Cowon D2 the Mini Portable Media Player

The Cowon D2 resembles a miniature flat widescreen T.V. and its overall design is elegantly compact. The D2 comes with 2GB of data which could have surely been more. Once you get the space concern, there are hardly any complaints and even this issue can be solved by the option of expandable memory with SD card slot, it was expensive. The D2 is a refreshing change with respect to the 'feel' with which the music, movies or videos, FM radio, pictures, and even text is displayed on screen. The D2 is also Podcast ready, which is an added premium feature. The player can be alternatively charged while it is connected to your PC's USB port. The D2 comes bundled with an external adapter to recharge it if you're away from your computer system.

To view movies or videos, you need to first convet them to the player's format using the jet application which comes on a bundled CD. The video quality and output is also commendable.

The touch screen is almost accurately responsive which makes the idea of mobile entertainment quite interactive and personal.

Good : Good sound output and great quality, big display area.

Bad : Should have had more storage space than 2GB at source.

Video Review :

Tech-Com DSC-520 5.0 MP

You just can’t go wrong with black and silver as a colour combination, and the DSC-520, while being far from a stunner, does look nice with an all-black face and rear and side trim silver all-round. The body doesn’t pick up fingerprints—very nice again.
Button ergonomics are good. The shoot button has a distinctive half-press for auto-focus. As opposed to some cameras we’ve tested, here you can actually tell by the tactile feedback that the camera is auto-focusing, without having to look at any indicators. Incidentally, there’s no viewfinder: you’ll have to manage with the 2-inch, 1,15,000 pixel LCD—which does get grainy, especially in dimly-lit conditions, and at the end of the lens zoom. The menu layout is pretty simple—all the options are accessible under a single menu. With four white balance modes and manual ISO ratings from 80 to 400, the Tech-Com DSC-520 is definitely not meant for a lot of indoor shooting, especially in areas where there isn’t sufficient lighting.

As expected, photo quality outdoors was good, except at full optical zoom (3x) where some slight graininess does creep in. Indoors, you’ll be using a flash… a lot. The flash is good for around 9 feet, after which it loses effectiveness altogether. Indoor shots are decent quality, but the noise is noticeable. At 640 x 480 @ 15 fps, this digicam is also a decent video recorder.

Specifications
5 megapixel CCD sensor; 3x optical zoom; 4x digital zoom; 2-inch LCD viewfinder; ISO manual 80-400 and auto; self-timer 2/10 sec; AA batteries

Source : Digit

Olympus SP-550 UZ Digital Camera

That's not the only trick up this Olympus' sleeve. The 18x optical zoom begins at a wide 28mm angle, F2.8, stopping down to F4.5 at the telephoto end. The SP-550UZ uses the CCD shift-type stabilization system to compensate for camera shake at longer focal lengths, though it wasn't clear on our preproduction model how many stops advantage it provides since we couldn't test it out. Like the Panasonics, there are two stabilization modes to choose from; we assumed that one would turn the system on continuously and the other only when you click on the shutter.

However, no amount of image stabilization will help if you have fidgety subjects, so this Olympus touts a high-sensitivity setting of up to ISO 6,400, allowing you to shoot at a faster shutter speed to freeze subject movements. As the set was a preproduction model, we're reserving comments on the image quality until we get our hands on a full commercial unit.

The SP-550UZ feels surprisingly comfortable in our hands. Our first finger rests just where it's supposed to be--at the shutter button with zoom lever--and the rubber coating both on the front side of the hand grip and thumb rest area provides non-slip handling. Unlike cameras that have their lens off-center (this Olympus, too), the SP-550UZ compensates for the uneven weight distribution with the mass of four AA-sized batteries used to power the shooter.

On the front, this Olympus looks like the Canon PowerShot S3 IS and could also easily pass off as a digital SLR. A button to the right pops up the flash with a solid "tok", raising it 2cm above the body. Unfortunately, there's no manual zoom ring on the lens and no hotshoe adapter for external flash units. Like the PowerShot S3 IS, this Olympus uses a removable lens cap.

The rear estate of the SP-550UZ is dominated by a 2.5-inch 230K-pixel LCD and dedicated function buttons common to most cameras. The four-way directional control lets you adjust exposure compensation, cycle flash options, set a 2- or 12-second timer, and shoot in macro as close as 1cm. There are also individual keys to call up the camera's menu, switch to picture review, delete photos and change display preferences for the LCD panel and the electronic viewfinder.

On the bottom edge is where you find the battery compartment which has a sliding lock switch for added security. Just next to it is a plastic tripod receptacle, which may wear out faster than if it had been metallic.

Other features of the SP-550UZ include full manual shooting with the LCD showing in real-time how your shot will turn out when changing the aperture or shutter speed; a 15 frames-per-second burst mode in 1.2-megapixel resolution which we weren't able to test out; and a guide on the mode dial that would automatically adjust the camera settings for shooting in various scenarios.

One last thing. Unlike Fujifilm which recently adopted the popular SD media format, the Olympus SP-550UZ is sticking to the proprietary xD-Picture Card.

3ds Max 9

The biggest thing to happen to 3ds Max in this version—which is what makes it 9 and not 8.5—is that it’s gone 64-bit. When you install it on Windows XP x64 Edition, it is capable of using up to 8 GB of RAM for its purposes, which means that you can work on more complex and resource-intensive scenes than ever before. Apart from this, plus a couple of new features, this release is all about improvements and enhancements.

What’s New
In keeping with the find-good-plugin-and-buy-it trend, Autodesk has integrated the ProBoolean tool in Max, to overcome the shortcomings of its own Boolean tool. Messing with Booleans isn’t a good idea otherwise—the resultant mesh can too often end up with bad triangles and can be a nightmare to work with. Pro Booleans, however, are cleaner, and offer a lot more options, including the ease with which more objects can be added to the Boolean.

Taking a lesson from Maya’s Trax editor, 3ds Max can now break animations into independent layers, bringing some sanity to complex animation. Using it is fairly easy—it’s similar to the functionality that’s already existed for Character Studio—if you’re comfortable with that, there’s practically no learning curve.
Another noteworthy addition is the new shaders for Mental Ray—the CarPaint shader, which creates realistic paint for your car models (in case you didn’t guess), and the Arch shader, which simulates rounded edges on objects (notice that none of the edges around you in reality are perfectly sharp), so you don’t have to fiddle with chamfering any more.

What’s Better
The first noticeable improvement in Max is its ability to handle more polygon-heavy scenes without choking. Apart from that, some older features have been polished as well.
Working with Cloth is much easier now—tailoring clothes is much easier and more streamlined, and doesn’t require you to keep editing the original surfaces to get right. The Cloth simulator calculates collisions much better, and the new Cling parameter lets you make them “sticky”, much like wet clothes.

The Hair and Fur plugin, which demonstrated some instability in version 8, has been tweaked, and didn’t crash the whole time we used it. It has also done away with the separate interface—which was, honestly, rather clunky—and now you can comb and style hair right in the viewport you’re working in.

Other tweaks—including the optimisations to the FBX file format which enables Max and Maya to work together better—are relatively minor, and were expected anyway.

Final Notes
Using 3ds Max 9, it’s hard to tell that it’s a new version—there’s nothing that comes off as special, at least on the surface. The improvements are there, no doubt, but the biggest thing that justifies this release is that it’s available in a 64-bit version. If you’re using Windows XP x64, and have more than 2 GB of RAM, you’ll see the difference.

Download :

Links are uploaded in Rapidshare.com

Link 01 , Link 02 , Link 03

Website : Autodesk.com

Access Digital Photo Frame

Here’s a unique way to, well, frame your memories. The Access Digital Photo Frame has the ability to store images and display them on its 7-inch frame, transferred from your PC or digicam via USB or memory card. Remote-controlled, it looks just like your average photo frame.
It is supported by a desk stand, but can also be hung on a wall. But the frame can only be placed horizontally, requiring you to rotate your portrait-style images before transferring them to the device.
In addition to image slideshows, it also supports MP3 and video. Larger Images larger are automatically resized.
Niggles: the hard buttons on the remote, and the lack of crispness in darker images.

Specifications
7-inch 480 x 234 display; inbuilt stereo output; USB 1.0/2.0; CF card slot; memory card slot (MS, SD, MMC XD)

Paperless office

Every office in this world is full of paper. You can see thousands of printed paper in various files in any office. Additionally you will find many books, magazines and photo copies of documents everywhere in the office. A paperless office has many advantages. Here are the advantages of using digital form of information instead of paper form.

01. Cutting trees to manufacture paper will be reduced. Therefore trees will live longer.

02. Since information will be stored in digital form, it will be easier to handle information. You can search and find information faster and easier.

03. You can save space by storing information digitally rather than in paper

04. Paper can be lost or decayed. Digital information can be backed up and therefore safer.

05. Information stored digitally can be easily found and transfered and shared between different people.

No doubt the digital form is better than the paper form. But many have the following questions and doubts while shifting from paper to digital form.

01. Is it too expensive to convert to digital form

02. Is it enough to have digital form of all current and future information while maintaining the old existing information in paper

03. The digital files are stored in a hard disk. what if the hard disk is corrupted. Will all the information be lost?

All these doubts are unnecessary. It is not expensive to convert data to digital format. It is always better to convert all the data including old and existing to digital format. The price of a hard disk is cheap. Therefore you can backup the contents of one disk to another disk. You can also backup data in CDR and DVD disks. You can use RAID technology to backup data using multiple hard disks. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices.

What you need, to convert to digital format?

01. A high end, fast computer with a good scanner is required.

02. If you do not want to save the scanned documents as images and you want to convert them to text then you need a software called OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Usually the OCR software comes free with the scanner. If you have many paper documents that needs to be converted to text then you can buy an OCR software such as ABBYY Fine Reader.

03. To backup the your digital data you need quality software that has Scheduler facility. With the scheduler facility the software specific files at specified intervals automatically without your intervention. You can use 'Second Copy', 'Win Backup' or any other backup software.

04. The next this you need is the 'Document Management Software'. New Soft's Presto1 Page Manager is one such software. Some scanners come with this software freely.