For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you for some items that you imagine Michael Jackson selling at his “I’m desperate” auction. The results, as I predicted, are awesome.
First Place — Bniel Jun
Second Place — Con Seannery
Third Place — Aaron Langeland
I am typing this on a 9-inch, 3G-equipped, almost-pocketable computer, running the best consumer OS money can currently buy. It costs around $400. Do you want one too? Here’s how to get yours.
There are a lot of netbooks on which you can install and run OS X, but if you’re mindful of the handy comparison chart those lads at Boing Boing Gadgets have compiled, you’ll know that the Mini 9 is about as ideal a platform as you’ll find for a Hackintosh ultraportable: Everything from wi-fi, sound and the function keys down to the optional integrated mobile broadband card and the SD card reader are supported and work as they should. No hardware compromises at all. It’s awesome.
Generally, there are two ways to approach a Hackintosh install: Using a “slipstreamed” OS X installer image that’s been modified to install on non-Apple hardware, or using a $129 factory-fresh retail OS X install disk in tandem with a special bootloader that does the necessary tweaking to let the install happen. The former can be easy enough, but it’s pretty much illegal since it contains a pirated OS X install disk, and on top of that you’ll run into all kinds of problems should you ever want to upgrade your OS or software via Software Update.
By using a retail OS X disk, you stay mostly out of pirate waters, and ensure that once everything’s up and running, you’ll be as close as is possible to having an actual Mac. Here we’re doing that, using a method referred to as the “Type11” install, cooked up by a fellow of the same handle and his colleagues over on the MyDellMini forums, a fantastic resource.
Even though we’re using a standard retail-purchased copy of OS X, the disclaimer: Apple does not like Hackintoshing. It violates the OS X EULA, and probably won’t make the Dell folks too happy either, should you need to return your hacked Mini 9 for service. So, as always, proceed at your own risk.
On a personal note let me tell you, it’s worth it. The Mini 9 is a beautiful OS X machine. So let’s get started.
What You’ll Need
• Dell Mini 9 With 16GB SSD or higher (8GB SSDs will techincally work, but it will take some fiddling not covered by this guide)
• Retail copy of OS X 10.5.x (NOT an OEM copy that comes with a new Mac)
• A USB flash drive 8GB or higher
• An external USB DVD drive
• The “Type11” Bootloader: DellMiniBoot123v8.01.iso.zip (download link in this forum post)
• Blank CD to burn bootloader image (I actually used version 8.0 of Type11 on my CD-if your boot process with 8.01 is different than what’s spelled out in this guide, you can download 8.0 here. Both should work.)
• Windows PC for preparing the flash drive (if DVD drive works fine, this is optional)
Preparing Your Boot Loader
The easiest way to use both the Type11 bootloader (burned to a bootable CD) and your OS X install DVD is via the external USB DVD drive. The catch is, some drives are mysteriously not compatible with installing OS X on the Mini 9. Mine was one of those drives—the bootloader CD would work without a hitch, but it would choke on the OS X install disk every time. Thankfully, it’s also possible to run both the bootloader and the OS X install disk off of a USB flash drive. I’m going to spell out my method here, which actually included both approaches, but try an external DVD drive first, and if yours is compatible, your life will be a little easier than mine was. On the other hand, if you don’t have an external drive, you can give the USB flash drive method a shot.
The general approach here it to boot from the Type11 bootloader, which allows you install, run and update OS X; once you’re up to 10.5.6, you can install a suite of Mini 9 specific drivers so you don’t have to rely on the bootloader anymore.
1. Unzip the DellMiniBoot123v8.01.iso and burn it to a CD with Disk Utility or a similar Windows tool (don’t just drag the ISO file to a disk). Pop that disk into your external DVD drive, connect it to your Mini 9 and power it on, then press 0 (zero) at startup to bring up the list of bootable devices.
2. Choose CD/DVD from the list, which will bring you into the bootloader. Choose the first option, “Install Retail OS X 10.5” which will bring you to a command prompt that says “boot:”
3. Take out the bootloader disk and pop in your retail OS X install DVD, keeping the PC running. (You can power your external drive off and then on again to make sure everything’s kosher.) Press Escape at the boot: prompt to bring up the drive options. The Type11 installer uses hex codes to choose which device you’re booting from, which you can assign at any time from the boot prompt by pressing escape: enter “9f” for the external DVD drive or “80” for the primary internal SSD. Here we’re booting from the external CD drive, so press escape, Type “9f” then press enter.
4. At this point, the OS X installer will either load or it won’t. If it does, great. You can skip to step 12. If not, you’ll need to do what I did, and transfer everything to a USB flash drive to install that way.
Preparing a USB Stick Instead Of/In Addition To a Boot CD
This is based on a tutorial found on the MyDellMini forums by “bmaltais”—bigup to him.
5. Open up Disk Utility and partition your USB drive (8GB or larger) into two partitions: one 200MB FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition named “TYPE11” and one with the remainder of the free space formated as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) called OSXDVD.
6. Move to a Windows PC (I know, I know), plug in your USB stick and download Syslinux-this is a utility that will make the FAT32 partition of your USB stick bootable. With the Windows Command Prompt, cd over to the “win32” subdirectory of the Syslinux directory you downloaded and type the following, where “F:” is the drive letter for the TYPE11 partition on your USB stick:
syslinux -ma F:
You won’t get any confirmation, but if you receive no error messages, you’re good: This copies a single file named ldlinux.sys (invisible in Windows) to the USB drive to make it bootable. Pop it out and go back to your Mac if that’s what you’re using.
7. Now, unzip the Type11 ISO (instead of burning it to a disk) and copy the whole directory structure to the TYPE11 partition. Do NOT overwrite the “ldlinux.sys” when it asks—you want to keep the one you copied over with Syslinux.
8. To fill up the other partition, insert your OS X install DVD and, in Disk Utility, select it and choose “New Image.” Save it to the OSXDVD partition of your USB drive as “live.dmg” with “compressed” as the type and encryption set to “none.” This’ll take about a half hour to rip the DVD to an image, which should weigh in at around 6.4 GB give or take.
9. After that’s done, go to Terminal and copy your mach kernel file to the OSXDVD partition by typing this:
sudo cp /mach_kernel /Volumes/OSXDVD
10. And finally, download this zip file, uncompress it and copy the System and Library folders inside to your OSXDVD partition. This is the last bit of magic needed to make your Mini 9 think it’s working with an actual OS X install DVD.
11. On your Mini 9, restart it and enter the BIOS setup by pressing “2”—and make sure legacy support for USB devices is enabled. Now, reboot and select the boot options list by tapping 0 at startup and choose USB Storage. Select the OSXDVD partition to boot from and press Enter. This should load up the familiar Apple and the OS X installer window.
Install OS X
While you’re installing and doing initial configuration of OS X, everything will be all warped to 800×600 rather than your Mini’s native 1024×600 res. Don’t worry, this will be fixed soon enough.
12. The first thing you need to do is format your SSD. Bring up Disk Utility in the installer select it at the highest level possible. Go to “Partition” and make it a single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition. Before hitting Apply, go to Options and select GUID Partition Table. Then hit apply.
13. Now, go back to the Installer, and install OS X to the SSD you just partitioned. You will definitely want to choose to customize your install to save SSD space—I would ditch all the printer drivers and language packs you don’t need to save space. If you install with the default options though, don’t worry—all can be removed later. The install will take about an hour, so go fix yourself a drink. You may come back to an Install Error message at the very end (I didn’t), but if you do, don’t worry. It’s normal.
14. Once OS X is installed, it’s still not ready for use right off the drive. On your first reboot, make sure you boot back into the Type11 bootloader on your CD or flash drive, as your new OS X partition is still not bootable without it.
This is, however, where a bit of weirdness set in for me. The Type11 partition on my USB disk would NOT recognize my fresh OS X install on the Mini 9 SSD. It just would not boot it. The Type11 boot CD I had made (with version 8.0 of Type11) DID recognize it, however, and booted it just fine. So bear that in mind here—even if you weren’t using an external drive before, you still might need one.
15. So now you boot back into the Type11 CD and choose option 1 (“Install Retail OS X 10.5”) again, even though you’re not installing. This takes you back to the boot prompt. This time, hit Escape, and type the code “80” for your SSD (as opposed to “9f” for the external DVD). Press enter, and then back at the “boot:” prompt, type “-f” with no quotes before hitting enter again to boot. This will load all of OS X’s kernel extensions (.kexts) to make sure wi-fi and everything works. OS X should boot, and you’ll go through the typical OS X setup process. Notice the webcam and—hopefully—networking are already working!
ONE MORE NOTE: If networking isn’t working, don’t panic. On my first boot from the SSD, wi-fi didn’t work. But after a restart and another boot from the bootloader CD (with the “-f” option) it worked fine. Throughout this process, if anything is screwy, before you panic and start Googling new strategems, simply re-do the last step that failed—it’s often that easy.
Free Up Space and Update OS X to 10.5.6
Now that you’ve booted from the fresh install on the SSD, it’s time to update to 10.5.6 (if necessary). After a default install, I only had a gig and change left on my 16GB SSD, so I had to dump some programs I wouldn’t need as well as all the printer drivers found at /Library/Printers. There is an app called Monolingual which can also help clear some space by removing unwanted language files and stripping out all legacy PPC code from your universal binaries.
16. Once you’ve cleared up enough space (if necessary, you’ll need around 6GB), go to Software Update and install the 10.5.6 update. This will take a long-ass time too (the SSD, strangely enough, seems to actually be slower on tasks that take tons of reads and writes).
17. After it’s done, restart, and boot into the Type11 bootloader one last time. This time you don’t have to use the “-f” flag. Once you’re booted, go to the DellMini9Utils folder on your Type11 CD or flash drive and run the DellEFI installer. This will load all of the Mini 9 .kexts and drivers as well as a special bootloader to boot your SSD install. Choose the easy install option and just let it do its magic.
18. After it’s done, you’ll be asked to reboot one final time. You won’t need to boot from the Type11 CD this time; you should boot straight off of your SSD like normal, and enter upon your fresh new OS X desktop, now in gloriously correct 1024×600 resolution. Awesome!
Configs, Tweaks and Fun Stuff
You’ll notice right away that OS X runs fantastically on the Mini 9. I was really stunned, and you probably will be too. Here are some things to make it even better:
• Follow this tutorial to get your mobile broadband working if your Mini 9 has it. Network preferences should recognize it out of the box.
• If you’re especially OCD, you can run the “AboutThisMac.pkg” inside the Type11 utilities folder to change “Unknown Processor” in the About This Mac window to the correct 1.6GHz Atom designation.
• This is a neat trick for fooling pesky oversized windows into shrinking themselves for your small screen.
• I haven’t had luck with this, but you can apparently enable some multitouch scrolling action on the Dell’s Synaptics touchpad by following these instructions.
Conclusion
So congrats, now you have a 100% functional OS X netbook. I’ve been using mine for a few days now, and it’s quite the machine for basic netbook activities-surfing, IM, email. It connects to my shared AirPort disk and streams my video collection (even high-def files) perfectly, and also backs up wirelessly over Time Machine. The 9-inch screen will make even your lower-res full-screen video look fantastic—YouTube or Hulu, QuickTime trailers and video rips are a pleasure to watch. Watching an episode of something in bed without lugging my 15-incher in with me is really nice.
In addition, I think I may have found the perfect toilet computer. No one wants to fight Windows on the throne. And of course it’s amazing for traveling. I’m about to take a trip to Cairo, and I’ll be bringing this little guy without a doubt.
Resources
Many thanks to everyone at the following sites:
• DellMyMini Forums: OS X: FAQs and How Tos
So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your own Hackintoshing, and have a great weekend!
I’ll admit, it’s depressing when a kid under 16 has achieved more in their life than you have as an adult. However, the achievements of the whiz-kids in this list can also be inspiring.
[Image via Flickr]
Like a skeleton in the closet or a beating heart in the floorboards, many home theater enthusiasts are cursed by a barrage of remote controls, each with different shapes, sizes, and battery demands. Cheap multi-device programmable remotes help, but Logitech’s Harmony line has for years been something of a savior, elegantly hiding all your devices behind simple activities like “Watch TV” or “Play a CD.” The Harmony 1100 is the latest to join the lineup, and is in many ways the most elegant to look at and to hold. Sadly, though, it’s far from the most intuitive to use, and so is not exactly our favorite.
Gallery: Logitech Harmony 1100
Continue reading Harmony 1100 remote review: a bigger screen isn’t always better
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Harmony 1100 remote review: a bigger screen isn’t always better originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
I, Mark Wilson, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, do declare this to be my last gadget Will.
While at the time of this writing, I am a spry (OK, a bit soft) 26-year-old man, I realize that I could, at any moment in time, die. In such an unfortunate circumstance, should the world ever recover from its loss, I’d like my most important possessions (my gadgets and digital media) to be well-tended pending their obsolescence (two or three months from now).
I will, give, and bequeath unto the persons named below, if he or she survives me, the Property described below:
My iPhone
Pending that my iPhone 3G was not crushed by whatever huge boulder must have smashed me, I would like to leave it to someone very special in my life. My wife Elizabeth, a long time iPhone hater, recently admitted that she was wrong in denouncing the phone and purchasing a Blackberry Pearl instead. I know she would really, really enjoy having my iPhone.
Too late, sweetie! Your penance were not adequate. My iPhone should go to an underprivileged child who is resourceful enough to pay a $100/month subscription even though they haven’t shoes on their feet. Actually, publicize the donation and guilt AT&T and/or Apple into picking up the tab. It’ll help if the child can’t read.
My Flickr Account
You can’t give thousands of pretentious sepia photos to just anyone. No, these all go to the Art Institute of Chicago. May they reconsider my genius when macro photography of mundane objects constitutes an artistic revolution, or when there’s finally a wing dedicated to LOLCatz.
My Plasma TV and Home Theater Accessories
The 46-inch Samsung plasma should be placed in my building’s workout room where, as of now, some devil has placed two crappy 13-inch LCDs under the guise that anyone can actually see those things. My TV now belongs to the condo association, pending that neither ESPN nor ESPN2 can ever be watched on it.
My Tangled Box of Cords
Everyone has an obnoxious, tangled box of various cords, and I was no exception. I hated this box, but found it a necessity in the mortal world. Now that I have transcended to a higher plane of existence (hopefully involving wireless HDMI and unlimited refills at a peach margarita machine), I leave this box to the last person who wronged me in life. Whoever that may be, I fucking hate you and my grudge will be eternal, just like that knot of cords.
My Xbox 360 and Games
OK, now this was a tough one. Who gets all the games, the controllers and the overpriced Wi-Fi dongle? Humanity, that’s who. And my gamer points go to Adam Frucci, the only guy who I know with less Live street cred than me. Well, him or my mom. Figure it out, lawyers. This point might go to trial.
My Wii
Sell it on eBay. I wouldn’t subject anyone I love to dealing with the horrors of the current Wiimote. If eBay has gone bankrupt, the lawyer has been instructed to bury the system in a time capsule until Wii MotionPlus comes out. If there’s a decent amount of game support (I’m talking games with headshots and blood, people), it should go to my two adorable nieces to aid in their development.
My PS3
Hahahahahaha. I mean, whoever will take this can have it! Hahahahahaha. Really though, in ten years, everyone will have them…pfft…hahahahhahahaha. Oh man, I’m funny even when dead.
My Low Digit ICQ Number
Mom, I know this has been hard for you, especially as you have no one to turn to regarding all things tech. No problem. You can have my five-digit ICQ number. (I realize you have no clue what that means.) It’s OK. Walk into any chatroom with that and, trust me, 87264829 isn’t giving you any shit, ever. You rule the internet now. Go forth and crush the opposition.
My MacBook Pro
Ahh, the MacBook Pro, the center of my digital life. That’s why you’re all here, isn’t it? Well, of course my darling wife Elizabeth receives it. With some provisions:
Always wash your hands before using. Before you turn it on, say three Hail Maries with “Steve” replaced for “Mary.” No Boot Camping Vista, but Win 7 is fine. No watching YouTube clips where kids light their own farts on the screen. No chatting with other men on it. Don’t worry about webcam restrictions, I’ve taken the liberty of breaking the iSight for you.
It should be noted that there is a lot of important media saved on the hard drive that represents not only my musical preferences but snippets of our life together. You are now the owner of all MP3s, photos, animated GIFs (this is a big score, honey), and videos.
On the condition that you never delete my Springsteen collection, as low as you may be on space, it’s all yours. The computer is out in the hall. Please go claim it now. Mom? Sis? You can go with and help.
[They should leave the room.]
OK, Jason Chen. Quick. The MacBook is under your seat. I need you to delete some files. Go to my hard drive. Open “Applications.” Open “System Files” folder. Open “DO NOT OPEN OR COMPUTER WILL MELT” folder. Open “I’M NOT JOKING.” Open “SEARS CATALOG BABES WINTER 2002-2008.” Select all files. If you have time, you can copy these to the external drive you were instructed to bring with in a past email. If not, select all and delete. Then empty trash. Thanks buddy. You’re a true friend.
Oh, and to everyone. Don’t mourn my passing. Remember, I’m not dead. My crippled body is merely frozen. When I awake from my long winter slumber, I’ll be totally cured of ailments and donning a 7-foot titanium robot body complete with laser Gatlings and a turbo orgasm button. So don’t feel sorry for Mark. That guy’s doing just fine.
Well, that, or the cryogensis freezer failed, I was wrong about Christianity being fake and I’m burning through eternity in some poorly ventilated internet cafe that only has dial-up.
For most, cellphone trade shows mean carefree gadget porn. For some, they’re an assault on beleaguered gadget egos. Last time we helped straggling WinMo users. Now, dear last-gen BlackBerry users, we’re reaching out to you.
Users of the Pearl, Curve and 88xx phones, despite being highly capable devices, are getting it from all angles; on one front, RIM left these handsets behind for OS 4.6, and the touchscreen Storm looks like it’s from a different planet. Other phone makers are moving into exciting new territory, releasing totally new hardware and software at steady clip. In short, it can be rough to own a last-gen ‘Berry, not to mention one of the older 7000 series handsets. But the theory here is the same as before—just because your handset is technically last-gen device doesn’t mean it has to feel like one.
Ditch the BlackBerry Browser for Good
RIM’s newest browser, bundled with 4.6x and 4.7x handsets, is good. It renders like a modern mobile phone should. NOT SO for the 4.5 and earlier browsers. They might be fine in the exciting world of WAP, but that’s yesterday’s mobile web.
Opera Mini: This feisty little browser has been backing up RIM’s stock software for years, and with good reason. It’ll run on almost any BlackBerry, with (old version) support spanning back to the ancient, black-and-white 5810, which was released in 2002. Opera uses server-side optimization to speed things up, but the end result is an experience that at least resembles browsing as we know it today.
Bolt Browser: Bolt, which I made note of a while ago for “not looking horrible“, is now available to the public, and it’s quite good. It uses server-side compression just like Opera Mini, but generally achieves more faithful results in a shorter time. Most of its magic lies in its rendering engine, the same soon-to-be-ubiquitous WebKit found in Mobile Safari, Mobile Chrome and the Pre’s new browser.
Dress Your Interface Up Like a New BlackBerry, Or Pretty Much Anything Else
Pre-4.6 BlackBerry OSes share the same awkward aesthetic. It’s at once dry and businesslike, pastel and cartoonish. A relic for sure, but one that takes customization quite well. Plenty of themes are floating around on the internet, but loads of them cost money and nearly all reside in horrible, spammy website. Oh, and 95% of them are terrible. But that means that a few aren’t—here they are:
Go to Themes4BB. Seriously. Registration is required to access the forums, but once you’re done you have access to a huge number of free, occasionally decent BlackBerry themes for almost any model. The obvious iPhone, Mac OS and Windows skins litter the message boards, but the best will give your interface a near-full conversion. If feeling left behind is your problem, there are high-contrast 4.6-inspired skins for most models.
Fill Out Your App List:
While you’ve got a prime messaging device in your pocket, there are areas where the standard BlackBerry apps are lacking. We’ve covered browsers, but there are other apps that can have an equally transformative effect on your handset.
Google Apps: Aside from plethora of mobile web apps offered by Google, there are a few native ones as well. Google Mobile provides access to Gmail (possibly a bit redundant), GPS-compatible Maps (a must-have) and Google Sync, which will keep your contacts and calendars neatly paired with Google Apps.
VoIP: BlackBerrys have been sadly neglected by Skype, but that doesn’t mean VoIP is out of the question. iSkoot is a surprisingly functional 3rd-party app which uses Skype’s network and is able to make and receive relatively clear Skype voice calls, even over 2G networks. Truphone is a simple app that’ll route international calls at local call rates. Gizmo5 is one of the better of the sea of second-tier Skypes out there, and their VoIP app, which offers not just free calls to other Gizmo5 users, but instant messaging on a range of popular networks, is worth a download.
WebMessenger Multi-Protocol IM: Some BlackBerrys are blessed with a bundled AIM app; most aren’t. WebMessenger does a handy job of combining most popular messaging protocols into an easy interface. And honestly, what is your BlackBerry good for if not furiously typing short messages to all your friends through as many channels as possible?
TwitterBerry: Further facilitating the aforementioned HAVE QWERTY, MUST COMMUNICATE ethos is TwitterBerry, the preeminent Twitter app for any BlackBerry. The iPhone may have seized the attention of the Twitterati, but any BlackBerry, new or old, is better suited to the service that the Apple’s buttonless handset. TwitterBerry has the potential to bring upon the world heretofore unseen levels of oversharing, courtesy of you, last-gen BlackBerry users.
Viigo RSS Reader: Viigo is a fantastic RSS reader, able to consolidate any number of feeds—website content, Google Alerts, social networking sites—into a friendly, simple interface.
Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.
Between all the new digital cameras pooped out before the upcoming PMA show and the crazy cameras buried inside cellphones at MWC, it’s a good time to go over why more megapixels isn’t necessarily better.
So, the nutshell explanation of how a digital camera works is that light lands on a sensor, which converts the light into electrical charges. Depending on the kind of camera you’re using, how the light reaches the sensor may seem different—honkin’ digital SLRs house a complicated pentaprism and mirror system that swings out of the way, while the inside of a compact point-and-shoot is mechanically far simpler. At the heart, though, the sensor fundamentals stay the same.
The sensor is where most of the megapixel machismo comes from. When you squeeze the shutter button, the sensor (like film in old-school cameras) is exposed to light for however long you have the exposure time set for. The most common metaphor to talk about how a sensor works is that it’s like an array of buckets (the pixels) that collect light, and the amount collected is turned into an electrical charge, which is converted into data. We talked a bit about the differences between the two major types of sensors, CCD and APS (CMOS) earlier.
Generally, the more pixels packed onto a sensor, the higher the resolution of the images it can produce. (Image resolution is somewhat confusingly also measured in pixels, but the term pixels doesn’t always refer to the exact same thing.) A megapixel is 1 million pixels, so a 12-megapixel photo has a resolution of about 12 million pixels. Sounds like a lot, till you consider gigapixel photos, which have over a billion pixels in them. By comparison, a 30-inch monitor with a 2560×1600 display resolution amounts to a measly four megapixels, and even the best high-definition video currently is around two megapixels, no matter how large the TV.
The most recent crop of $250ish point-and-shoot digital cameras from Canon and Nikon seem to establish 10-12 megapixels as the new norm for everyday pocket cams, and hell, Sony Ericsson crammed a 12-megapixel into their tiny Idou cellphone—the same as Canon’s entry-level XSi DSLR and Nikon’s $3000 D700 pro DSLR. Uh, what the hell?
Obviously, there’s a world of difference between the image quality you’re going to get out each of those. Most of it comes down to the size of the sensor and the pixels. You can fit a much bigger sensor inside of a DSLR than you can inside of a cellphone, which not only means you can fit more pixels on the sensor, you can fit much bigger ones—imagine bigger buckets to catch the light. Sure enough, the sensors inside of DSLRs are huge compared to the ones in compacts as DPReview’s detailed size chart shows. They also explain how to the read the sizes—which actually refer to the size of the tube around the sensor, not the sensor itself. Sensor sizes are referenced against 35mm film as a standard—cameras with sensors equivalent in size to 35mm film are called full-frame, though right now that’s limited to pricey semi-pro level DSLRs.
To get really high-resolution smaller cameras and phones, manufacturers pack as many teeny pixels as tightly as they can onto tiny sensors. The pixels in standard point-and-shoots aren’t the same kind of high-quality pixels found on DSLRs—and generally speaking, bargain bin cameras will offer lower quality pixels than higher-end shooters of the same class—which results crappier color accuracy and usually lower dynamic range too.
The other problem is noise. When you pack in pixels like delicious cows headed for slaughter, you create a lot of heat, which is one of the ways noise is generated—the rainbow colored random grain you see sometimes on digital photos. Noise gets worse as you crank the ISO, amplifying the sensor’s sensitivity to light. In newer point and shoots, it’s really noticeable around a sensitivity of ISO 800, though the D700 and 5D Mark II DSLRs can be jacked up to 3200 ISO and produce acceptable images (we’ve used some on Giz).
So, on a given sensor size, a lower megapixel count with bigger pixels will produce cleaner images—hence the D3 only rocking 12 megapixels. Most cameras mitigate noise with fancy noise reduction algorithms that are getting better all the time—Canon’s 5D Mark II manages to balance delivering 21 megapixels with images about as clean as the D700’s at higher ISOs—but for the most part, we’re happier to see bigger sensors and fewer pixels. One disadvantage of the bigger “buckets” in DSLRs is that you do need more light to fill them up, meaning you might need longer exposure times.
And when it comes to print quality—that old argument for extra megapixels—for most of the shooting the average person does, 6 megapixels is just fine, as David Pogue shows (and Ken Rockwell has more on), since you can make ginormous prints from it, and a clear, noise-free 8×10 looks better than a crappy one when its framed and hung on the wall. As Douglas Sterling told us via email, pros crave the extra detail of ginormous megapixel images, but when it comes down to buying cameras for regular people, just keep in mind that more megapixels isn’t necessarily more better. It’s how good those pixels are that matters.
Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about cameras, obscuras, or Waffle House to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
The Engadget Spanish team just got their hands on the Samsung Show (the European, i7410 model) projector phone that we first caught a sneak peek of a CES. The Show’s projector is powered by Texas Instruments’ DLP pico technology, and though the fact that it packs a projector does increase the bulkiness of the phone as far as looks are concerned, the phone is still rather small and light. The Show can project an image of anywhere from five to fifty inches, with a 480 x 320 resolution. It’s got a 3.2-inch WQVGA touchscreen, the TouchWiz UI and also boasts a 5 megapixel camera. There are plans for this bad dude to hit Asia and Europe (but no word on if it’ll ever make its way to North America), but we still haven’t heard when, nor how much it’ll cost when it arrives. Check the video after the break.
[Via Engadget Spanish]
Gallery: Samsung Show Hands-on
Continue reading Samsung Show hands-on and video at MWC
Filed under: Cellphones, Displays
Samsung Show hands-on and video at MWC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Toy Fair, despite the sunny name, is not just a place of wonder and magic. If you look below the gilded surface of happiness and joy, you can actually see portents of doom. Doomy doom.
To see each reason we’re doomed, just click on the little thumbnail. We’ve got a bonus reason as a recession special.
We just stopped by TechnoSource’s booth at the Toy Fair to check out its just-announced Rubik’s TouchCube, a fully touch-sensitive update on the old classic Rubik’s Cube. The new model boasts a few features the old one did not (besides the lights and touchscreen), namely undo and hint options if you get stumped. Each of its six sides are touch-sensitive, and the cube’s got an internal accelerometer so that it only recognizes the touching going on on the top side of the cube. It also remembers your place even if you turn it off — great for those of us who will likely spend years trying to solve it just once. The Rubik’s TouchCube is going to hit shelves this fall for $149.99. Check the gallery and video demo after the break
Gallery: Rubik’s TouchCube
Continue reading Rubik’s TouchCube hands-on and video
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Rubik’s TouchCube hands-on and video originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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