Buy Memory Cards

A lots of big-boys have entered the market of e-book-reader technology and a war has broken out. It’s a war to develop the most commonplace and universally accepted e-book format. Among these we have:

• LRF - Sony’s proprietary format.
• AZW - Amazon’s proprietary format.
• MOBI - Mobipocket; a more widely accepted format across the board.
• PDF - Adobe’s universal format.

The Sony Reader is one of the only e-book-reader that doesn’t support the widely available Mobipocket format. The reason for this is that Sony hope to make a profit by selling e-books in their own proprietary format to its customers. This is a risky tactic as they run the risk of loosing many potential customers not willing to limit themselves to Sony’s e-book collection. Amazon however have taken a more open minded approach by giving their Kindle device Mobipocket support as well as support for their proprietary format, AZW. Generally speaking, when considering a purchase of an e-book-reader device, the more supported formats the better. In this article I aim to look at the various advantages and disadvantages of e-book formats.

Sony Reader Format (LRF)

LRF is Sony’s proprietary e-book file format. The Sony Reader devices allows three levels of zoom for LRF e-books. E-books of this format can be purchased from Sony’s own website which boasts thousands of best-selling titles. Unfortunately this format is only available with the Sony Readers and therefore the e-book collection isn’t as large as it is for other formats on offer.

Amazon Kinder Format (AZW)

The AZW format is Amazon’s proprietary file format. Unlike Sony, Amazon have taken the surprising step of allowing support for other commercial formats on their reader device. For Amazon this may be a case of shooting themselves in the foot, or alternatively a stroke of genius and a missed opportunity for Sony. Amazon have their own e-book store in which they sell AZW books. Being the largest book supplier on the Internet, Amazon( Amazon Kindle) certainly know a thing or two about this market and should feel quite confident going up again Sony in this way.

Mobipocket Format (MOBI)

Unlike the other two mentioned formats, the MOBI file format wasn’t developed for any specific device. Instead it was made for a specific piece of software. The Mobipocket reader software is free for download and distribution. This is what makes the format so appealing. Money is made purely through book sales. This philosophy seems to have more future than that of Sony and Amazon with their proprietary formats. Amazon however seem to have recognised this and allowed the format on to their devices - a step that Sony haven’t taken. In this digital age of so many different devices, it is in the interests of the consumer to have standards: the Mobipocket format seems to be establishing itself as this standard.

Adobe Reader Format (PDF)

It would be a brave manufacturer who released a device without support for the PDF format. Over the years PDF has really established itself the number one digital text format. There are a number of issues with this format however that I hope to clarify here. Firstly, the philosophy of the PDF format is to display text on screen exactly as it will display in print. The problems arise when a text was designed for A4 print. There are currently no e-book-reading devices with an A4 screen size and as such, PDF documents on these devices will not display as they were intended. This also leads to reduced readability and sometimes even zero readability. There are a number of third party programs designed to tackle this problem. For the Sony Reader there are packages that convert the PDF files into the proprietary LRF format with minimum loss of quality. It’s important to note that the Amazon Kindle doesn’t support the PDF format at all, they do however provide “experimental” software that should convert a PDF file to the proprietary AZW format.

Final Thought

So when considering purchasing an e-book-Reader device, research is everything. An important question to ask oneself is this: what are the e-book formats I use the most? You should look at the various e-book stores to see if they offer the kinds of books that you might buy. If you usually read larger PDF files you might consider buying devices with larger screens such as the Irex Iliad. Initial research is the key to avoid headaches later on.

Richard Merry
E-books and Readers

In a few years, we’ll all be wondering how we got along without Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is an electronic reading device that is smaller and lighter than a paperback book, but it can hold thousands of books, magazines, documents and blogs.

The first thing that everyone notices and comments on when they see an Amazon Kindle, is the clarity of the page. It uses a technology called, “electronic ink” which really looks like page from a book. This means you never have glare that makes it difficult to read. You can even take your Kindle to the beach and read without straining your eyes.

Speaking of straining your eyes, a very nice feature on the Amazon Kindle is the ability to adjust the font size. For those of us who find ourselves make annual adjustments to our reading glasses, this means we can now read without them.

Let’s also talk about the ability to connect anywhere, anytime (there is currently a limitation in Alaska and Wyoming) in the United States. And there is no connection fee, no looking for hot spots and no monthly wireless fee. The cost of the Kindle includes all your connection services.

With the Amazon Kindle your newspapers are delivered to you electronically first thing in the morning, your magazine subscriptions are delivered before they hit the newsstands, you can buy over 110,000 books in Amazon’s inventory for only $9.95 and you can even email your own documents to yourself to store on the device.

All this makes the Amazon Kindle the most convenient reading device since the invention of the printing press. When you travel, you can take an entire library full of books, magazines and newspapers with you, without lugging a trunk with you.

Did you know that anyone in the United States can sell books on Amazon Kindle? Did you know that you do not need to be the author of the book provided the book is in the public domain?

Its true. And it is simple. You can publish a book in minutes on this innovative platform.

Amazon’s Kindle platform allows anyone who is a writer or who works with public domain books to sell works on Kindle. That means that as a product developer, you now have access to an entirely new market for the millions of public domain works just sitting around waiting to be rediscovered.

Why not make sure that the person who rediscovers these works for the new digital era hearalded in by Kindle is you? You can bring valuable old works to a new audience and make money at the same time.

Selling on Kindle is easy. You do need to have a United States bank account and identifying number (SSN, EIN or TIN) to open an account but that is the only requirement to begin selling on Kindle.

Once your account is set up, you will create a listing for each book you wish to publish on Kindle. This is a simple three step process.

Step 1: Describe the book. This includes things like the title, author, description of the book, an image if you want and a few other optional details.

Step 2: Upload the digital copy of the book to the Kindle Server. The server supports several formats including HTML, raw text and PDF files amongst other formats. Once you upload the book, you have an opportunity to preview the book in its Kindle format so you can see exactly how the book would look to buyers. And if you are not happy with the presentation, you can always make formatting edits and reupload the book.

Step 3: Set the price you want to charge for the book and click on finished.

Congratulations. You are now a publisher.

Amazon keeps track of all delivery and sales - all of which you can monitor in your own control panel. They pay you 35% of the price you select for your offering and pay you on a monthly basis - all on autopilot. Once you have published a book on the Kindle platform, you do no additional work. Amazon promotes, fulfills and pays you by direct deposit.

Let’s face it, we stopped storing things the old fashioned way - you know papers, file folders, photo albums etc. a long time ago. At least twenty years! Now a days we store all that in a much better and smaller way! We store it in our digital camera memory, and of course most of us have the sdhc memory cards now. We store it on our external hard drives, or our M2 memory cards. We store it on our Micro-SD Memory Cards. We live for the latest and greatest revolution in the memory stick evolution. We wait with baited breath to hear if our memory card has an upgrade so we can print faster or store more.

What’s funny about our techno revolution is that we truly believe we cannot live without these things. What’s sad about this same techno revolution is that if our memory stick goes on the Fritz, we go into massive loss and mourning. We mourn the loss of the memory stick, sure. But we also mourn the potential loss of anything we had not yet downloaded.

Twenty years ago the concept of losing all our phone numbers because the memory card went bad was simply unheard of. We all had our rolodexes on our desks and happily flitted through those huge cardboard cards to find just the right number. We mourned the loss of a card perhaps, but we never really worried about it. We could always write another card.

Now we just gotta have a new memory card, or we gotta have a new memory stick - or sometimes we gotta have both. No matter, if we don’t have memory sticks or memory cards, we can’t survive.

When we shop, we don’t look for any old memory stick, we gotta have just the right one. Maybe we are out looking for Micro-SD Memory Cards, or sdhc emmory cards. Maybe we are out to get an M2 memory card. You can bet, we won’t give up until we find it. We are on a mission.

Mostly we order our memory cards online. That’s the best way ultimately. So easy to type in a search window digital camera memory and surf away. We love it. We are hooked. There’s no going back to cameras that use rolls of film, or printers that don’t have external slots. There’s no buying a second file cabinet, when you can simply get a second external hard drive. We live for techno. We bow to techno. We depend on techno. Down with the Rolodex. Down with the file cabinet. Bring on the latest and greatest in memory cards!

So What’s in a Memory Card? Our lifestyle as we have come to know it.

And this would certainly be where video is headed, but that is not where most of us are with our digital cameras and their memorys cards. In fact, most of us are still marveling over the 4GB, 8GB secure digital cards (nicknamed sdhc cards) that we have come to be familiar with. And if the sdhc cards are not catching our eye (which do allow us to have the 4GB and 8GB by the way) then it is likely we are using the M2 memory cards or the Micro-SD memory Cards. That’s for those of us who need or use digital camera memory.

People who need memory sticks - maybe for their printer, or computer, or one of their favorite gaming machine may not be using these types of memory cards, but you can bet if they want any type of ability to save any large files, they’ve got a memory card.

When expandable memory slots were first developed and incorporated into the portable digital devices we all know and love, it was hard to think with the idea that that latest and greatest gadget would ever need anything like more memory. There were thousands of people who thought that buying a memory stick was just some cool new sales ploy to get more money out of them. However, what they didn’t know was that these small portable devices will not hold much in their internal memory.

Thus the evolution of external memory was not a sales ploy but a truly bona fide need. Some people may remember how there were those who scoffed at the idea of external hard drives. But once it was recognized that these were of tremendous advantage, those devices started flying off the shelf just as quickly as memory sticks did once people got the “bigger picture.”

And this seems to be the natural evolution of the high tech industry. They come out with the latest and greatest, whether that is memory cards or sdhc memory cards and the humans take a while to decide if it just a gimmick or if it truly is a real need.

The fact of the matter is, your digital camera just isn’t so great of a device if you don’t have digital camera memory. Your computer will potentially run out of hard drive space if you don’t get an external hard drive.
These are simple truths.

So we rely on Wired Magazine to keep us posted on the latest and greatest devices that rock the boat and we think about how much we need it. Before you know it, whether it is high def video for your camera or simply a memory card for your pda. You know you will be getting it sometime in the relatively near future.

Remember those days of the traditional camera, and all the hassle of loading and unloading films, and taking them to photo shops to get them developed? But now you can finally say goodbye to all that, thanks to the digital camera. With a digital camera you no longer have to deal with having to load the film, and develop the film etc. You can now capture memorable moments with just a click of a button of your digital camera, then quickly and easily download the pictures onto your PC, and your pictures can then be viewed on the computer monitor for anyone to see.

If you are not well versed in technology, you may well wonder how your images transfer from the digital camera to the computer. The actual device that holds these images is called the memory card. To put it simply, the memory card is an electronic and much more convenient alternative to films used in traditional cameras. The unique advantage of the memory card is that it is reusable as images on the memory card can be deleted, unlike films that are not useable anymore once developed, and thus discarded. Memory cards also allow you to easily view your pictures by simply transferring the images from the memory card to the computer, whereas films have to undergo a special process to develop the images on the film.

With all these versatile and innovative benefits memory card provides, digital camera has boomed in popularity. The digital camera memory card market has been flooded with a wide range of memory card brands. With so many competing brands, choosing a particular memory card has become increasingly confusing and difficult.

There are various types of memory cards available in the market today, including Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro media format, SmartMedia, XD Picture card, SD and MMC cards and the most time tested, CompactFlash.

Before deciding on your memory card, check which type of card is compatible with your brand of digital camera. For most digital cameras, your choice of memory card is likely to be limited to just one or two of the above-mentioned types. However there are some models that can accept a combination of SmartMedia and CompactFlash, or SmartMedia and XD memory cards. Consult the camera manual to learn about the compatibility.

The speed rating of the memory card is also another feature you need to consider, as buying a high speed card is only necessary when you are using a professional model. Otherwise, an ordinary camera will not be able to match the speed.

Also, consider buying a memory card with higher capacity, so that you can store more images at a time.

Is it possible to get amazing pictures from a cheap digital camera? Buying a Nikon Coolpix L11 Digital Camera is certainly not going to break the bank. It’s currently selling for about $90 at a number of online retailers. But, can you get great pictures out if it, or will it bring you nothing but heart ache and lousy pictures. Let’s take a look at some of the less appealing features of the Coolpix L11 by Nikon, and find out.

One of my biggest complaints with digital cameras and digital camera manufacturers, is the exclusion of an optical viewfinder. Sure, we all love the cool factor of having a nice big LCD screen to view pictures with. But, not if a larger LCD means sacrificing a viewfinder. Especially on a camera the eats batteries like the Coolpix L11. Having a viewfinder, means you can still take pictures, even with dying batteries. It’s a bit of a vicious circle… bigger LCD = no space for viewfinder = batteries die sooner… and no user option to switch to viewfinder mode.

The other problem with a big LCD screen on a low priced camera, is the quality of the screen. The LCD on the L11, is somewhat grainy, but usable when used indoors. At least it’s quite readable. Going outdoors however is a different story. There is technology to make LCDs readable in bright sunlight, and it works great. I have it on my marine grade GPS chart plotter, but that’s an $800 toy. Trying to view the LCD on the Coolpix L11 on a sunny day, is next to impossible. An optical viewfinder, would of course resolve this problem (see earlier complaint).

The power saving feature, while a good idea for the L11, was not implemented very well by Nikon. The camera tends to take about a minute to shut off, when it decides it’s no longer being used. During that time, you can’t stop the shutdown, and even powering it back on, is not the most intuitive process.

A typical complaint with pretty much every camera in this price range, and even $100 more, is the big lag time between taking pictures. Primarily caused by the flash recharging, and the camera taking a long time to save the last photo to the memory card. You can get faster memory cards, and stronger batteries, but they won’t make much of a difference. Some of the faster memory cards cost almost as much as the Nikon Coolpix L11. Your better off just getting a better camera.

As if I haven’t given you enough reasons to stay away from buying a Nikon Coolpix L11, here’s a few more to ponder:

- main settings dial is too small and susceptible to operator error

- night pictures or low light pictures turn out very grainy

- the flash is not effective beyond a range of six feet

- USB connector cable is non standard (micro USB)

- older model Coolpix 2100 actually performs better

- color accuracy suffers on indoor pictures

You are going to buy a Gamecube system but what else do you need to buy with it? What are the best games to buy? Do you need extra controllers? Should you buy a memory card, or Gameboy Player? And what is a Gameboy Player? Follow these simple directions below and you can answer all those questions and start enjoying your system in no time.

Games – After choosing the system, the biggest decision is what games will you buy to go along with it. The Gamecube is just a big indigo paperweight if you don’t have any games to play. The first way to pick a game is to choose something related to a hobby of yours outside of gaming. Do you play football, skateboarding, like cars, or fishing? There are games for all of these hobbies and more. The second option for choosing your games is start with a list of the most popular games released on the Gamecube. They are:

Super Mario Sunshine, Zelda Wind Waker, Zelda Twilight Princess, Super Smash Bros Melee, Mario Kart Double Dash, and Sonic Adventure Battle 2

These games aren’t made for everyone, so be sure you check the ratings and descriptions before buying one.

Controllers – The Gamecube console originally came with one controller in the box but four slots for controllers. So you can buy three more controllers for the system if you want. If you will always be playing by yourself, you don’t have to spend money on an extra controller. But I recommend buying at least one more because you never know when a friend will pop on over to play. If you choose any of the games that allow four players to play at once, definitely buy three extra controllers. They will be worth every penny with all the fun you will have with them.

This is a great time to mention the difference between Nintendo controllers and third party controllers. Nintendo controllers are more reliable and comfortable while third party controllers are less expensive. I only buy Nintendo controllers myself, because I think they are worth the extra money for the piece of mind that they will not break on you.

Accessories - Two major accessories were released on the Gamecube, memory cards and the Gameboy Player. Memory cards are required to save your progress in a game. You will need at least one memory card unless you want to keep playing the same levels over and over again. Nintendo made three different sizes of memory card, 4MB, 16MB and 64MB. The smaller sizes will work for many adventure games but almost all sports games will require at least a 16MB and sometimes a 64MB card to save a season. I recommend a 16MB card for most people unless you are definitely buying sports games.

The Gameboy Player is completely optional but can be a great addition to the system. The player allows you to play any Gameboy, Gameboy Color, or Gameboy Advance game directly on your TV. It is great if you already have a Gameboy game collection but can be quite expensive. Nintendo made a few other accessories for the Gamecube including a Network Adaptor for online play and a Gameboy Advance link cable but neither of these is supported by many games. Unless you are sure you are buying a game that uses one of these, you shouldn’t buy them.

This list should have helped you choose the games, controllers, and accessories you want to buy with your Gamecube. Now get out there and enjoy your new gaming purchase.