(es) is the only way to go.

The only time more megapixels serves to your benefit is when you’re upgrading from a previous full-bodied digital cam to a better one.

You can be the worst photographer armed with the cheapest digital camera and still get great shots if you’re willing to seek out subjects that look interesting.

Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about.

(click any image for larger size)

This is the prop car from Back to the Future, taken at Universal Studios in Orlando Florida in March 2007. This shot was an absolute no-brainer. Center the car in the shot, point, shoot, done. There is absolutely no thinking necessary (other than centering the subject) when taking a photo like this. Not only is the subject interesting but the background is also complementary as well.

This is a shot of some sunrays breaking thru a cloud. For all intents and purposes, this is a bad shot. There’s a big ugly phone pole and an ugly sign to the right, but for some reason this shot actually works. I couldn’t tell you why. To get a shot like this, it’s real simple. Wait for dusk. You can get a shot like this just driving home from work. (This is why I tell anyone to always have a digital camera in your car whenever you go anywhere – you never know when a shot will present itself.)

I took this shot while out on a date. It’s a theater that’s built-in to a mall. There was enough light blasted out by the neon and signs to “get away” with taking a shot like this. To be honest I didn’t even know if it would come out correctly, but it did. I took a risk and it worked. Luck? Yes.

Location doesn’t necessarily mean exotic (like Universal Studios); it means anything that looks particularly interesting.

The best advice I can give anyone is to always carry a digital camera wherever you go. If your camera is too bulky to do that, buy a thinner one. Then you won’t be kicking yourself every time you see something and think Oh wow, what a shot I could get.. ah rats.. my camera is at home… Locations will present themselves to you if you have your camera at-the-ready.

I am in the midst of writing an article that is going to compare online photo services plus a few freebie photo clients.

It occurred to me that in order to make for a better article, it would be good to ask the audience: Why do you use what you use and what features are important to you?

Your online options

With online photo management you’ve got several choices (and if I missed any please feel free to mention one or more in the comments):

• Picasa
• Flickr (which connects with Yahoo! 360)
• Zooomr
• Windows Live Spaces
• Photobucket
• MySpace
• .Mac/MobileMe

Your client options

I personally find it absolutely necessary to have a locally installed program to manage my photos so I can tag, categorize and upload to the web easily.

For the ones of note, this is what I could immediately find:

• Picasa
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• iPhoto
• F-Spot (Linux)

Once again, if you know of any that are readily available for download, please feel free to post a comment or two.

Of the ones listed above, the only one I haven’t tried is F-Spot (although it looks really good).

It also just happens to be that F-Spot is the only one that can connect with the most online services (Flickr, Picasa and so on). And yes, this means Linux scores a win once again for its ability to connect with the most stuff.

Windows Live Photo Gallery will connect to Windows Live Spaces and Flickr.

iPhoto only connects to the .Mac service to the best of my knowledge.

Picasa only connects to Google’s Picasa service to the best of my knowledge.

What do you use? Why do you use it?

Is there any particular reason why you would use one online service over another? Do you even use a photo managing program?

At the present time I’m using Windows Live Photo gallery because it appears to be the only Windows client that will connect up with Flickr easily.

But before I fly out that article – your opinion counts. What do you use?

We all like the convenience of the Ipod. We like our cell phones. In short, we like small things when we’re on the go. Digital cameras have gotten super small. And now, video cameras have as well.

The Flip Video is a super small video camera that retails for only $150. In fact, it is easily small enough to fit into your pocket. I had an opportunity to give the Flip Video a try. So, is a compact, sub $150 video camera any good?

Continued

Generally speaking there are three types of digital cameras, that being consumer, “prosumer” and professional.

In layman’s terms you can think of each like this:

• Consumer: Basic
• Prosumer: Advanced (or “mid-grade”)
• Professional: Expert

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1. You do not need any paid software to edit photos and/or post them on the internet.
2. Most paid software (if you decided to go that route) will have professional features that you will never use.

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Digital cameras are everywhere today. Just about everyone owns one. Not only that, they are good cameras. Even the cheapest digital cameras today are capable of taking really great photography if in the hands of somebody who knows how to do so.

Blatant Plug: We have just launched a brand new course at PCMech University which is designed to give you tactics you need to know on how to take professional photographs using any standard digital camera. No, you don’t need the expensive model to make good images. The secret is in the person holding the camera, not the equipment (in most cases). Come by PCMech University for more information.

But, that’s not the purpose of this article. I promise. Let’s say you are taking some cool shots with your camera. What can you do with them besides impress yourself?

Continued