Hasta La Gadget!

A nasty rumor had been making the rounds about Intel, something along the lines of it wouldn’t sell its Atom CPUs to netbook vendors without its 945 chipset in tow. If true, the move would essentially act to block graphical entrants such as NVIDIA from making a move into the netbook GPU space. An unnamed Intel spokesman chimed in on the whispers today by outrightly denying the claims, telling InternetNews that “there is nothing preventing vendors from using [NVIDIA’s] Ion platform; [Intel] sells Atom as a standalone processor, or as a package with chipset.” ‘Course, it’s not like Intel hasn’t pulled similar tricks before, and to say that the chip maker’s relationship with NVIDIA has been dysphoric is understating things dramatically. Still, it sounds as if the company’s in the clear here, but we’re still waiting to see a wicked Atom + Ion combo in a shipping product before we believe the hatchet is entirely buried.

Filed under: Laptops

Intel put the kibosh on anti-Ion hubbub, welcomes standalone Atom sales originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The giving souls over at Engadget HD aren’t done yet, as they’ve got a VUDU movie set-top-box awaiting a new owner. If your unwrapping ceremony this morning wasn’t all gumdrops and lollipops like you had hoped, there’s hardly a better way to remedy the situation than to bring home an on-demand movie box. Head on over and drop your name in the hat — Kris Kringle just might have a little somethin’ (more) for ya.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Engadget HD’s Holiday Giveaway: win a VUDU movie set-top-box! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So you followed our guide to getting a sweet HDTV for dirt cheap for Christmas, and now a lovely glossy box of plastic and glass is sitting in your living room. Congratulations! Now what?

Did You Buy Everything You Needed?
We covered this a bit in our buying guide , but your TV isn’t the only thing you should’ve walked out of the store with. At bare minimum, you need cables—up to four sets of HDMI, depending on how much stuff you’re going to be plugging in. If you planned ahead, you could pass on the $100 Monster set Best Buy tossed your away, and already had them waiting at your house from Monoprice.com.

Also, a decent surge protector is a must, since you’re going to be having a ton of crap plugged into one outlet—we like Belkin’s Conceals a lot. And we’d recommend a universal remote, since you’re probably going to have a lot of crap plugged into it and no one wants 17 remotes to deal with. Logitech’s Harmony remotes are a good choice.

Sort of optional, but not really if you’re semi-serious about getting the most out of going HD, is a surround sound setup. The easiest way to do this is to just buy a home theater in a box (HTiB). We like Onkyo stuff and Sony’s got a bunch of different options too. An alternative to a full surround sound dealio is a soundbar—Brian has a huge hard-on for Yamaha’s, and for good reason. We used one at the Giz Gallery with our 103-inch Panasonic plasma, and it was awesome.

Where’s It Going
We really, really hope you planned this out beforehand—especially if you’re wall mounting—but you need somewhere to plop your TV. A stand, a full-fledged entertainment center, or something.

You actually kind of have to figure this out one backwards. First question: How far away are you planning on sitting? That’s how you figure out how big of a TV you’re gonna need, unless you just want a 70-inch TV for the hell of it—but then you’re probably going to fit your living room around it, not the other way around. Here’s a chart from HD Guru that’ll help you figure out the right viewing distance to size ratio.

After you know how big your TV is gonna be and how far away you’re gonna sit, you can figure out whether you’re gonna mount, plop it on a stand or install it in a huge entertainment center. It goes without saying (but we’re going to say just in case) that knowing the size (don’t forget the bezel!) and weight (plasmas are heavy) of your TV before you buy wall mounts or a stand is a must. Just please don’t mount it over a fireplace, that’s so tacky. If you are a poor planner, and you’re scrambling to buy a stand the day of, the ones at Best Buy typically suck—check Home Depot or Lowes. There are also some less conventional options.

HDTVs Are Useless Without HD Stuff
You’ve got your HDTV mounted and have a fistful of cables to plug stuff into it. Awesome. Now you need some HD content on there. Again, planning ahead goes a long way here—primarily with the cable or satellite company. Your old cable or satellite box doesn’t do HD, and you’re going to need a new one. Since every asshole who just got a new HDTV is going to be calling up the cable guy to get ESPN in HD, if you’ve already set up an appointment (if needed) or a time to pick up your new box, you’ll be one step ahead. If not, especially if your cable company actually has to send a dude out there to do the exchange, expect to wait a week, if not more, to get your HD HBO on.

You need a Blu-ray player—it’s the only real way to get gorgeous 1080p goodness up on your set. Luckily, they’re cheap as balls now, and you don’t have to pay more than $250 to get a player unless you want to (like to get a PS3, which is a solid pick). Obviously, our favorite Blu-ray showcase movie right now is The Dark Knight, since it’s one of those flicks that definitively stabs into your engorged eyeball how visually ormfgasmic a full HD movie experience can be (even if it doesn’t quite match IMAX).

Blu-ray isn’t the only option, obvs. There are lots of different ways to flood your HDTV with downloaded HD video from the intertubes—rented, bought or free. In terms of sheer video quality, Vudu, conveniently on sale right now, is is completely unrivaled with its stunning HDX downloads, and it has a pretty solid catalog too.

If you’ve got a ton of iTunes movies for some reason, Apple TV will get ’em on your TV easy, and the open-source software Boxee will unlock its full Super Saiyan media center power. Another powerful choice is the Xbox 360. It’s a Windows Media Center extender, which makes it easy to stream movies from your PC, and it’s got the Netflix HD streaming service built right in, which is free with a Netflix subscription. (Plus, it’s the best gaming system of this generation. Yeah I said it, wannafightaboutit?)

You also can’t go wrong with a TiVo HD, which is a must if your cable or satellite box doesn’t already come with a DVR (and even then, is highly recommended).

Make It Look Good
Last thing: You need to calibrate your TV, ’cause out of the box, even the best HDTVs will look like shit—or at least as half as good as they should—and even the worst ones can be made infinitely (almost) better. Don’t pay Best Buy to do it for you though. We’ve got you covered with a full guide to doing it without losing your mind.

Finally, get your favorite beer (Gizmodo Features Editor Wilson Rothman recommends Coors Light), kick back and enjoy your awesome new TV, completely maxed out.

It’s Christmas, and we’re betting that at least some of you received new digital cameras (be they point-and-shoots or DSLRs). And if you’re a photography n00b, we’ve got a few tips to help.

Turn On Burst Mode
It’s harder to capture candid shots on point-and-shoots (let’s call em PASs) than DSLRs, but in either format you should turn on “burst mode” or “continuous shooting.” This allows you to keep the camera taking shots as fast as it can by holding down the shutter button. Even the greatest photographers don’t predict magical moments down to the millisecond—they let their camera do it for them. And with today’s cheap and gigantic SD cards, you can afford to waste plenty of shots to get the best.

Control the Color Temperature Yourself
Auto White Balance (AWB) does a good job on most cameras. But you know who can do a better job? You. Backing up for a moment, since every color has its own relative “temperature” that’s measured in degrees Kelvin, even the orangey glow of an incandescent bulb or the relatively bluish hue of the sun’s light can screw with your photos. Your brain factors it out when you’re looking around, but it’s important to notice whether the light falling on your scene is more yellow or blue, and to compensate.
Your camera uses auto white balance to get around this cacophony of color, but it’s not always right. On some cameras, you can actually use “manual white balance” (MWB), shooting a white patch, such as a piece of paper, in order to say “THIS IS WHITE.” That’s the most accurate way, though the simpler way found on most cameras is to manually select the best white balance by choosing the tiny icon that identifies your light source: a sun for direct sunlight, a cloud for cloudy, a round bulb for incandescent, a rectangular bulb for fluorescent, etc.

Keep ISO to 400 on PASs, 800-1600 on Low-End dSLRs
ISO, a carryover term from the days of film, essentially signals the sensitivity of the imaging sensor to light. A higher number means grainier (noisier) but better defined shots in low light; a lower number means smoother shots in decent light. Most cameras will crank this number in medium to low light situations so that it can capture a shot without blurring, but you will get a grainy image. This may just be a rule of thumb based on the cameras I’ve used, but for optimally crisp shots, don’t let the ISO exceed 400 on your PAS or 1600 on your DSLR. (In some older DSLR models, you probably shouldn’t exceed 800.)
Use Diffuse Flash, Or Just Turn it Off
Any way you cut it, flash is a problem. When used instead of ambient light, it pulls the color and texture from skin, turns eyes red (a phenomenon caused when the flash is too close to your lens, which it is in most cameras) and often erases the background ambiance from your shot. A few things you can do will help tame flash:
1. Check your manual for minimum and maximum flash distances—probably around 6 to 12 feet away—and stay in those constraints.
2. Diffuse the flash. A classic trick for DSLR owners is to put a cigarette carton on large flash attachments, but in the absence of a large flash—and a cigarette carton—try taping some kind of translucent paper over your flash.
3. Turn it off. Even a grainier high-ISO shot is better than a washed-out flash explosion. If you use a tripod, you can get nice low light shots without resorting to flash or upping the ISO. Most cameras now have a flashless “night mode” to automate this process.

Carry a Pocket Tripod
Ultimately, if you want to take good shots in dark environments, you need to allow light to hit your camera’s imaging sensor for a longer period of time. And the only way to keep your shots sharp in this scenarios is to stabilize your camera. Though even cheap cameras boast image stabilizers of all kinds, a $7 pocket tripod trumps all that marketing speak, allowing you to use a solid surface to set up the camera and then angle it to your liking. If you don’t have a tripod, try resting your camera on the side of a table, or up on a (preferably empty) water glass.

Protect Your Images From Lens Flare
In any situation where sunlight or some other bright light source is hitting your lens indirectly (not associated with your subject), you may lose part of your image to stray light. Sometimes this looks cool, of course, but not always. The best and most common solution is a lens hood. The second best solution (and the one that works for PASs) is your hand, a piece of paper, anything, between that light source and your lens.

Exhale, Then Shoot
ISOs and tripods aside, maybe the best tip I’ve ever gotten to taking great shots was to exhale, then take the picture. Right after you exhale, the tension is released from your body, and you’ll find yourself, for a brief moment, at your stillest and most relaxed. In low light especially, it could be the difference between getting a clear shot and getting a blurry one.

Use Sepia Filter Whenever Humanly Possible
Sepia is well known for making your lousy photography “deep.” Helllllooo precious moments! (OK, I sort of despise sepia because it’s been so overused, but that’s just me. It can be beautiful, of course.)
For DSLR Owners…Shoot in RAW, Shoot in RAW, Shoot in RAW
There are many advantages to the average DSLR camera, but the best, by far, unequivocally, is RAW shooting. If you save your pictures as JPEGs, they can be beautiful, but they’ve been compressed and packaged into a product. If you save in RAW, you have a picture, but you also have the cold clay that shaped it.
RAW is the data pulled right off the imaging sensor of your camera, before it gets run through a bunch of optimizer and compression algorithms. This data allows for a complete do-over on many aspects of the picture, like color temperature. In other cases, it allows a lot of room for fudging, as with exposure. You’ll need software that can handle RAW images—most cameras come with something proprietary, but Photoshop can also manage RAW from the major camera brands. Just don’t be scared by it. It’s why you’re holding that shiny new DSLR you have no idea how to use.

And Your Own…
I realize this list will seem too obvious to some, but the goal is to help those who didn’t know much to start with. Since we have more than our share of incredible photographers among our readership, I’d encourage any of you with pro tips to please offer them up in comments.

[Example images 1, 2, 3, 4]

You know we couldn’t let the holidays pass us by without doing a little giving, and the snow shoveling crew over at Engadget HD have put down the Egg Nog just long enough to host up a lovely giveaway (one of two, in fact). Rumor has it that a Sling Media Slingbox PRO-HD fell right out of Santa’s sleigh and into an open window at the EHD headquarters, but don’t worry, Mr. Claus has a stout insurance policy. Head on over and register to win!

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Engadget HD’s Holiday Giveaway: win a Slingbox PRO-HD! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Dec 2008 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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