Digital Camera:

39 MegaPixels Camera may be out of touch for the most of us, but there will be more. The last time I got my hands on Hasselblad was back in the 70’s; what a camera!

For the most of us, 7 MegaPixels Digital Cameras may serve well in day to day use. SLR will be nice and cost 4x more. But it does not provide movie and mic features and it’s bulky unless you try to impress your girl friend.



Most Mainstream Digital Cameras come with 8, 16 or 32 MB memory, either built-in or in SD/Memory stick card from the manufacturers. You will find yourself shopping for higher capacity memory card the next day. If it happened that you have a Windows Vista laptop and less than 2GB of system memory, you could use the SD or memory stick for ReadyBoost. Get the largest capacity your camera can handle. 16 GB SD card is hitting the market soon. 8GB Memory Stick Pro Duo for Sony is available; the cost is much higher than SD. Can anyone tell me why Sony cards cost more? ;)





Wrapping up:

• USB flash drive comes in handy in any situation since all PCs made after 1997 carries one or more ports. R/W CDs of yesteryear could totally be replaced by this handy portable device. The Kingston Traveler 4GB USB drive lacks some of the goodies included in SanDisk Cruzer and Visiontek Go Drive such as password protection and lock. It is good to know it is ReadyBoost capable.

• High capacity SD and Memory-Stick-Pro cards make sense to meet the ever increasing resolutions in digital cameras. Make sure your camera will handle the high capacity. I know my laptop built-in card reader has problem reading the SanDisk 4GB SD. I had to use my desktop to finish one of the tests using Micromate and 4GB SD.

• Not all memory cards are created equal is a matter of common sense, the same applies to card readers.

ReadyBoost is a make believe, it seems to speed up load time on certain applications. It does not speed up Vista load time. With low enough system memory price, it is far better to upgrade system memory than using ReadyBoost. However, if you are stuck with 512mb system memory, a 4GB flash or SD card configured in Vista for ReadyBoost may ease your day a little bit.

I like to thank Geeks.com for sending in the review samples and making this article possible.