Sean Captain
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What's the Best Digital SLR Camera for Beginners?
Advice: Our current favorite among beginner models is the Nikon D5000. It's not the cheapest -- even from Nikon -- but it has great room to grow. The D5000 is very similar to the company's pricier D90 camera and comes with one significant upgrade: An articulating, 2.7-inch LCD screen allows you to frame the photo while holding the camera above your head, down at your waist, or even facing towards you for a self-portrait. That gives it a leg up on Canon's Digital Rebel line of entry-level SLRs.
The LCD is especially handy when using the D5000's video-capture feature, since you don't have to hold the camera right up to your nose while shooting. The 720p HD movies it takes don't match the crisp images you can get with a dedicated high-def camcorder, but they make a fun supplement to the excellent 12-megapixel still photos.
Sony Brings New Low-Light Tech to Cyber-shot Pocket Cams
"After Midnight...We're gonna give an exhibition," promised Eric Clapton in his famous goodtime-party song. But if you bring your digital camera, you probably won't get any good pictures of shows that take place in backstage lairs, smokey clubs, or other dark, dusky hep-cat hangouts.
Until now, promises Sony, thanks to its new WX1 and TX1 Cyber-shot models with a new, 10.2-megapixel sensor that's billed to be twice as sensitive to light. The tech, called "back-illuminated CMOS" basically takes a bunch of wires that used to partially obscure the pixels and moves them to the back of the sensor. Sounds like a no-brainer, but Sony spent years figuring out how to do it.
14 Facebook Ills (and How to Cure Most of Them)
From tracking the Jonas Brothers to organizing the Iranian democracy movement, Facebook is the most powerful network -- at the moment -- for linking people up around town or around the world. Love it or hate it, you really can't avoid it.
Which is what makes the site's various bugs, glitches, and buried features so painful. They are intimidating and off-putting to newbies, and continuing irritants even to obsessive fans. We polled both types, using our network on -- what else? -- Facebook, to find out what irks our "Friends" the most. We also trolled the Web for top complaints. Then we sat down with Facebook to see if they had a fix -- or at least an explanation -- for each gripe.
At least the social network is aware of its foibles. "A lot of things are not as intuitive as we'd hope," our contact at Facebook, Kathleen, told us. "But there's actually a lot of functionality there that a lot of people just don't find." In most cases, they were able to show us some workaround, or they said that a fix was in the works. Only in a few cases were the ills incurable. Read on for our list of common Facebook pains -- as told to us by users -- and the best pain relievers.
Do You Play RPGs? (We Asked These Fantasy Fans)
Don't get us wrong. If you make the trek out to E3, the mecca of video game conventions, you're already a hardcore gamer. But, no matter how seriously you take your 'Halo 3,' there's still a class of gamer that takes it all to a whole other level: the role-playing gamers. We asked these über-players about their favorite titles, strategy, beefing up before combat, and the insatiable desire to kill! kill! kill!
Switched Splurge: McIntosh 60th Anniversary Audio System
At the risk of sounding like a crabby old man, let's just say that you kids -- with your little white iPod headphones and cheapie home theater systems -- have no idea what you're missing. And as for MP3s, oh, don't even get us started mister (or missie).
Okay, you can find top-notch audio gear with some amazing new capabilities these days. Yet even over forty years ago, audio engineers had already figured out how to make premium sound -- albeit with tubes instead of chips -- that is as impressive today as it was then. High-end audio maker McIntosh revived one of those classic systems with a limited re-issue of its C22 Tube Preamplifier and MC75 Power Amplifier. Yes, you needed three pieces of gear to do what a little receiver does now, and that's just for stereo. They are bundled together into what the company calls its 60th Anniversary System -- though that's the anniversary of the company, not the gear.
Is the Casio EX-S12 Camera With 'Dynamic Photo' Worth the Hype?
Most point-and-shoot camera makers are marching in lock step -- all introducing features such as fancier face detection, higher light sensitivity, and larger LCD screens. Casio is playing along, but it's also adding more-powerful image processing -- allowing its cameras to capture photos in high-speed bursts, shoot slow-motion video, or track fast-moving subjects. What it is: Casio's EX-S12 (and ...Switched Download: Hulu Desktop Eases Up PC TV-Watching Experience
What it is: Hulu Desktop is a free, Flash-based application for Mac and Windows that plays video from the Hulu Web site, including full episodes and clips from ABC, Fox, and NBC television shows, plus a smattering of movies. What we like about it: Hulu desktop brings a high level of polish to what was already a fantastic video site. Once you get the hang of the left-to-right organization, the ...Best of the Week: Spam, Polaroid 'Instant' Film Are Back
Even in our ever-accelerating, technologically turbulent world, we can count on some things to remain the same. Baby boomers, the generation that virtually invented short-lived trends, experienced another one with Facebook. After joining in droves last year, they started dropping from it like flies this spring. At the other end of the generational spectrum, teenagers continue to do really dumb ...Morning Xtra: Highrise Escapes, Reviving Old TVs, Zombie Flicks
Using a fishing reel to escape from buildings Watching the tragic loss of life at the World Trade Center inspired San Francisco inventor Kevin Stone to come up with a simple rescue tool to evacuate people from high-rises. His creation, called the Rescue Reel, is inspired by a fishing reel and allows people to descend safely from a 100-story building in about a minute. [From: Popular Science] ...The 5 Greatest Planet-Exploring Robots
If its mission succeeds in 2012, NASA's latest Mars rover, the newly christened Curiosity will join an elite group of robots that have managed to touch down safely on an alien world. Click through to see Curiosity's five greatest forbearers.
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