• Waterproof up to 10 ft. (3 m)
• Full 1080p HD video
• Electronic image stabilization
• Brilliant 2.0 in. color display
• Capture 5 megapixel HD stills (16:9)

Heads up, adrenaline junkies. The KODAK PLAYSPORT has as much appetite for adventure as you do. And it’s not afraid to get wet. This audacious little camera can plunge up to 10 ft under water and capture the entire experience in full 1080p HD. And you don’t need to worry about blurry footage when things get a little shaky. With built-in image stabilization, the KODAK PLAYSPORT will stay steady as a rock. From the waves, to the slopes, to the mud-soaked trails, this baby was made for the extremes. Show them what you’re made ofin HD
Take the plunge with the waterproof digital video camera capable of shooting up to 10 ft under water Go anywhere rugged design enables full 1080p HD video recording in just about any environment Start bragging with amazing 5 MP, 16:9 widescreen HD still pictures Make a colorful statement
The KODAK PLAYSPORT Video Camera was designed with you in mind, right down to the colors it comes in. We took cues from the environment—from nature, to climat

Rating: (out of 215 reviews)

List Price: $ 149.00

Price: $ 149.00

More Products

• Waterproof up to 10 ft. (3 m)
• Full 1080p HD video
• Electronic image stabilization
• Brilliant 2.0 in. color display
• Capture 5 megapixel HD stills (16:9)

Heads up, adrenaline junkies. The KODAK PLAYSPORT has as much appetite for adventure as you do. And it’s not afraid to get wet. This audacious little camera can plunge up to 10 ft under water and capture the entire experience in full 1080p HD. And you don’t need to worry about blurry footage when things get a little shaky. With built-in image stabilization, the KODAK PLAYSPORT will stay steady as a rock. From the waves, to the slopes, to the mud-soaked trails, this baby was made for the extremes. Show them what you’re made ofin HD
Take the plunge with the waterproof digital video camera capable of shooting up to 10 ft under water Go anywhere rugged design enables full 1080p HD video recording in just about any environment Start bragging with amazing 5 MP, 16:9 widescreen HD still pictures Make a colorful statement
The KODAK PLAYSPORT Video Camera was designed with you in mind, right down to the colors it comes in. We took cues from the environment—from nature, to climat

Rating: (out of 180 reviews)

List Price: $ 149.00

Price: Too low to display

• Waterproof up to 10 ft. (3 m)
• Full 1080p HD video
• Electronic image stabilization
• Brilliant 2.0 in. color display
• Capture 5 megapixel HD stills (16:9)

Heads up, adrenaline junkies. The Kodak Playsport has as much appetite for adventure as you do. And it’s not afraid to get wet. This audacious little camera can plunge up to 10 feet under water and capture the entire experience in full 1080p HD. And you don’t need to worry about blurry footage when things get a little shaky. With built-in image stabilization, the Kodak Playsport will stay steady as a rock. From the waves, to the slopes, to the mud-soaked trails, this baby was made for the extremes.

Rating: (out of 173 reviews)

List Price: $ 149.00

Price: Too low to display

Canon CLI-8 4-Color Multipack Ink Tanks

• Multipack contains most popular color ink cartridges
• Package includes one cartridge each of black, cyan, magenta, and yellow ink tanks
• Long-lasting Chromalife ink for bright and vivid results
• Resistant to fading and smudges
• Yields up to 280 pages per cartridge, based on 5% coverage

Canon has poured all the Know How of its extraordinary history of developing innovative office machines into each of its copiers, printers, and networked office systems. The same superiority of design and manufacture goes into all of the Canon-branded consumable imaging supplies and parts for this equipment. Naturally, no one makes better parts and supplies for Canon products than Canon. Using genuine Canon parts and supplies is your best insurance against equipment damage, and possibly voiding your equipment warranty.The CLI-8 from Canon is a pack of four high-capacity color ink cartridges that use long-lasting Chromalife ink for bright and vivid results. Compatible with Pixma models iP4200, iP5200, iP5200R, iP6600D, MP500, MP800, and MP950, each of these four ink cartridges yields up to 280 pages, based on five percent coverage. The ink is also resistant to fading and smudges, so everything you print is sharp and clear. What’s in the Box
One cartridge each of black, cyan, magent

Rating: (out of 309 reviews)

List Price: $ 50.99

Price: $ 37.48

From the VentureBeat review:

The paperback-sized device is aimed at 55 million people in the U.S. who have eyesight problems and don’t want to be dependent on others for the pleasure of reading a novel, looking at a restaurant menu, or reading web site pages. It comes with a 5-megapixel digital camera that can be used to snap pictures of book pages. Foss said he was able to scan a 262-page book in a half hour and listen to the first chapter of the book while he was doing it. The device can read text in the DAISY format, plain text, as well as MP3 music files.

Can the Kindle or Nook help a vision-impaired individual order from the menu at a restaurant? I think not. The ability to scan and read custom text makes the Intel Reader something very different from the current offerings of e-book readers. This is clearly a multi-purpose device designed to enrich the life of its user, not just be a portal to selling electronic books. The Reader can speak the menus aloud to the user, and the instruction manual comes as an audio CD, making this extremely friendly to visually impaired individuals.

An optional book scanning system, the Intel Portable Capture Station, can be purchased, to allow home users to digitize books with ease. A lot of time and effort has gone into researching the ergonomics of the Reader and its accessories, since the target audience isn’t your normal fully-abled young-to-middle aged person.

The Intel Reader boasts some custom made parts, but is otherwise fairly run-of-the-mill in terms of capacity and performance:

The device has an Intel Atom microprocessor and two gigabytes of flash memory storage. It runs Linux software and some third-party software for scanning and reading aloud. With a fully charged battery, the device can read aloud for four hours. It can last for days on standby power. It can store about 500,000 pages of text or 600 pages of scanned book pages.

Here’s a video of the Intel Reader in action:

I think this is a terrific use of technology, and it demonstrates an impressive commitment from Intel in terms of research spending. I think this will create a lot of opportunities for the people who can afford to purchase it, and Intel deserves a lot of praise for cooking this thing up.

But I think that we, the general Internet population, can do a lot more. Listening to books read aloud by crappy digitized computer voices doesn’t really do justice to a lot of printed materials — especially novels. When I read a book, I hear in my mind’s ear distinct voices for each character. I read faster during tense or exciting scenes. I experience the story in a way that the monotonous drone of a computer voice can never reproduce.

Something like Project LibriVox can breathe real life into stories. We, the general Internet population, can donate a couple of hours of our leisure time to read a chapter — or a complete work — of a book so that others can enjoy the story in the dramatic manner in which it was intended. It’s a lot of work, I know: I recorded Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. But it’s also a lot of fun, and a very rewarding experience.

Sprint’s Hero is a bit blobbier than HTC’s original, but it also looks less chinny—an HTC design quirk that’s starting to get on some people’s nerves—and at any rate, there isn’t a whole lot of the Hero that isn’t the screen, so aside from the shuffled hard buttons, this redesign shouldn’t change too much in terms of usability.

Wisely, Sprint left the Hero’s guts—hardware and software—intact. That’s the same 3.2-inch multitouch capacitive screen, the same 5-megapixel camera, the same microSD slot (Sprint throws in a 2GB card for free), the same 3.5mm headphone jack, the same multitouch browser (no mention of Flash support though) and the same Sense UI, which converts Android into something unexpectedly beautiful, but tragically sluggish. And since this thing obviously supports EV-DO, we’ll finally get to play with it on proper 3G.

Whether or not they’ll be able to load HTC’s latest Sense update—the one that fixes basically every complaint we had with the original Hero, including slowdown—before the handsets ship is still up in the air, but in any case, it’s coming eventually.

The $180 price assumes a 2-year agreement at a minimum of $70 a month, and that you’ve got the initiative to mail in a rebate form, though just like with the Pre, there’s a good chance retailers like Best Buy’ll just take care of this for you. Like the Pre, the Hero is eligible for the $100 Everything plan, which is just about the best deal going for obnoxiously talky/texty types.

So, uh, Sprint’s kind of killing it these days, no? They’ve got their iron grip on the only two smartphone underdogs anyone really cares about: the first of which made all the other carriers’ Palm phones look pathetically lame; and the second of which looks like it’ll sucker-punch a complacent T-Mobile right off its Android throne—especially considering the fact that Sprint’s priced this thing a few bucks below T-Mo’s categorically less good MyTouch 3G. It may have taken a year, but this whole Android thing is finally getting interesting.

The best bits of press release below. [Sprint]

The Innovation and Openness of a True Mobile Internet Experience Coming Soon to America’s Most Dependable 3G Network from Sprint on HTC Hero with Google

Sprint’s first device with the Android™ platform available Oct. 11;
Pre-register for HTC Hero today at www.sprint.com/hero

OVERLAND PARK, Kan., and BELLEVUE, Wash. – Sept. 3, 2009 – Sprint (NYSE: S) and HTC Corporation today announced the upcoming arrival of the first wireless device offering the combination of the open and innovative Android platform with the high-speed connectivity of America’s most dependable 3G network1 (EVDO Rev. A), HTC Hero™ with Google™. Offering a rich mobile Internet experience, the much-anticipated HTC Hero offers synchronization for built-in Google mobile services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, and YouTube™ as well as access to thousands of applications built on the Android platform.

Beginning on Oct. 11, customers will be able to purchase HTC Hero through all Sprint retail channels including Web (www.sprint.com), Telesales (1-800-SPRINT1) and our national retail partner Best Buy for $179.99 (excluding taxes) after a $50 instant savings and a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. Pre-registration begins today at www.sprint.com/hero.

Access to countless applications
As a charter member of the Open Handset Alliance™, Sprint is actively engaged with the Android community. Through Android Market™, HTC Hero users have access to more than 8,000 useful applications, widgets and fun games to download and install on their phone, with many more to come. Thousands of developers are working to introduce new Android applications every day.

Intuitive, user-focused and fun
HTC Hero is the first U.S. device to feature HTC Sense, an intuitive experience that was built with a guiding philosophy to put people at the center and allows the device to be completely customized to the wants and needs of the user. The device’s seven-panel wide home screen can be populated with customizable widgets that bring information to the surface.

HTC Hero users can easily create and switch between Scenes to reflect different moments or roles in their lives, such as work, social, travel and play. For example, a work Scene can be easily set up to include stock updates, work email and calendar, a play Scene could have music, weather, and a Twitter feed or a travel Scene could offer instant access to the local time, weather and maps.

Industry-leading features
HTC Hero features an integrated 5.0 MP camera and camcorder. It also offers easy access to personal and business e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging through POP, IMAP, and Exchange Active Sync accounts.

HTC Hero is a full-featured smartphone with Wi-Fi capability, a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with pinch-to-zoom capability and a fingerprint resistant coating, integrated GPS navigation, and trackball navigation. Additional features include:
Stereo Bluetooth® 2.0 Wireless technology
accelerometer, light sensor and home screen widgets for improved usability
multimedia capable with microSD slot (32GB capable, 2GB included)
Sprint TV® with live and on-demand programming
NFL Mobile Live and NASCAR Sprint Cup MobileSM
easy access to social networking sites, including Facebook®, Flickr® and Twitter
visual voice mail for quick and easy access to specific voice mail messages

HTC Hero requires activation on a pricing plan offering unlimited data. Sprint’s Simply EverythingSM plan provides unlimited nationwide calling, texting, e-mail, social networking, Web browsing, GPS navigation, Sprint TV, streaming music, NFL Mobile Live, NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile and much more for only $99.99 per month. That’s a savings of $1,200 over two years vs. a comparable AT&T iPhone® plan2. Sprint Everything Data plans with unlimited messaging and data start at just $69.99 for 450 minutes with unlimited night and weekend calling starting at 7 p.m. (All price plans exclude Sprint surcharges and taxes.)

The price: $180

The verdict: Kodak’s first foray into pocket camcorders set them ahead of the pack, at least for a while—a trick they’ve pulled off again with the Zi8. They’ve stolen back the top spot not with video quality—though it is impressive—but with a few obvious features that, until now, hadn’t trickled down to this price point.

Click for gallery

First though, the core improvements: This Zi’s undergone a full hardware redesign which, once you peel the ugly, feature-touting sticker off the front, feels more modern, more solid, and more, well, designed than its lumpy predecessor. The screen is way, way sharper, which makes the whole camera, despite its similar interface and button layout, truly feel like a new piece of hardware. HDMI output works instantly and smoothly, and the microphone-in jack pulls concerts and noisy environments into the Things The Zi8 Can Do list. The hard, flip-out USB plug has been replaced with a rubberized flexible one, which makes life easier for situations where you don’t have much clearance on a USB port. Oh, and the battery—a Li-Ion slab replaces the old model’s rechargeable AAs.

The Zi8′s ballyhooed feature is its 30fps 1080p video recording, which, along with a new 5-megapixel photo option, joins the 720p (30fps and 60fps) and WVGA video modes of the Zi6. The added resolution is technically impressive, sure, but it’s also sort of excessive, and mostly unnoticeable. People have a hard enough time distinguishing between 1080p and 720p video when it’s professionally produced and displayed on a high-end screen; the Zi8 is still very much a pocket camera, meaning that the video isn’t quite crisp or vivid enough to gain much from the added pixels. Cameras like this are meant for uploading quality-sapping video sites—something the Windows-only software makes dead-simple—not Blu-ray discs.

That’s not to say the raw video quality is bad—far from it. It’s noticeably better than the Zi6, and a new, larger sensor boosts quality at all resolutions, especially in low light. Again, this is still a pocket camcorder, so expect some noise in dimmer situations. That said, the noise is subtle and tolerable, and a far sight less crappy than most of its direct competitors.

The reason the Zi8′s video really stands out is image stabilization. This is a much bigger deal than it might sound, because it accomplishes something that might not be immediately obvious: it cuts down on shimmering—that queasy rippling effect you get whenever you move a cheap camcorder too quickly. It’s still there, but with less microtwitches and jitters, it’s way less apparent. In addition, the Zi6′s macro mode makes a reappearance on the Zi8, but it’ a lot more usable, since its field of focus has grown since the Zi6, which only gave you an inch or so of leeway before things got fuzzy. On top of it all, the Zi8′s lens is wider. Some people might miss the extra optical zoom a little bit, but I found the wider angle much easier to film with.

The photo mode is acceptable, but not at the level of even a entry-level point-and-shoot, and prone to blurry shots, since the record button is a little stiff, and you’re usually not holding the camera in an especially stable way. But in fitting with the ethos of this whole genre of device, it’ll usually do just fine.

The takeaway here is that the Zi8, though still firmly a budget camcorder in terms of both price and image quality, is a device you’ll be comfortable relying on in more situations than the old model, or for that matter, any other pocket cam on the market today. You’ll worry less about how well-lit your subjects are; about just how macro you want to go; about keeping your hand steady enough to make your footage not look like frantic cellphone clip from a disaster scene; about how loud your surroundings will be. It’s not going to replace a real camcorder in all situations, nor is meant to—but for a lot of people, it’ll be more than good enough. At $180, that’s nothing to smirk at. [Kodak]

Sharp, clean video in bright lighting, respectable video in low light

Antishake

Slimmer profile

More versatile USB Plug

Li-Ion Battery

More plugs!

No internal storage

Software is convenient, but not that powerful

Photos of the under wraps mobile of the moment, the LG BL40, have appeared on a German forum confirming some things we knew and some we didn’t. You can see from the shots that we have confirmation that this next Black Label phone is indeed sexy. The 21:9, 800 x 345 res screen is there for all to see. What we now know is that it’s got a 5-megapixel Schneider-Kruznach lens camera, 355MB of onboard storage (expandable by microSD), Wi-Fi and an FM transmitter. It’s of little surprise that it also runs on the S-Class operating system given what we’ve already witnessed in the promo video and LG’s push of the jury’s out software. Perhaps the most interesting news of all, though, is the image over the jump… …a sibling! What is this? Another Black Label Chocolate handset? A feature phone? One for the style conscious and function frightened? That’s my guess. Looks rather like a MP3 player too. With the BL40 set to launch next month, expect to be hearing more developments on a bi-weekly basis. Only a matter of time before a German website spills the beans.

(via Engadget)

If you’re thinking of scanning all your old photos using a traditional flatbed scanner, let me be the first to tell you what a royal pain in the ass it is. I’ve done it a few times in my life and I put it up near the top of the list of things I don’t want to do, right underneath “helping someone move”.

This “photo converter” looks a lot quicker and more convenient. It’s not a scanner, though — it actually takes a photo of your photos using a 5-megapixel digital camera and then zips the file into your computer via USB.

You’ll notice a single button marked “COPY” which ought to be straightforward enough. You load your photos into one of three trays — 3×5, 4×6, or 5×7 — drop it into the box, and hit the button.

No lifting the scanner lid, aligning the photo just right, scanning it, and then cropping or rotating the finished image file because the picture moved when you took your hand off of it.

This thing is just $50, which is down from a list price of $200. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that actually seems like a fair price.

Hammacher Schlemmer Photograph Converter [Buy.com via dealnews]