Contributed News
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Making connections: The story of DisplayPort
Why DisplayPort is coming to a computer near you, and what that means.
I do most of my writing on a big old wooden desk in my office. Crammed into the top left hand side drawer of my desk is a dizzying array of cables, dongles, converters, and other technological bric-a-brac that one naturally accumulates over the course of owning electronics. Just the other day I was pawing through a tangle of wires and I thought, 'You know what the world needs? Yet another standard connector so we can all buy adaptors that, invariably, will end up at the bottom of our techno-heap.'
Enter DisplayPort. You may have heard of DisplayPort thanks to Apple's recent announcement that they are abandoning DVI, a more traditional way of connecting a monitor to a computer, in favor of DisplayPort for their new MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup (Mini DisplayPort pictured, right). Apple isn't the only computer maker to hitch their wagon to the DisplayPort's rising star, though — a host of companies that you know, including HP, Lenovo, and Dell, are also adding DisplayPorts to their products (including desktops, laptops, and monitors to attach them to).
What is DisplayPort, and why should you care? Don't feel too bad if you aren't aware of what DisplayPort is because at the moment you can't buy too many computers that support it. The computer industry faced a challenge: more and more people were buying flat screen monitors for their computers and wanted to hook them up simply and with a crystal clear picture. Old monitors used a connection called VGA, which is an analog connection. To get the picture from your computer to the monitor required a conversion from a digital signal (the output of the computer) to analog (which is what VGA uses to transmit the image to the monitor screen). Along with that conversion comes an inevitable image quality degradation. This didn't pose too much of a problem before the dawn of cheap and plentiful HD video, but you and I are much pickier about our video quality now. We want it all, and we want it in HD, darn it!Profile pages: Apple, HDMI, VGA, Dell, DisplayPort, HP, Lenovo, DVI
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Ebook readers roundup
If you routinely cart around a small library of tomes, your back may thank you for considering an ebook.
We all take books for granted. They are cheap, plentiful, and easy to get, but that wasn't always the case. Books are the culmination of many different technologies into an almost perfect form factor. It is that 'almost' which has more than a few companies vying for your interest, and money, in the ebook reader market.
Ebook, as you might guess, is short for electronic book just like email is short for electronic mail. Like email, the ebook hopes to supplant those old, dusty things lining the shelves of your house. A number of different ebook formats exist including: mobipocket, FictionBook, and the Amazon Kindle format. Not every ebook reader can display every format, and in fact some formats can be used only with a particular device.
Which ebook reader will best suit your needs? That depends on what you consider important. We're going to take a look at four ebook readers to get a sense of what's available in the wild, and exciting, world of 21st century reading.Profile pages: Sony, Amazon, E-ink, eBook, Amazon Kindle, iRex, Sony Reader, Sony Reader PRS-700, Sony Reader PRS-505
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Ebook readers roundup
If you routinely cart around a small library of tomes, your back may thank you for considering an ebook.
We all take books for granted. They are cheap, plentiful, and easy to get, but that wasn't always the case. Books are the culmination of many different technologies into an almost perfect form factor. It is that 'almost' which has more than a few companies vying for your interest, and money, in the ebook reader market.
Ebook, as you might guess, is short for electronic book just like email is short for electronic mail. Like email, the ebook hopes to supplant those old, dusty things lining the shelves of your house. A number of different ebook formats exist including: mobipocket, FictionBook, and the Amazon Kindle format. Not every ebook reader can display every format, and in fact some formats can be used only with a particular device.
Which ebook reader will best suit your needs? That depends on what you consider important. We're going to take a look at four ebook readers to get a sense of what's available in the wild, and exciting, world of 21st century reading.Profile pages: Sony, SDK, Touchscreen, Amazon, E-ink, eBook, SD card, iRex, EV-DO
Sony PS3 Slim image gallery
