Todays & Tomorrows Technology

If the design of Samsung’s HMX-U10 camcorder is a little too outré for your tastes, the company has two more traditionally-shaped offerings today. The Samsung SMX-K40 and SMX-K45 both conform to the standard palmcorder format, but actually they’re not quite as technically capable as the U10; each can record up to 720 x 480 resolution, rather than their upright sibling’s 1080p.

Still, you get a 65x “Intelli-Zoom” (52x optical zoom) and optical image stabilization, together with an HDMI output for direct connection to a TV or display. There’s also Schneider Optics and the same Intelli-Studio onboard editing suite as the U10, that boots up whenever you connect to a PC via USB. From there you can make basic tweaks and upload to YouTube.

The K40 has an SDHC card slot while the K45 has a 32GB SSD, good for up to 20hrs and 40 minutes of recording. Both can shoot 800 x 600 stills and do time-lapse recording, and will hit the market in August 2009. The Samsung SMX-K40 will be priced at $329.99 while the SMX-K45 will be $499.99.

SanDisk announced their brand new Extreme SDHC 32GB card today and it is intended for use in higher-end HD camcorders and DSLRs. In fact, it has a 30MB/s read and write speed and beats the AVCHD HD video recording requirements.

This card is capable of holding about 160 minutes of video at 1080p and up to 2,500 RAW images. Accompanying 4GB, 8GB and 16GB version of this SDHC are available now with the 32GB available starting in August.

The “Extreme” line can withstand low and high temperatures ranging from minus 13 F up to 185 F. While we don’t knowing the pricing for the new 32GB model, you can take a guess based on the pricing of the rest of the line, with the 4GB costing $70, the 8GB costing $120 and the 16GB priced at $200.

Eye-Fi have announced their latest wireless memory card, the 4GB Eye-Fi Pro. Using the SDHC format, the new Eye-Fi Pro offers the usual automatic wireless transfer of images from digital cameras to a computer or website; however it also adds new file-type support, increased control over which images are synchronized, more flexible WiFi connectivity and video functionality.

The Eye-Fi Pro 4GB now includes “Selective Transfer”, which allows users to choose which photos and/or videos are uploaded. This bypasses the issue with the older cards where every shot was transferred; according to Eye-Fi all users will now be able to use Selective Transfer, not just those with the Pro 4GB. Images are selected by locking them through the camera’s own menus.

Meanwhile the Pro 4GB also supports RAW images, making it more appealing to pro-photographers, which like the JPEG images can be geotagged automatically. WiFi ad-hoc connections directly between the camera and a computer can be used for peer-to-peer transfer, too.

Users also get access to more than 10,000 Wayport hotspots, together with any open WiFi hotspots they may come across, and the system supports in excess of 25 online photo/video sharing sites. Of course, media is also stored locally in the card’s own storage too. The Eye-Fi Pro 4GB is available now, priced at $149.