Sun
1) Creative Web-Cam Live! Motion, $180.
This USB 2.0-connected Web cam has a 76-degree field of view, which beats out the typical 52-degree cam by almost 50 per cent. With Smart Face tracking, it can follow your movement and keep you in frame or it can be operated from the computer screen. The quiet motor pans and tilts with ease with 200-degree horizontal and 105-degree vertical viewing. Its base is designed to attach in the perfect place on your monitor for capturing video for messaging or conferencing. With its glowing blue ring, it comes in either pearl white or black. Oh, and if you want, you could use it to monitor a room in your house while you’re away.
2) NHL Optical Aqua Mouse, $29.95
We’re sure you’ve got your favourite NHL team’s pennants flying from either side of your LCD monitor. But that’s not really enough is it? Well, now you can get these NHL Model mice (mouses? meese?) — with a puck floating in water — for your favourite Canadian team. Once they were offered only in an arena version and sold in the likes of GM Place in Vancouver, but now they’re being made available by Pure Orange of Vancouver in retail stores, just in time for Christmas. Stores include CompuSmart and the Source by Circuit City.
3) Panasonic SDR-S100 camcorder, $1,650.
Lightweight and ultra-compact this three CCD camcorder records its images on SD memory cards rather than CDs or tape. It features 10x optical zoom and image stabilization. It is sold along with a two gigabyte memory card with the capacity to hold approximately 100 minutes of MPEG2 video if you record in LP mode. The SDR-S100 records in the 16:9 aspect, the same as widescreen TVs. And it can frame shots for the 4:3 aspect featured on traditional television sets. As well, the unit can be used to take 3.1 megapixel still shots.
4) USB Christmas Tree, just released in Japan, no price.
Yes, there are a number of USB Christmas trees around. Just plug them into the (USB, natch) port of your computer and they glow nicely throughout the Yuletide season. But this one has a little blower motor in it that takes tiny pieces of Styrofoam and scatters them around in an imitation of whirling snow. It also plays four Christmas songs, although it’s hard to make out from the Google translations from the Japanese exactly what these are since one of them is described as Once Upon a Time, Mary Christmas, which we suspect just isn’t true. In any case, it probably has, oh, half an hour’s worth of amusement in it.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
