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March 13, 2008
[ INSPECT A GADGET ]
BUYING A DIGITAL CAMERA opens the door on a whole pleasure dome full of gadgets – some essential to get the best from the camera and some just good old toys. It’s hard to keep up with the flood of new optional extras for the digi snapper, but here is the low-down on a few that we have under review at the moment.
Velbon Ultra Lux-i L tripod ($200) Tri
pod design is all about finding a compromise between rigidity and weight. This unit gives weight priority over rigidity, at least at its full extension. Folded up it measures 39cm and weighs 1320 grams. At its full height it measures 161cm. At its lowest, with its legs splayed, which it does with clever leg-top clips, it is 19cm off the ground with the centre column detached. The legs are tubular and lock in place with a quick twist. The supplied pan and tilt head has three spirit levels to check both horizontal and vertical orientation. The camera – up to 2kg – is attached with a detachable base plate. Rigidity is good up to 115cm, but the final leg extension is too thin and flimsy. A carry bag is included.
Lexar Professiona
l UDMA Dual Slot memory card reader ($67) This USB 2.0 compatible memory card reader will transfer files from either Compact Flash or SD cards. The unit is a lovely piece of industrial design in glossy piano-black plastic. Press the buttons on each side of the base and the top pops up, revealing the card slots. It comes with a USB cable. The box promises “ultimate high speed file transfer”, but this only applies to the UDMA high speed cards. We compared file transfer speeds with a standard CF card reader inbuilt into the computer and found that the time taken to copy files was exactly the same using either device. We compared transfer times from a Lexar UDMA CF card, copying a card full of RAW images, and found that the Lexar took 2 minutes and 5 seconds, compared with 2 minutes 31 from the inbuilt card reader. We didn’t get the “incredibly fast speeds”. Still, it is a neat unit that looks great and does the job, if not quite as spectacularly as we were led to expect.
Kaiser Baas Keyring Photo frame ($30) Now you can carry photos of your children, pets, rhododendrons – who knows? – on your key ring. This 3.75cm LCD device works like larger digital frames. You load pictures into it through a USB connection and it cycles endlessly through the slides. Resolution is low and low contrast pictures work best. Carefully prepared pictures displayed well enough. PhotoViewer software is supplied for resizing and transferring JPG images from the computer. It is possible to crop the images for best fit with a crude but effective
cropping tool. The battery is charged through the USB connection. The design of the key ring is decidedly cheap, although we were sent the white model and we suspect that the black unit might look flasher dangling from the Alfa key.
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Posted by terry at March 13, 2008 01:56 AM
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