formats

WinPDF from PDFDesk Informatique is a free tool for creating PDF documents via the Print properties. It installs a virtual printer on your system that you select via the Print command. It saves documents as PDFs in a directory of your choosing, or it can print them out as PDFs. It can convert other documents to PDFs, too. Though it's a free solution for creating PDFs, it adds a watermark on output, limiting its appeal.

Installing WinPDF adds the Easy PDF Creator printer software to your Printers directory, and you can access it like your system's other real … Read more

The Windows Clipboard only displays basic file formats like text and bitmap when you copy a file to it, but in fact it makes a wide range of formats available; it just doesn't show them. NirSoft's InsideClipboard is a small, free utility that displays the binary content of all the formats currently stored in the Clipboard and lets you save the content of a specified format as a binary file.

Like most of NirSoft's utilities, Inside Clipboard is completely portable and runs as soon as you click the program file, with no formal installation required. It has … Read more

A virtual machine can be a very handy tool to have, as it lets users run multiple operating systems on one computer. Do you have to run Windows for work but prefer Linux for pleasure? Not a problem! A virtual machine can give you the best of both worlds, and VMware Player is one very easy way to set it up.

The program is plain and intuitive, with a wizard design that walks you through each step of the virtual machine creation process. The opening menu lets you select whether you want to create a new virtual machine, open an … Read more

PDF is a popular file format that works well for all kinds of text- and image-based documents. Unfortunately, though, PDFs haven't always been easy to create. PDF24 Creator makes the process of creating a PDF as easy as printing. We've seen other programs that do the same thing, and while PDF24 Creator didn't totally knock our socks off, it stands up well to other basic PDF programs.

The process of using PDF24 Creator really is just like printing: the program appears as an icon along with the your other installed printers, and you need only select the … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany--How much room is there in the medium-format digital camera market? Pentax is hoping to find out by elbowing its way in with its 645D.

The company showed off the hefty camera at the Photokina Imaging show here this week. It's been for sale only in Japan so far, but at Photokina, Pentax announced it will go on sale in Europe starting in December.

"The 40-megapixel picture-taking mean machine, [which] delivers unprecedented image quality while offering top end control and user friendly handling, will be spreading its reach beyond Japan to invade European photography," Pentax said in a statement.

When Pentax launched the 645D earlier this year after years of on-again, off-again development, it downplayed its ambitions by saying the camera was chiefly for Japanese landscape photographers who have equipment from Pentax's medium-format 645 film camera days. But the company is taking a new tone with its aggressive statement about geographic expansion. It's also investing in work to ensure Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom can automatically correct Pentax medium-format lens issues, even before more mainstream optics have that support. … Read more

There's nothing easy about reformatting text in a Microsoft Word document. You can use the Format Painter to apply the formatting of one paragraph to others with a single click, and Word's Find and Replace features let you remove unwanted characters (or strings of characters), but these tools make their changes one at a time and often require additional cleanup.

I wish I had discovered Greg Maxey's free Clean Up Text add-on for Word years ago. The retired U.S. Navy submarine ordnance officer and former Microsoft Word MVP has created a Word DOT template that removes … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany--For those who find Hasselblad's 60-megapixel H4D-60 camera a little too confining, the company plans to sell a 200-megapixel model in the first quarter of 2011.

The Copenhagen-based medium-format camera maker announced the product today at the Photokina imaging show here. Interestingly, it uses the same camera body as its current H4D-50MS, which will be upgradable, said Peter Stig-Nielsen, director of product development.

However, even in the rarefied air of the medium-format market, where image sensors are very large and very expensive, the 200-megapixel "extended multishot" technology won't appeal to everyone: each shot will take about 30 seconds to capture, restricting the camera to stationary subjects such as cars, watches, and jewelry.

That's because of the design of the Hasselblad multishot-series cameras such as the H4D-50MS. The current model uses tiny piezoelectric motors to shift the sensor a very small amount to combine two shots into one higher-quality image.

"We are now building it into a real product that's going to hit the market in the first quarter of next year," Stig-Nielsen said. "It is going to be an extension of the current H4D-50 multishot."

Most digital cameras capture color with a checkerboard of color filters called a Bayer pattern over image sensor pixels; each pixel captures only red, green, or blue color information. The multishot technology shifts the sensor so the same pixel can capture each of the colors, ridding the camera of the need to mathematically infer the missing values of red, green, and blue. … Read more

The CD is fast approaching its 30th anniversary, and it's looking a bit tired. Funny, the LP is more than twice as old and its resurgence is ongoing. Not just among oldsters playing records they bought decades ago; a fair percentage of young bands are releasing new vinyl pressings.

CD box sets and remastered CDs, like the Beatles catalog that came out in 2009, still sell in big numbers. I remember when the CD was introduced, the media predicted the LP would be gone in just a few years. Now it's starting to look like the LP will … Read more

USB flash drives are this century's floppies, holding everything from personal and medical information to music and pictures and even secure data, with the added advantage of being small and rugged enough for keychain duty. You can even boot from flash drives, just like the old floppies, which, together with portability, universal compatibility, and enough space to host useful tools, makes them ideal recovery devices. Hewlett-Packard's USB Disk Storage Format Tool can quickly and thoroughly format virtually any USB flash drive in a wide range of file systems as well as create bootable USB media. We tested it … Read more