A crushproof camera and a smartphone sidekick

Tag: Multifunctional Socket

Adding mood lighting to a space-age bachelor pad is easy with the five-watt LED bulb from ThinkGeek that comes with its own remote control. The bulb will work in a standard socket; it uses less power than incandescent bulbs, because the LEDs are more efficient at turning electricity into visible light. This model costs $50, but prices are expected to come down.

The remote control can set the bulb's intensity, its transition pattern (steady, fading, flashing or strobing) and its color, which can be any of 15 major colors of the spectrum, from red to indigo. There is also the choice of plain old white light.

Multifunctional and wireless

Epson's first printer with Wi-Fi, the Stylus CX9475Fax, is also a scanner - and as the name suggests, a fax machine. Although it can hook up directly to a computer with a USB cable, it is really more at home on a wireless network, where it is accessible to multiple computers in a household or a small business.

Although this $179, four-color printer can churn out photos up to 8.5 by 44 inches, the prints might not be as fabulous as with six-color photo printers. Faded prints can be scanned and printed out in a rejuvenated fashion with automatic color restoration.

Window into a smartphone

Fans of devices running Windows Mobile just got a new sidekick. The Redfly from Celio, which looks like a mini-laptop, works with almost any Windows smartphone and gives you a better look at your data.

The Redfly doesn't store anything. It simply "mirrors" what's going on in the smartphone and adds a better interface, including a full keyboard and touch pad. The two-pound device will cost $499 when it goes on sale next month
Neither rain nor sleet nor controlled drops from a height of two meters shall deter the Olympus 1030 SW from taking snapshots.

This 10-megapixel point-and-shoot camera is waterproof, freezeproof and apparently crushproof: It can withstand a plunge of 6.6 feet and pressure of 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds, which means it should generally survive being sat upon.

The camera, which will go on sale next month for $400, weighs six ounces and comes in silver, black and green. It has a 3.6x optical zoom lens and a 2.7-inch LCD screen, as well as 29 picture modes like "cuisine" for food and "behind glass" for items that are, well, behind glass.

The in-camera panorama feature lets you take multiple pictures of a scene and stitch them together to make one long shot, without using a computer. The camera has 15 megabytes of internal storage and supports MicroSD and xD-Picture memory cards for expansion.

While you probably don't want to try testing all of Olympus's claims at once, it's nice to know your camera can survive a dip and a drop without turning into shrapnel.