Chill Grill
The sweet smell of success has never smelled better than when it comes from a grill costing more than $2,000. Sure, that seems like a lot, but with the Cal Flame CR-3000S barbecue cart, you get a lot of grill. Naturally, it’s made of weather-resistant stainless steel. It’s also got three burners and is capable of producing a scorching 60,000 BTUs in total. (Trust us, that’s a lot of heat.)
The CR-3000S also has the little niceties that many grills lack, like two big drawers for all your grilling tools and a little light to keep an eye on late-night hot dogs — premium brand, of course. It also has left and right pull-out trays, a side burner, an infrared burner on the back — designed to help sear meat and vegetables — and an optional rotisserie and smoke tray, for those occasions when you need some classic BBQ. ($2,299; calspas.com)
Move the Earth
Black & Decker’s Power Cultivator features 18 volts of earth-churning power, doing away with the need for such manually intensive tools as the hoe and the shovel, at least when it comes to freshening soil for the spring. With its counter-oscillating hardened steel tines, it’ll cultivate 325 square feet of soil to a depth of four inches on a single charge. The handle is adjustable, and the unit is small enough to allow a gardener to navigate around a tightly planted layout. ($99; blackanddecker.com)
Glade Runner
The garden cart has finally joined the future, with its own motor. The Neuton is battery powered and is easily recharged by plugging it into the wall. With two forward speeds as well as a reverse gear, it carries up to 200 pounds of materials, whether you’re toting firewood — it’ll carry about 30 pieces — mulch, fresh roses, or horse manure. Now if someone could just invent a garden cart that would actually do the gardening. ($329; drpower.com)
Mighty Mouse
HP’s Bluetooth PC Card mouse travels in your laptop’s PCMCIA slot, charging up whenever the power is on and sliding out for work when you’re ready. Flip open the stand and you’ve got a smooth, two-button optical mouse with a 10-hour battery charge. And since it’s Bluetooth-enabled, there’s no annoying USB card sticking out of the back of your laptop. If they weren’t doing so already, we’d call this the mouse of the future. ($59; hp.com)
On the Move Again
The best thing about Sanyo’s Easy Street NVM-4030 GPS device is that it’s truly portable, which is important because if you’re using it, you’re probably on the move. Palm-size, with a four-inch touch screen, the device runs up to three and a half hours on a single charge. It comes preloaded with a map of the United States and more than a million points of interest. It also serves as a Bluetooth-equipped speakerphone and will even play your MP3s, in case you get bored with always knowing exactly where you are. ($399.99; easystreetnav.com)
Pixel Postcard
Nikon’s Coolpix S7c is a pocket-size digital camera with the ability to send photos wirelessly over a network like T-Mobile’s HotSpot Wi-Fi system. It’s got a 7.1-megapixel display with a huge (for a camera) three-inch screen, vibration reduction, and a 3X zoom. But the best feature is the wireless communication, which allows you to connect with laptops, printers, and anyone with an e-mail account. All of which makes the S7c one of the best tools ever devised for showing your vacation photos. ($349.95; nikon.com)
(Overindulgence of the Month)
Home Theater in a Laptop
Ever get jealous of the person in the seat next to you watching a movie on a laptop? Revenge may be yours, and sweet indeed, with the PC Microworks Vega laptop, a multimedia SLI, Blu-Ray-RW-enabled hot rod. The Blu-Ray format is part of the next wave in high-definition programming and takes full advantage of the Vega’s huge 20.1-inch HD display. Packed inside are dual core AMD processors, 1GB of graphics memory, 4GB of RAM, dual NVIDIA graphics cards for intense gaming as well as video, and the ability to assemble, edit, and burn high-def movies taken with your camcorder. Also built in are a camera and microphone for seamless video communication, and wireless cellular broadband access capability. Sure, you probably don’t need all those features, but aren’t they nice? Take that, seatmate! ($6,229; pcmicroworks.com)
(The Way It Works)
What Makes a Good Digital Camera?
Anyone who has thought about buying a digital camera in the last five years has surely been bombarded with one seemingly all-significant figure: the number of megapixels a camera is capable of recording in an image. Pixel is computing shorthand for “picture element,” and a megapixel is one million of them. More megapixels, the reasoning seems to go, equals a better picture. But is that really all there is to it?
To find out, we called Lori Grunin, a senior editor at CNET.com. “The truth is, just about any camera you can buy today will provide you with more than enough megapixels,” she says. Few cameras, in fact, even offer less than five megapixels, which was a huge number just a few years ago.
Grunin likens the megapixels issue to the size of the engine in a car. A big engine doesn’t necessarily define how a car will drive. “If your fuel injection isn’t great, it’s not going to matter,” she says. “Your car is going to hesitate.” There are a variety of “tuning” options, to take the automotive image further.
The lens is a big factor, and it is more difficult to build a good wide-angle lens for a digital camera than for a film camera because the lens sits much closer to the sensors than it does to film, which means there is greater chance for error.
Once the light hits the sensors, the image is processed by a chip set inside the camera. Each manufacturer employs its own algorithms to turn light into colors, and different algorithms produce different results. Other factors include software to compress the image and reduce image “noise,” and the capability of the lens to maintain focus across the entire image. — Bryant Urstadt
FLY & BUY
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