compact

PITMAN, N.J.--In this corner of the music universe, you won't find many limousines, groupies, or people lighting guitars on fire.

While the public often associates the music business with jet-setting rock stars and lavish living, this place is marked by minivans, Phillies and Eagles fans, and, very soon, people without work.

Pitman, which has 9,365 residents and is about 17 miles southeast of Philadelphia, is home to one of Sony's two remaining U.S.-based CD-manufacturing plants--until March 31. After that, the company will shutter the facility and 300 workers will be out of jobs. … Read more

ASCII art is the ancient variety of computer graphics and images created by typing ASCII text characters. Most users encounter ASCII art in the form of NFO files, literally, "info" files; they're text files that Windows can open and display, albeit via a cumbersome process that uses Notepad. CubicDesign's Compact NFO Viewer is a great choice for folks who just need to open and view NFO files now and again as well as those who regularly handle NFO files, too. It's not often that a new ASCII art viewer comes along!

Compact NFO Viewer certainly … Read more

When it comes to flash memory cards, large capacity and high data-transfer speeds usually are somewhat mutually exclusive advantages--if nothing else, to keep the costs down. But what happens when you give the product development folks an opportunity to indulge their fantasies?

SanDisk's new Extreme Pro CompactFlash card unveiled at CES, that's what.

This card from one of the premier brands in flash memory products has three superlative attributes: a 128GB capacity, a data-writing speed of "up to" 100 megabytes per second via a UDMA-7 interface, and a price tag one penny shy of $1,500. … Read more

With CES fast-approaching, the rumor mill is at full bore, and one of the latest items to come out of it is that Microsoft will be rolling out a "stripped-down version of Windows" that will run on set-top boxes and upcoming TV sets.

The report comes courtesy of The Seattle Times, which says the boxes will cost somewhere in the ballpark of $200, will run the Windows Media Center interface, and will be on the market sometime this year.

As The Times points out, the version of Windows that will be running this TV-friendly interface is not a … Read more

Lexar Media, one of the premium-brand flash memory card makers, will introduce its first SDXC cards later this quarter with two high-end models geared for professionals, a 64GB card for $500 and a 128GB card for $700.

The 128GB model illustrates the narrowing gap between the SD lineage and a rival format popular among professionals, CompactFlash, which tops out at 64GB for mainstream brands. But while SDXC might be a step ahead in capacity--at least when it comes to announced products--CompactFlash leads in a different domain, data transfer speed.

Each of Lexar's new SDXC cards, with a 133X speed … Read more

The most remarkable thing about the Samsung WB700 is its 18x 24-432mm lens crammed into a body that's just less than an inch thick. Of course an 18x zoom will only get you so much attention, so Samsung's decided to lead with the camera's Smart Zoom feature that digitally extends the zoom range to 24x. (Judging by the sparse details in the press release, it sounds similar to Panasonic's Intelligent Zoom feature that basically crops in on a photo and then sharpens for better detail.)

In other zoom-related digital hocus-pocus, the WB700 has active noise cancellation … Read more

Ah, it's that time of year again where we reflect on the technology that arrived and got us to open our wallets and try to predict what will tempt us in the coming year to toss last year's model for the new shiny shiny.

In past years, when it came to digital cameras the majority of announcements at CES were for refreshes of budget and style lines with the exception of a few with some attention-grabbing feature or design.

However, a big reason for that was the annual Photo Marketing Association's PMA trade show that followed CES … Read more

In the flash-memory format wars, Secure Digital has vanquished xD Card and Memory Stick. SD, as it's known, is supported by everything from Apple laptops to Panasonic 3D videocameras.

But CompactFlash, a rival flash-card format that prevails in high-end SLRs from Canon, Nikon, and Sony, is holding out. More than that: its backers are developing a high-performance successor. Nikon, Sony, and memory card maker SanDisk have proposed that the CompactFlash Association standardize a sequel that can transfer data at a rate of 500MB per second and reach eventual capacities of 6TB.

"This next-generation format is expected to be … Read more

Transcend, a major manufacturer of flash memory cards, has begun selling models built with the new CFast interface designed to succeed the CompactFlash format.

CompactFlash is still widely used in high-end SLR cameras but is increasingly threatened by the more mainstream SD format, notably the new high-capacity SDXC variety. But CompactFlash allies are working to modernize the technology.

CompactFlash uses the same data transfer technology as hard drives--specifically, the older IDE interface and more recently, the slightly less old UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) variety. While computer hard drives long ago moved to the faster SATA (Serial ATA) version, the CompactFlash format is only making the jump now with a new version called CFast.

CFast offers significantly higher data-transfer speeds--about 375MB/sec compared with 90MB/sec for high-end CompactFlash cards today. Faster data transfer on a camera means the memory buffer can clear out faster when shooting bursts of photos, something that's handy, for example, with sports photographers trying to take multiple sequences.

Transcend's CFast cards, though, aren't for the consumer market. Instead, they're for industrial applications, such as inside train engines or slot machines. And CFast uses a different physical connection, which means the cards aren't compatible with today's CompactFlash. … Read more