By Al GORDON
HELP DESK
July 20, 2008 02:11 am Summertime and, as the song says, the living is easy. Here are a few suggestions for making it easier: Digital cameras continue to gain features and drop in price. Happily the state of the art has reached the point where the megapixel race is now pretty much a dead issue. Megapixels are a measure of how many digital sensor elements a camera has (a digital picture being a collection of electronic "dots.") Most popular models are now in the 7- to 8-megapixel range, which is more than adequate for consumer use. Do not waste money on anything more than that. Five megapixels, in fact, often are good enough for typical snapshots, so you might want to think about turning down the sensitivity of your camera so you get more pictures on your memory card. Where 7- or 8-megapixel capability does come in handy is allowing you to either make huge blow-ups or to crop your photo down to a small segment. The former lets you create poster-sized prints to decorate the family room. The latter helps when, for example, you are a tourist and, having had to shoot a landmark from a distance, want to crop the extraneous elements out of the picture. The fact is that lenses are the key to good photography, not the digital sensor or old-fashioned film. The typical point-and-shoot camera doesn't have a spectacular lens, so the higher-resolution sensors really aren't capturing much extra detail. When I go shopping for a camera I tend to favor those manufacturers who have been in the camera business for a long time (as opposed to the electronics companies) because they have years of experience in making top quality lenses. The other thing I look for, frankly, is compact size. A camera doesn't do you a lot of good if it's so big it's inconvenient to carry around and requires so many settings that you miss half the pictures you want to take. If the camera can fit in my pocket, it's a good bet that I will have it with me more often. Many consumers don't think much about the memory cards they use in their cameras, but these days that's an important part of photography. Today, a 2 GB card is considered small and 4 or 8 GB are becoming commonplace. With cards of that capacity, it's worth your while to invest in a higher-speed model (look for something with a label like "ultra" or "extreme"). They will noticeably decrease the lag time between shots. One more photo tip: Don't forget to regularly archive your photos to your computer's hard drive or burn them on CD or DVD. That's not so much for protection as it for freeing up the cards for reuse. Otherwise you can wind up, as I did on a recent trip, with your card out of space just when you are trying to take an important shot. Another summer pleasure is music, which in the portable player world usually means an iPod. While there may not be a serious competitor to the iPod among players, the iPod Music Store does have a big challenger: Amazon.com. Amazon's digital music downloads are in the universal MP3 format, at a high quality setting, and no digital rights management (DRM). Apple has a similar higher-quality, DRM-free format it calls "iTunes Plus," but the recording industry has allowed relatively few songs to be released in it. So while the iTunes Music Store has vastly more downloads than Amazon, the latter has more DRM-free choices. Thus, if a song you want on iTunes is in the DRM format, it is worth your time to check on Amazon to see if an unrestricted version is available. Finally, there is a new choice in music player headphones designs, what Macworld has dubbed "canalbuds." These are in-the-ear plugs that do not go in as deeply as full-fledged in-the ear designs — they fit into the opening of the ear canal but don't protrude down into it. I tested a set of V-Moda Vibes ($101) a stylish metal design that comes in a variety of cool colors. V-Moda also makes a "Duo" version with a microphone for use with iPhones. The Vibe meets the "looking good" test, always important in the iPod world, and deliver decent sound for the money. They don't give you audiophile quality, but then audiophile in-ear phones can cost two or three times as much. (A huge caution here: various review Web sites report a great variance in Vibe performance from unit to unit so your listening experience may differ from mine.) Since I hate sticking things in my ears, I appreciated the fact that the Vibes were more comfortable than the typical in-ear model. The comfort comes with a downside, though: the canalbud design does not offer as much sound isolation as standard in-ear devices. If you don't plug the ear as much, you can't shut out as much outside noise. It's that simple. This problem tends to undermine the value of sticking something in your ear.
Al Gordon is a Massachusetts-based writer who specializes in technology and consumer electronics. You can read more of his articles at www.algordon.com/techblog.html and e-mail him at eagle@algordon.com.
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