Epson Address Expert printer series are good postcard printer

What you are looking at here isn’t some miniature all-in-one desktop computer with printer, but the Epson Address Expert.

This is a printer that is set up to postcards, and that looks like all it can print. I have to admit that it has been a while since I have sent a postcard, but they are still popular in Japan, so I’m told.

The Epson Address Expert series come in two forms: the E-800 and E-600. Each of them have a 7-inch LCD display with 5760 x 1440 dpi resolution, and are PC and Mac compatible. The E-800 includes a wireless keyboard so you can compose your well-wishing messages.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these myself, because I think I should start a new habit of sending postcards to people. I guess in the age of email, nobody really uses them when you can just send a JPG. That, or post pictures of your vacation on your blog.

Yeah, we’ve just about phased postcards out of our technological online society. Perhaps this is why we should bring them back, they would be so old that they would be new.

Unfortunately, I have no word of availability or price, but I am guessing it will probably be released only in Japan.

MoGo Talk for iPhone unveiled

o you’re extremely happy with your new iPhone 3GS, and are actively searching for means and ways to enhance your iPhone experience regardless of where you are. Newton Peripherals could have the answer, where they will lend their expertise in integrated mobile peripherals to come up with the new MoGo Talk for the iPhone. Just in case you were wondering what a contraption known as MoGo Talk for iPhone is, this is touted to be the first ultra-thin integrated Bluetooth headset in the world, measuring no thicker than 5mm while being stored on the back of your iPhone. In addition, it will also have its batteries charged up in the process, giving users the convenience of a charged headset at all times. This has led me to think though, won’t charging the MoGo Talk sip even more juice from your iPhone’s battery, which leaves you with less battery than before to carry out conversations? Well, at least we do know the MoGo Talk’s minimalist design will allow one to fold the headset flat easily, snapping it in and out of its protective case in a jiffy.
It isn’t a with the MoGo Talk for iPhone as it will feature a potent combination of patent pending SoundShape noise blocking, comfort fit ear tips, high fidelity balanced armature audio drive.

and rich SmartAudio processing to provide you with the best audio quality possible whenever you’re holding a conversation. When combined, these elements will do away with previous nuinsances such as noise, echo and wind interference. The MoGo Talk’s patent pending folding boom also makes sure the headset can be folded flat to a mere 5mm low-profile for easy and convenient storage – just don’t forget you’ve placed it in your wallet and sit on it accidentally.
You will get up to 4 hours of active noise compensation talktime with this, where it can standby for up to a week. Expect MoGo Talk for iPhone to retail for $129.99 when available.

SONY ERICSSON C903 IN INDIA

The much waited 3G Camera phone from Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot™ Series slider C903 has officially shipped to India packed with full of features the C903 Cyber-shot™ comes with face Detection technology, Sony Ericsson C903 intelligent cam can find up to three people in the frame at a time and using Smile Shutter™ technology it can automatically pick beaming smiles.
The C903 Cyber-shot™ also comes complete with aGPS which will never lose track of where you took an image or where you are simply tag your photos to a location or use the feature to find your way home or to the pub.
Specifications at a glance Size – 97 x 49 x 16 mmWeight – 96 gScreen – 2.4-inch TFT (256K color & 240×320 pixel)
Camera - 5 megapixel with Auto focus, LED Flash along with other Sony’s innovative add-ons like Image stabiliser, Face detection, Smile Shutter™, upto 16x Digital Zoom. Take pictures easier, C903 comes with an accelerometer to auto-rotate its orientation(portrait or landscape) when you hold the phone sideways. C903 also comes with BestPic™, Activate it to take 9 pictures in quick succession – with one press on the camera button. Keep the ones you like, delete the rest. Phone’s integrated application Photo fix – edit just-captured pictures in a flick.
Video recording is restricted to QVGA resolution at 30 frames per second. Video stabiliser is also here. Video blogging is possible directly from the phone.
The phone also offers in-built social networking features, you can upload your photographs to blog, photo-sharing site like Picase, YouTube, etc. Adding to it, the C903 has the support for HP’s Snapfish™ service that enables users to order for printouts of photographs to be delivered at your doorsteps. or use PictBridge – print straight from your phone. You can take advantage of phone’s location-based service capabilities – geo-tag your photos. And of course you can use your photos and videos to send as MMS.
To save your memories in form of photos and videos the phone has internal memory of 130 MB (actually around 100MB to use), but supports upto 16GB Memory Stick Micro™ (M2™).
Apart from its great camera, C903 offers features like 3G (for Streaming video/Video calling); Bluetooth with A2DP; GPS, A-GPS and G!Maps; stereo FM radio with RDS; and full EMail support on the box. Modem & USB support is available. You will never get lost with C903 – it comes with a trial version of Wayfinder Navigator™
Media Player of C903 is featured with PlayNow™ – 3 click music download, TrackID™, MegaBass™ and supports Music tones – MP3, AAC.
According to company claim, it can provide 10 hours of talk-time and 400 hours of standby time.
Now available on 3 attractive shades – Glamour Red, Lacquer Black, Techno White, the C903 Cyber-shot is retailing across India for around Rs 18,500.

MY NEW NIKON D80 CAMERA

I just got my new Nikon D80 Digital SLR camera. It came with a Nikkor 18mm-135mm Zoom lens. The camera is extremely lightweight for a SLR camera, even with the Zoom lens. The camera can support over 43 SF Nikkor lenses available, in addition to the DX Nikkor lenses.The Nikon D80 has an 10.2 effective megapixel CCD sensor. It has an automatic ISO mode which automatically adjusts the light sensitivity from ISO 100 to ISO 1600 giving excellent results in all light conditions. Like all digital cameras, it has seven different modes (Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Close Up, Sports, Night Landscape and Night Portrait), for different situationsStarting the Nikon D80As I turned the round power switch to the 'ON' position, I was amazed. The camera starts up almost instantaneously, requiring en eye-blinking 0.18 seconds only to start up and be fully ready to shoot! Now that is what I call FAST! My Kodak CX 6330 takes atleast 4 seconds to start-up. So the Nikon D80 is effectively ready to shoot in 0.18 seconds and you can start clicking pictures immediately.I put the camera in the 'Auto' mode, focussed the lens on the building across the road, and clicked the shutter release button. The Nikon D80 comes with a large 2.5 inch LCD monitor, and surprisingly the LCD screen is clearly viewable from a wide variety of angles. The results of the Nikon D80 are amazing! Any photo taken from the camera has a magical look and feel to it. Even ordinary subjects come to life with the D80. I am sure with a little practice, I will be able to shoot outstanding photos with the Nikon D80. I will be posting a more detailed review on taking photos with the D80 in the future.Transferring Photos from the Nikon D80 to your computerThe Nikon D80 has a SD memory card slot. I have a 1 GB SD card installed in mine. The camera connects to your PC with a USB cable. The file transfer process is extremely fast as it uses a USB 2.0 interface. I did not use the bundled software, instead I just accessed the SD card, which shows up as a 'removable drive' from the 'My Computer' section on my PC. I simply selected all the images in the folder on the 'removable drive' and copied them to my hard drive.Nikon D80 Battery LifeThe Nikon D80 comes with a high-power EN-EL3e rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The battery provides enough power to shoot upto 2700 photos on a single charge! Now that's battery power! A travel charger is provoded with the Nikon D80. You just need to slide out the battery out of the camera, slide it in the charger and turn on the charger. The battery took about 1.5 hours to fully recharge.First Review of the Nikon D80I am at a loss of words for the Nikon D80. With this camera, i am now able to shoot professional looking photos, without even trying! The camera is extremely easy to use, even for someone who has never used a SLR before. it has so many pre-set modes, that you can practically shoot in any light conditions using one of the photo modes. The Nikon D80 has some neat special effects software built-in. You can crop, brighten, sharpen photos right on the LCD screen without even having to transfer them to your computer! All in all it is a terrific SLR camera and is a benchmark for other 10 megapixel camera. The Nikon D80 is a very hard product to beat and has brought professional looking photography in the hands of a an amatuer like me. I love the Nikon D80 and highly recommend it to anyone looking for an entry to mid level SLR camera.

LEARNING FROM LEHMAN-A YEAR LATER

The first anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, and the consequent seizure of credit and liquidity flows among the top Wall Street banks, is upon us. At the time of the crisis, the balancesheet size of some ten troubled banks on Wall Street exceeded the combined GDP of all emerging Asian economies.
So the reverberations of Wall Street had to be felt across the global banking system. Last September, the world economy seemed to be hurtling down in a way that had initially raised the spectre of the Great Depression in America of the late 1920s.
After a while, the consensus view that finally emerged was that the world was possibly facing the worst recession since the Great Depression. Economists in reputed western research institutions studied recessions of the last 100 years and broadly concluded that the global economy would take two to three years to fully recover.
Of late, some of those who had completely missed the financial crises building up under their noses have begun to talk about a V-shaped recovery in the global economy! Mind you, this is based largely on the performance of stock markets which are supposed to reflect future trends in the real economy. However, such knowledge embedded in the markets can be imperfect, as we have learnt by now.
A small section of die-hard optimists is even talking about a V-shaped recovery in the US. The question is how much should one believe these economic forecasters who have gone so horribly wrong in the past. A recent edition of The Economist had rightly suggested that the biggest bubble of all was that of economic theory!
In some ways, the global financial crisis and its fallout are forcing economic agents to acquire new knowledge in regard to what might happen in the future. For both governments and central bankers, the past has ceased to be an accurate guide for determining future policy.
Commenting on the way the global stock markets were shooting up in recent months, the head of a Mumbai broking company said "there was absence of knowledge in the short run". What he had meant was that it was difficult to explain rationally why the stock markets were furiously running up even as company balance sheets were still bleeding.
The Mumbai broker may have been quite charitable in suggesting there was an absence of knowledge in the short run. Quite possibly, the world economy may well be faced with a situation where there is an absence of knowledge in the longer term as well. This is very clear from the way governments and central bankers have so far responded to the global economic crises.
In some ways, policy makers and central banks have done the only thing they could think of — inject massive fiscal and monetary stimuli. But this is old knowledge. For there is a consensus that the fiscal and monetary stimuli of $3 to $4 trillion across the world may be just about preventing the global recession from deepening further. There is immense comfort in the knowledge that we are not falling any further!
The US banking system appears to have seen its worst and the economy too has shown tentative signs of bottoming out. But is this recovery durable? No one wants to answer this question yet. To answer this question you need new knowledge. Old will not do.
The Fed chief Ben Bernanke had the humility to concede this point when he said his biggest challenge would be to rightly time the withdrawal of the massive liquidity injected into the system. This has to be done just about the time a sustained recovery is anticipated on the horizon. What if you don’t see a sustained recovery at all?
Indeed, if a sustained recovery is not seen in the US economy, it could well get into a long-term liquidity trap, of the kind Japan did in the 1990s. Many economists increasingly subscribe to this theory. Japan experienced a low growth trap for well over a decade as the government kept bailing out banks and injected enough liquidity to bring interest rates to zero.
Indeed, it was never anticipated that even at virtually zero interest rates investment and consumption would not pick up. This was new knowledge at that time.
Many believe the United States too is losing its memory and DNA of creative destruction on which it had built its robust capitalist economy in the mid-20th century. With a much expanded and politically empowered middle class, the United States has made creative destruction a difficult proposition now.
This can be seen in the way the US government has bailed out the banks and other inefficient parts of the economy such as the automobile sector. Much of EU is already in this mode. Indeed, Karl Marx had spoken about advanced capitalist societies developing socialist tendencies as the laws and regulations to protect workers became deeply institutionalised.
To understand this, you just have to compare the number of hours factory workers in the US and EU put in with that of workers in China, India or Brazil.
So what have these deeper tendencies got to do with the global financial crises and the consequent recession that gripped the world? The fundamental shift in the capitalist growth impulses from the developed North to the developing South has caused serious imbalances in the global economic system.
RBI governor D Subbarao recently said that not much has been done by nations to debate the fundamental imbalance in the global economic system which could in fact have been the primary cause of the Wall Street financial crises. This imbalance essentially made the United States merrily borrow from the rest of the world to consume.
Of course, in the past year or so some of this imbalance is partly correcting with the US current account deficit dropping and its savings rate going up. But is this enough?
The US needs to recover its real growth impulse by becoming a prime exporter of high technology goods — it is no more competitive in the manufacturing sector — if it wants to reduce its borrowing from the rest of the world.
If the US fails to do this, it will again be tempted to use finance capital as a steroid to create an illusion of growth. Wall Street helps in doing this. You don't sustain long-term growth with pure finance capital play. Finance capital works only when complemented by dynamic elements of the real economy. This was the big lesson of last year’s crises. Another crisis will surely occur if this lesson is not internalised.

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