Sun
1) Canon Pixma ip6700D photo printer, $380, available in October.
If you own a Canon digital camera (and that’s a lot of Canadians) then this top-of-the-line photo printer has some advantages. The upcoming six-colour ip6700D’s Canon-to-Canon connection allows users to brighten faces, print shooting information on the print or even print a 35-image (or less) contact sheet direct from the camera controls, without a PC. The printer has a 3.5-inch colour LCD screen, smart LED equipped ink tanks and an advanced paper handling system. Other new printers in the line are the ip6320D ($230); the ip1700 ($100) and the ip300 ($80).
2) Sony Micro Vault Tiny four gigabyte storage medium, $290, available in September.
Just a half-inch wide and an inch in length, the various Sony Micro Vault Tinys — ranging in size from 256 megabytes up to the latest one at four gigabytes — are a remarkably portable way of carrying your data. A major advantage is that the Tiny uses a program called Virtual Expander that uses compression (and automatic decompression) to allow storage of up to three times as much data as drives of the same size. The drives — the lower capacity ones are available now — come with a clip-on carry case.
3) Griffin TuneCenter, $149 US.
Complete with a 14-button remote, the TuneCenter allows users to turn their iPod into a home media centre. All you have to do is doc your iPod into the TuneCenter and it lets you use your TV and stereo for viewing photos, watching video and listening to either the tunes in your library or to Internet radio. You can display iPod playlists on your TV screen. And, hey, if you have an iPod that stores your photos or plays videos then you can watch them on your TV screen as well.
4) Xerox WorkCentre 4118 multifunction device, starts at $1,000.
If you’ve got small office, and you’re looking for a way of doing copying, printing, scanning and faxing then the WorkCentre 4118 might just meet your needs. It prints at 18 pages a minute and has two configurations, the 4118P copies and prints, while the 4118X also has faxing and colour scanning. Both machines have copying features like ID Card Copy that allow copying of both sides of a document on to a single side of the page. The WorkCentre 4118 also comes with Ominipage SE 4.0 software, which converts copied items into editable electronic documents.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
