Hasta La Gadget!

You want short depth of field? Can’t be bothered to walk closer to your subject? Need to work on those weedy biceps? Hands shaking from a little too much of the good stuff last night? Nikon has you covered, with its new 6.4-pound, 300mm ƒ2.8 monster, a lens which packs in just about every new technology that Nikon has cooked up in the past few years.

Despite the weight, the lens is not that huge, and amazingly has just a 52mm filter thread. Inside you have a Silent Wave motor so the camera doesn’t have to shift the elements into focus and a VRII shake-reducer which adds up to four stops worth of wobble control (and has an auto-detecting tripod mode which optimizes the anti-shake for non-handheld shooting).

There is also a rather odd but possibly very useful feature: AF Memory Recall, which despite its name is not for remembering to take sharp pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger on Mars. Instead, it lets you flip instantly back to a pre-determined point of focus. We’d like to see this on some shorter lenses, too — it would be dead handy for popping to the hyper-focal distance of a lens for fast street-shooting, for example.

Otherwise, there is a range of coatings on the elements, from ED to Nano Crystal to SIC. These all help the light get through to the sensor quickly and cleanly.

The price? This is a pro level lens, and has a pro-level price of $5,900. Nikon also has a 2x teleconverter out today, with an aspherical element which is a world first in converters. That will be going for an equally painful $500.

AF-S NIKKOR 300mm ƒ2.8G ED VR II [Nikon USA]

AF-S Teleconverter TC-20E III [Nikon USA]

ASUS is said to be quietly working on the launch of a new pad device, between four and seven inches in diagonal breadth, which should offer a combination of MID and tablet PC capabilities. That’s the short, sweet and uncorroborated whole of what we know so far, though we might reasonably expect to see some variant of the Eee PC Touch UI making an appearance. For an indication of what to expect from an ASUS touchscreen device, you can check out our T91 review right here, and the comments are the place to unload all your wild and wacky theories about just what might be inside an Eee Pad. Get to it.

ASUS Eee Pad coming soon? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Our first reaction to this was to think just how wildly unnecessary “e-skins” are, but then we saw that slide up there and started to see the (electronic) light. Philips appears to have struck upon its own version of Kent Displays’ electronic skins, which requires no backlighting, operating by reflecting ambient light instead. Based on similar tech to e-books, this invention is initially targeted at generating colorful covers for things like mobile phones and mp3 players, but it’s said to be “highly scalable” and e-wallpapers and light-dimming windows could be on the cards if things continue developing. And of course, no “water cooker” would be left behind.

Philips develops color e-paper, wants to skin your gadgets with it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It sure took awhile, but Panasonic now has controlling interest of Japan’s beleaguered Sanyo Corporation. After shareholders approved the deal last year, the partnership became mired in anti-trust concerns across the globe. That was then — today the company founded by Konosuke Matsushita is the proud owner of 50.19% of Sanyo for the bargain price of ¥404 billion ($4.6 billion). That gives Panny access to Sanyo’s battery (some of which was sold off to appease regulators) and solar technology as well as its unsurpassed ability for making dull and matronly consumer electronics. Everybody wins!

Panasonic now in control of Sanyo, promises to be nice originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hellooo Onkyo. Sure, it’s just a rebadge of the Japanese Kohjinsha DZ-series dual-display rig we’ve already seen. But Onkyo’s DX raises the bar significantly by delivering a pair of 10.1-inch 1,366 × 768 pixel LCD displays (as promised at CEATEC) that easily trump the 1,024 x 600 panels used on the Kohjinsha without increasing the portable’s overall size. While we’re still looking at the same 1.6GHz Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and 3x USB jacks, Oknyo’s offering starts with 2GB (not 1GB) of memory standard expandable to 4GB, a 320GB 5,400rpm disk (not 160GB), Gigabit Ethernet, and 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. Here’s the best part: it’s priced at just ¥84,800 (about $966) compared to the Kohjinsha which lists for ¥79,800 / $909 on Kohjinsha’s retail site or a steep ¥100,800 / $1,148 premium if purchased through the GeekStuff4u exporter. Guess which one we’d choose?

Onkyo’s DX dual-screen laptop is a far better deal than Kohjinsha’s DZ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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