The most important improvement of the year for compact digital cameras is image stabilization. It used to be Panasonic?s trademark but they are no longer the only one. All manufacturers now use image stabilization at least for one of their camera. For example Canon has released the first Ixus / PowerShot with image stabilization, the 800-IS / SD700. Nikon released two cameras, the Coolpix P3 and P4 which are in fact the same camera at the exception of the Wifi compatibility for the second. About surprising performances, there is the 26 mm thick Ricoh that has 7x optical zoom! Or even the 16 mm thick only Casio EX-S600. Panasonic also improved their products. Their latest FX01 has a 28 mm wide angle.

According to Casio, the EX-Z5 is beginner friendly with numerous default settings, such as the ones for outside, night and inside shots. Personally, one of our favorite technologies is the anti-shake feature. As the name suggests, it stabilizes the image even if you can?t hold the camera still, which is indeed a common occurrence.

Lost. 24. Depserate Housewives. Forget broadcast television. The future is here, and it's IPTV. We investigate what's hot, what's not, where you can download it and whether you'll break the law doing so. We also look at great geek shows like Diggnation and Hak.5

Bit-Tech

With VCR's and VHS tapes soon to be phased out completely by DVD players, many consumers want to digitize their old VHS tapes to the new format. There are various ways to accomplish this, but none are as easy as using Samsungs VR-325 DVD Recorder/VCR.

Today, Kodak unveils the 6MP EasyShare V610 digital camera. Looking at the back of the camera, with its large 2.8-inch LCD, it almost looks like a Sony PSP. Its features include Bluetooth, image enhancement, digital-image stabilization and noise-reduction capabilities. The camera will be available this spring for $449 (list).

PCMag.com

Don't want to spend a lot of money on a home theatre PC? Adaptec's GameBridge is a nice option to turn an existing PC into one. It allows you to hook up a video source or game console to your PC, tune in to TV programs, and even make recordings of your game sessions.

Toms Hardware Guide

There are already a large number of 1080p HDTV sets on the market, which upconvert all incoming signals, including standard-definition TVs, DVDs, HDTVs and PCs, to their panels? native resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. Ironically, these 1080p televisions can not accept a 1080p signal. Yes, you read that correctly.

Today was an exciting day at Microsoft. We saw our 3+ year journey in HD DVD bear results in the form of the Japanese Toshiba player. And what an incredible feeling that was. OK, enough with sentimental stuff

External hard drives so far have had only one purpose; to back up and store data. Today we take a look at a new innovative external hard drive enclosure from Vizo, the Opera Portable HDD Enclosure & Multimedia Player. The Opera not only backs up and stores data, but also does double duty as a multimedia player.

Techtastic.ca

As we mentioned earlier, what makes this product special is its native 1080p resolution AUO LCD panel. 1080p True-HD resolution is an excellent (1920x1080) 2,073,600 pixels, more than twice the standard HD 720p resolution that is a total of (1280x720) 921600 pixels. Most current display technologies at this screen size are limited in resolution. For example 42" and under HD Plasmas have a native resolution of only 1024x768, which is not even enough to fully display a 720P signal without downscaling.

The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was already tricky for consumers. But new content protection may mean buyers get even less than they might have hoped.

BusinessWeek

Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them.

MP3 Insider

Scott writes to tell us that Dell's product support page for the UltraSharp 2007WFP and 2007FP accidentally showed up a day or two early.

DailyTech

Take it from me, there is nothing like watching a guest come into your living room and dropping their jaw on the floor when their eyes first rest on a huge 42 inch TV. The usual words are "Wow! Nice TV!" or "Where did that come from?!". Plasma TVs are a thing of beauty and if you are in the market for a new TV soon and considering a large plasma for your next purchase, you owe yourself the time to stick around and allow me to give you a quick walk-through of the HP-R4252 and what it has to offer.

Samsung had to pull out all the engineers in their design department to pack such an array of functionality into a device that won't even cover a deck of poker cards. I have to hand it to them for jamming everything this device, and still keeping it easy to use and completely functional. The video quality is actually quite good when set to the maximum resolution and quality, the MP3 player works as stated, the voice recorder is superb and having the potential of having a 2.5Gb portable hard drive in your pocket when you take advantage of the external memory capacity alone is a lot to ask out of one product.

Flat screen televisions are one of the most interesting products in this upcoming holiday season. The dominance of LCD monitors in the computer market has dispelled most users' fears of moving from the large CRT screen which they have gotten used. The advantages in size, aesthetics, and performance of an flat screen television is immediately clear, but people's reluctance to make the change and the price premium on this new technology is going to slow the transition down a bit.

With computers and televisions using flat panel technology, it is becoming clear that the two products are on a collision course. The growing similarities between LCD televisions and displays coupled with the increasing interactivity between computers and the home theater has made this practically inevitable. This article goes over the trends showing the merge between the two once disimilar products and also some of the hurdles which must be cleared before the convergence can be anywhere near complete, or at least as complete as its ever going to be.

Sony is stepping up the picture quality of ultra-slim digital still cameras with the introduction of its new Cyber-shot DSC-T9 model, the first in this category to offer both Super Steady Shot optical image stabilization and high light sensitivity.

Gadget Flash

Sony today presented a new car radio with 1GB of flash memory and a USB port to transmit music from your PC to your car stereo. The Xplod MEX-1GP features AM/FM radio, a CD player and MP3/WMA support.. More info over here.

The device that generated the most press and the most media hype in the last few months has been Apple?s iPod. It?s not because it?s the most successful player in the market (though that worked to Apple?s advantage), but mainly because the rumors have abounded for months regarding the video iPod.