Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

Even though it looks, feels and mostly functions like the digital picture frames you can buy anywhere these days, the people at the ALBUM booth tried to convince me their photo viewing device was in fact NOT a digital picture frame. And you know what? I kind of believe them. The ALBUM is just a half-inch thin, and features a postcard-sized 7-inch LCD display with a resolution of 800×480 pixels. It’s designed to be easily passed around and shared, just like a stack of printed photos, and in order to allow others standing nearby to see the photo you’re looking at, the company didn’t skimp on the LCD display.

And it shows. The viewing angle on the ALBUM is fantastic. It’s almost as good as the top of the line Dell LCD I use for graphics and photography work, and it’s probably the only reason I stayed at the booth to listen to their spiel. But the device also benefits from a well-polished UI, and the 3 large buttons camouflaged into the edge of the screen’s bezel make navigation really easy. It’s also got 4GB of storage on board, an SD card slot and can even be connected to your digital camera via USB and used as a remote viewer for the images stored in its memory card. The company is currently looking for a brick and mortar store to distribute the ALBUM in North America, but you can actually buy one now from their website for about $200.

[ ALBUM Portable Digital Photogallery ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you’ve got a shoebox or album full of old photos that you want to digitize, but for some reason don’t want to go to the scanner route, the VuPoint Digital Photo Converter provides a somewhat easier solution. You just place your photograph on one of the included trays (they come in various sizes for photos up to 5×7) and then slide it into the converter. Instead of a moving scanning head, the VuPoint uses a 5 megapixel digital camera that allows for up to 1,800 dpi and 10 bit color. While the converter can automatically deal with exposure and color balance, it does come with additional software (XP & Vista only) for more advanced tweaks or cropping and resizing. At $149.98 from Taylor Gifts it’s a bit more expensive than the cheapest scanners on the market, but I guess they’re mostly selling ‘ease-of-use’ with this thing.

[ VuPoint Digital Photo Converter ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Yesterday Fujifilm announced the launch of their new UDMA 310x CompactFlash cards that have the fastest sustained write speed of any card on the market. Thanks to a specially designed controller and the latest SLC (single layer cell) flash memory chips the new CompactFlash cards are capable of writing data at an impressive 46.5MB/sec.

You might think that a 310x card is a bit overkill, but considering that DSLR cameras are pushing towards 18 and even 24 megapixel resolutions, you don’t want to spend all day waiting for your camera to finish saving your photos. The new cards will be available in late July in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities and will cost around $100, $235 and $413 respectively.

[ Fujifilm launches fastest CompactFlash card to date ] VIA [ Newlaunches.com ]

By Luke Anderson

I love my latest digital camera because it takes CompactFlash memory, rather than SD. While that unfortunately meant that I was left with several useless SD cards, I was more than happy to shell out the extra cash for a much faster format. While CompactFlash is already the fastest flash memory that you can put inside of a camera, the standard is getting revamped to provide even more speed.

The new standard being developed by the CompactFlash Association, dubbed CFast utilizes a SATA interface which promises theoretical transfer speeds of up to 375MB/sec. I’m sure that in reality speeds will be much slower, but even half of that would be a tremendous boost. There are a couple of downsides to this new memory. The first being the fact that it is still 18 months to 2 years away from being finalized. The other (and more important I think) is that the cards won’t be compatible with current cameras. You’ll need to start saving now if you want to take advantage of this faster format.

VIA [ UberGizmo ]

By Shane McGlaun

Sony announced a new digital photo album called the HDMS-S1D recently that features an 80GB internal HDD capable of storing up to 50,000 digital photos. The photo album connects to HDTV sets via HDMI and has multiple methods for importing photos available.

The S1D can import photos via virtually all memory card formats plus CD, DVD, and USB or over an Ethernet network connection. Once photos are imported, they can be managed with the included remote control. Organization options allow for grouping photos by date or events like birthdays and holidays.

Photos can be rotated, edited and deleted from the system via the remote. The S1D has the ability to arrange photos for a slideshow or into a digital scrapbook with Sony’s x-Application that is included. The application includes 30 pre-loaded music tracks to set your photos to and you can print photos directly from the S1D to your printer. Pricing for the HDMS-S1D digital Photo Album is around $400 and is available at Sony retailers or the Sony Style website.

VIA [ Sony ]