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Flexibility and ease of use are not mutually exclusive, though most camera makers don’t know that. You shouldn’t have to choose between pocket point-and-shoot cameras and larger, bulkier, and complicated models that let you make manual adjustments to ensure the perfect shot. It’s a bogus trade-off:

Some brand names transcend price: Rolex. Bulgari. Trojan. And some, like Ferrari, have a value that can easily be computed. In the case of the Olympus-built Ferrari Digital Model 2004, that value is about $400 — the premium you’d pay over a comparable 3.2-megapixel camera with more prosaic styling a

You know you’re going to burn your video to disc sooner or later. Why not do it the moment you record it? With DVD camcorders, you can browse, edit, and rearrange the order of scenes right on the camera. And once you’re done shooting, transferring videos to your computer or DVD player is as simple [

If you’re the art-house type, you’ll embrace anything, no matter how stupid — clove cigarettes, turtlenecks, David Eggers novels — as long as it’s outside the mainstream. If this describes you, and you’ve got money to burn, the Canon Optura 500 is your camcorder. Although small, the Optura 500 is re

If you’re trying to break into Hollywood, you don’t want your brilliant script ruined by poor video quality. Go ahead and plunk down $1,200 for the Panasonic PV-GS400: a superb camcorder with the best-quality video we’ve seen yet. Two factors contribute to the PV-GS400’s excellent video. First, a Le

A little thicker than a box of Altoids, the D-snap packs video recording and still-photo capabilities into a package small enough to fit in a pants pocket or behind a potted plant. Despite its size, the D-snap takes remarkably good videos — comparable to, or even slightly better than, the full-size

The Fisher FVD-C1 Pocket CameraCorder’s unusual shape tips you off that something went terribly wrong in the design studio at Sanyo (Fisher’s parent company). The concept is good: Pair a decent 3.2-megapixel still camera with the ability to take MPEG-4 compressed videos, add sound recording and a fr

Research in Motion turned the corporate world on its ear with the first BlackBerry pagers, which gave middle managers the power to hound subordinates 24/7, no matter where in the world the expense account took them. Later, RIM grafted mobile phone capabilities onto its pagers, producing functional —

Get ready to meet the next big innovation in mobile communications technology: the hinge. The Sierra Wireless Voq Professional phone is a rather ordinary-looking, somewhat bulky handset with a traditional 12-button keypad. Flip back the keypad and you reveal a miniscule QWERTY keyboard concealed ins

Link: The Ultimate Travel Toolkit Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

If you put your ear up close to the speaker grille on the Olympus DS-660 Digital Voice Recorder, you can hear the faint, distant screams of agonized microcassette manufacturers. For years, portable audio recording meant fumbling with these infernal tapes, which often broke, tangled, got demagnetized

The first thing you need to know about the Iomega REV 35GB/90GB drive is that its name is a lie. The REV is an external hard drive with removable 35GB hard-disk cartridges, plain and simple. The “90GB” part of its name refers to the amount of data you could, in theory, store on each cartridge […]