Languages at your fingertips
Scarcely larger than a deck of cards, Franklin’s top-of-the- line Speaking Global Translator can order sushi for you, in 12 languages.
The $230 device, found at www.franklin.com, uses a real human voice instead of a synthesizer to speak typed words in English, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
You can either enter words directly, using a tiny qwerty- style keyboard that slides open below the LCD screen, or use hierarchical menus to choose up to 12,000 common phrases, such as “Find me a hospital!” According to Franklin, the device can speak up to 450,000 words.
Other features include an MP3 player, an alarm clock for multiple time zones, a calculator and a lottery- number generator. For those wishing to improve their skills with a new language, a built-in microphone lets you hear your voice compared with a native pronunciation of a word, and quizzes devised to help you learn a language.
The battery is charged through a computer’s USB port, providing up to a week of translations. – Warren Buckleitner, The New York Times
Canon aims high
One of the biggest stars of last weekend’s Photo Marketing Association show in Las Vegas was Canon’s new mega-cam, the $4,000 EOS-1D Mark III. It doesn’t capture more pixels than other cameras, just better ones, the company says. Canon says its 10-megapixel CMOS sensor (for complementary metal- oxide semiconductor) has bigger micro-lenses over each picture element, so more light from the subject is recorded.
The camera can shoot at a sensitivity level of ISO 6400 without speckling the images with digital noise. The sensitivity allows high- quality photography in very dim light or the use of a very long lens without a tripod.
The EOS-1D Mark III is also the first dual-processor camera. Two Digic III chips speed up the image processing, the handling of information from 19 auto- focus points and the optional saving of uncompressed RAW and compacted JPEG files for each shot.
With 76 gaskets to keep out the elements and the ability to shoot at 10 frames a second, this is likely to be the tool of choice for photo- graphers on the battlefield or the basketball court. – Marty Katz The New York Times
