SAN FRANCISCO -- Kodak, Olympus, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard all have well-attended booths on the floor of the Expo here but the real action seems around the corner in some of the smaller booths. Under the radar, so to speak. Which is where we found a number of interesting products today.
Prototype of the Day
It's about the size of a cassette tape and weighs 50 grams without the two AAA batteries it uses. A fixed-focus f3.8 glass lens with a focal length of 3.85mm focuses from one meter to infinity. A USB port is the only way to get the approximately 40 640x480 images taken by the 1.4 inch CCD out of the 4M camera. No flash. Optical viewfinder.
So what does TechWorks call this miniature digital camera? PowerCam. Go figure.
The shipping case is black but we shot the clear one to show the single circuit board behind the lens and above the batteries. We put our glasses behind it to give you an idea of the size. Small. Very, very small.
It is expected to ship in February for $89 (with a 30-day money back guarantee) from www.techworks.com.
Storage Device of the Day
The $419 LaCie 12x4x32x CD-RW drive with a Sanyo mechanism made news with new features like Triple Beam for theoretically more reliable burning, Optical Power Control to automatically determine the type of media inserted and a non-linear method of writing that LaCie said is guaranteed to prevent buffer underruns (responsible for the explosion in amateur coaster making).
But an unusually candid LaCie technician explained that if you just set your Toast buffer (under preferences) to 8M, you'll achieve the same result with any CD writer.
Still, it's a fast burner. And at the same price (roughly) as the slower competition.
Peripheral of the Day
What do you do if you have to read CompactFlash from your Kodak, SmartMedia from your Olympus and floppies from your Sony Mavica?
You just order a USB Tri-Reader from Y-E Data at www.yedata.com for $189 and take what comes. It can handle all three.
The floppy drive is just above the SmartMedia reader on the left and the CompactFlash reader (no PCMCIA card required) on the right (with a card inserted in the picture). Orient yourself by finding the little grayed out LEDs under each drive.
No plans to include Sony's Memory Stick in the array, though. But there had to be some catch.
Beta Software of the Day
ClubPhoto wants you to upload your images to their site at www.clubphoto.com to share them and print them on mousepads, coffee cups and other media (even cookies and chocolate). But they realize the process of uploading your images can be daunting. So they're developing some novel tools to make it easy.
Living Album is one. The Macintosh version is still in development but we got a shot of its Aqua like interface (Mac OS X's makeover, which you can see for yourself at www.apple.com/macosx/aqua.html) and spoke to Rick Thorp, marketing support manager, about it. You drag your images to it and it creates thumbnails you can organize into albums with any number pages that are transparently transmitted to your online album at ClubPhoto if you wish. You can also arrange slide shows.
And you will be delighted to know Living Album will be available at no cost as a download from the ClubPhoto Web site. Soon.
They've also made available a Photoshop plug-in called iShare which Thorp demonstrated that lets you transmit an open, layered Photoshop file to ClubPhoto without flattening the image. Very cool.
Craziest Idea We Ever Heard of the Day
Don't get too excited when we tell you Corel is offering CorelDraw 8 Limited Edition as a free download from www.corel.com until Jan. 15. Because the installer for both Draw and Photo-Paint is over 50 megabytes. It may take until Jan. 15 to download it.
The limited edition is true to its name, restricting the number of files you can open at one time and offering only a subset of effects and file format exports of the full version. But it is not time limited.
We have to applaud the concept. It shows a confidence in the full product and an appreciation for the difficulty of shopping for software. How many times have we bought an inferior product simply because we didn't know how to get what we have to do what we wanted?
Just try to find the CD.
Presentation of the Day
Hands down (or up and all around, in this particular case) this one goes to Jean Marie Binucci. But with a product called Watch & Smile 2, how could he lose?
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| Binucci, on the right, watching. Customer, at left, smiling. |
You can visit www.watchandsmile.com if you want, but we prefer to schedule an interview at 4-6, Avenue Prince Hereditaire Albert in the Principality of Monaco where the company is headquartered (or crowned). And, Dave, how about some business cards with my new address?
Jean Marie is the "binu" behind binuscan, a reputable prepress company whose RECO (REbuilding COlors) technology can be found in high end products from UMAX, Kodak and Polaroid. Binuscan's claim to fame is maximizing digital image quality automatically.
You don't have to know anything to do that.
Just the perfect thing, really, for the burgeoning consumer (single users) and prosumer (single users with bills to pay) digital imaging market. So Binucci put the imaging engine from his high-end PhotoPerfect product into a cute low-end product called Watch & Smile. Cute because it uses a television metaphor (with remote control) to manipulate images. Fun things like warp (familiar to Goo fans) and utilitarian things like perspective controls are included. But ease of image correction and editing are the real point winners here.
Not to mention slide shows (is there a product that does not do slide shows?) and sound (ah, that's often missing) to accompany the slide shows, and ... well, we'll have more to say when we review the product. From the French Riviera. About the time of the Cannes Film Festival. Probably.
And what does this sophisticated, automatic, color correction technology cost? Just $55 -- which is your cue to throw up your hands and shake them hysterically.
That's All, Folks!
All good things must end and everybody has to get back to work, but we'll be sorry to see this Expo close tomorrow. While a number of companies are missing (Nikon and Symantec, to shame two), those that are here really have something on the stove.
Turning a corner on an aisle by the gamers, we were somehow stopped by an inexpert flyer announcing nothing more than "Boswell." Boswell? Who would name a product after Boswell? Who even knows who Boswell was? Who, for that matter, knows who Johnson was? But Boswell. Who wrote down Johnson's every word, becoming the official biographer of the man who put English in a dictionary.
We had to read the flyer. And no sooner had we read the flyer (which described a text search program) than we asked for a demo, chatted with the youthful developer (who had a cold) and, despite our misgivings about the product (oh, drop by www.copernican-tech.com just for fun), were profoundly glad to pretend that in the face of exhibition fees high enough to discourage Nikon and Symantec, these two stalwart youths (let's call them) who had the erudition to name their text search program Boswell might be the next Wozniak and Jobs. It could, we smiled, happen again.
We wished them well. And didn't say anything at all about the radar.
