KIDTECHGURU

Cameras have become even more popular after the rise of digital images. The demand for digital cameras has risen, allowing manufacturers to offer a wider range of products to an ever-ready-to-consume market. Digital SLRs, point and shoot cameras (instamatics) and even mobile camera phones now have larger file formats, better light compensation capabilities and automatic color correction and white balance functions to boot. Because of the many camera functions and properties to choose from, consumers may feel overwhelmed with the decisions they have to make in order to get the right gear for them. Do any of these specs really make sense to the user? Let’s take the ZOOM property of your camera as an example. Zoom is the capacity of your camera lens to move in closer to your subject, therefore, magnifying its size in relation to your distance from the object to be shot. Your camera may boast of either of two things- optical zoom or digital zoom. Which one do you choose? Let me break it down for you.

OPTICAL ZOOM

Optical zoom is basically dependent on the focal length of your lens. If the standard lens that shoots what-you-see-is-what-you-get is at 35mm, a higher number in the focal length brings you closer to your subject. In other words, an 85mm lens can shoot portraits and a 10mm lens can shoot landscapes better. Depending on the focal length of your camera (check the side or the rim of your lens to find out your focal length) you can move your lens closer or further from your subject. Optical zoom allows you to shoot an image, manually bringing the lens closer to your subject, therefore creating a clearer, sharper image.

DIGITAL ZOOM

Digital zoom is a bit of a cheat. What it does is that it takes the picture of the image at the default focal length (measured in mm.) After the picture has already been taken, only then will it zoom in on the image. You may think that this won’t make a difference to the image but it does. The concept is the same when you zoom in on a picture in your computer monitor. The closer you move into the image, the bigger the pixels become and the more detail you will lose. In other words, it compromises the sharpness and quality of the image. Usually, manufacturers make sure that the file sizes of the cameras that have digital zoom are relatively bigger in order to compensate for the pixels lost in the process.

WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

Lenses are very expensive. If you wish to take images just for keepsake and you won’t be printing your images anyway, a camera with a digital zoom will come in cheaper and more practical for you. On the other hand, if you’re seriously in to photography and you need to print out your shots with crispness, detail and clarity, go for a camera with optical zoom. It may be more expensive but the measure of its quality remains unparalleled.

Cameras have become even more popular after the rise of digital images. The demand for digital cameras has risen, allowing manufacturers to offer a wider range of products to an ever-ready-to-consume market. Digital SLRs, point and shoot cameras (instamatics) and even mobile camera phones now have larger file formats, better light compensation capabilities and automatic color correction and white balance functions to boot. Because of the many camera functions and properties to choose from, consumers may feel overwhelmed with the decisions they have to make in order to get the right gear for them. Do any of these specs really make sense to the user? Let’s take the ZOOM property of your camera as an example. Zoom is the capacity of your camera lens to move in closer to your subject, therefore, magnifying its size in relation to your distance from the object to be shot. Your camera may boast of either of two things- optical zoom or digital zoom. Which one do you choose? Let me break it down for you.

OPTICAL ZOOM

Optical zoom is basically dependent on the focal length of your lens. If the standard lens that shoots what-you-see-is-what-you-get is at 35mm, a higher number in the focal length brings you closer to your subject. In other words, an 85mm lens can shoot portraits and a 10mm lens can shoot landscapes better. Depending on the focal length of your camera (check the side or the rim of your lens to find out your focal length) you can move your lens closer or further from your subject. Optical zoom allows you to shoot an image, manually bringing the lens closer to your subject, therefore creating a clearer, sharper image.

DIGITAL ZOOM

Digital zoom is a bit of a cheat. What it does is that it takes the picture of the image at the default focal length (measured in mm.) After the picture has already been taken, only then will it zoom in on the image. You may think that this won’t make a difference to the image but it does. The concept is the same when you zoom in on a picture in your computer monitor. The closer you move into the image, the bigger the pixels become and the more detail you will lose. In other words, it compromises the sharpness and quality of the image. Usually, manufacturers make sure that the file sizes of the cameras that have digital zoom are relatively bigger in order to compensate for the pixels lost in the process.

WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

Lenses are very expensive. If you wish to take images just for keepsake and you won’t be printing your images anyway, a camera with a digital zoom will come in cheaper and more practical for you. On the other hand, if you’re seriously in to photography and you need to print out your shots with crispness, detail and clarity, go for a camera with optical zoom. It may be more expensive but the measure of its quality remains unparalleled.

When Lloyd Watts was growing up in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had a knack for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and plunking out the melodies on the family piano. But he wondered, wouldn’t it be great to have a machine that could “listen” to songs and immediately transcribe them into musical notation? Watts never built the gizmo, but his decades-long quest to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain.

Microchips designed by Audience, the Silicon Valley company Watts launched, are now being used by mobile handset makers in Asia to improve dramatically the quality of conversations in noisy places. Even a truck passing right by someone using the technology won’t be heard at the other end of the phone line. The chip is modeled on functions of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. “We have reverse-engineered this piece of the brain,” declares Watts.

The 47-year-old neuroscientist is on the leading edge of what some believe will be a fundamental shift in the way certain types of computers are designed. Today’s computers are essentially really fast abacuses. They’re good at math but can’t process complex streams of information in real time, as humans do. Now, thanks to advances in our understanding of biology, scientists believe they can model a new generation of computers on how the brain actually works?the microscopic chemical interactions and electrical impulses that translate sensations into knowledge and knowledge into decisions and actions. It’s a successor to the old ideas about artificial intelligence, and a handful of companies have initiatives under way, among them IBM (IBM) and Numenta, a Silicon Valley startup.

Scientists caution that the changes won’t come quickly. “The nervous system is very sophisticated, but I applaud what they’re doing. Eventually we’ll figure it out,” says Carver Mead, a microelectronics pioneer and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.

In one of the most ambitious efforts along this track, IBM was scheduled to announce on Nov. 20 a $4.9 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for research into creating intelligent computers. The money funds the first phase of a multiyear effort to engineer computing systems that simulate the brain’s activities while rivaling its compact size.

SMARTER CIRCUITRY

The government says it will use the results to design battlefield monitoring systems that detect threats and warn troops. Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, foresees a wide variety of applications, from security monitoring to detecting worrisome climate changes or predicting disastrous storms. “We’re creating a planet that is covered with sensors,” he says. “We need a global brain-like device to aggregate, integrate, and make sense of all this data?and respond if appropriate.”

The mind behind Numenta, Jeff Hawkins, has a long record of inventions, including the first successful handheld computer, the PalmPilot, and the first successful smartphone, the Handspring Treo. But for more than two decades his real passion has been figuring out how the cerebral cortex works and applying that knowledge to computers. Hawkins hopes to produce a software toolkit for product developers next year that will allow them to mimic the way humans process visual imagery. Uses could include medical imaging, security monitoring, and Web search. “We’re laying the foundation for a second wave of computing,” says Hawkins.

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Technology has gone so very remarkable in terms of style and design. Mobile technology, for instance, has captivated the taste of the public for technology. It has, for the past years, the darling technology of the public because of its growing popularity which has transcended the commonplace technological preferences of men and women alike. Mobile technology has, indeed, reached its full potential as the newest technological vogue that is to stay and will remain as the public’s apple of the eye. Appealing and interesting, cellular phones are no longer a thing of luxury for people but a thing of necessity.

Experience technology at its best through mobile technology. The designs, styles, colors and features of mobile phones are certainly a thing of beauty to many people. Because of the growing competition among mobile companies, cellular phones have been so enriched in looks and features—there’s lot of reasons to be amazed on the ground-breaking achievements that this technology have gone so far. So popular is the mobile technology to the public that you will scarcely see a man in the street without a cellular phone. Its use has become so widespread. The sending of SMS and MMS for example had never been so well-known to mobile users all over the world that millions of messages of these kinds are being sent every minute of the day.

The Nokia mobile phones are among the best mobile gadgets in the present age. Their cellular phones are second to none. The company which owns the Nokia mobile technology offers the most excellent service when it comes to the manufacture or production of mobile technology. A pioneer in the mobile technology, Nokia has been giving the public exceptional technological support to their customers and is continuing to be of genuine service to the people.

Nokia mobile phones are certainly the most durable, fashionable and dependable mobile products today. One of Nokia’s latest products which surely catch the interest of the consumers of mobile technology is the Nokia N96. This newest Nokia cellphone gadget has features which are truly innovative and novel. The features which were not present in the latest cellphone models for the past years are all in the new Nokia N96.

Capture the moments through the Nokia N96. A 3G phone equipped with the latest and state-of-the art materials, Nokia N96 has a 5 megapixel camera. So when you view the pictures that you have captured, you will be able to see crystal-clear and translucent shots rich with details. Not only that, Nokia N 96 has Carl Zeiss optics and a Tessar lens which will make any subject vivid and clear. The Nokia N96 also has a 2.8″ QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) LCD TFT display with up to 16 million colours, digital MP3, visual radio and more. The Nokia N96 is very versatile gadget that you can use wherever you are.

Your Nokia N96 is really a thing of beauty to behold!