Sean Captain

Purple is the new black, Sony is telling us, by introducing the “eggplant” color for its new Webbie HD line of pocket-sized camcorders. You can also get them in orange or silver, but I have to admit, eggplant is pretty cool-looking (and according to many of my women friends, indeed the hot new color).

Cutting-edge HDTVs are confusing enough, but vendors torture us further when they fixate on some ambiguous number and beat us over the head with it. In past years, they challenged us to parse sexed-up estimates of viewing angles and contrast ratios. Then they bragged about wide color gamuts that allow the TVs to distort what we’re watching by adding neon-like hues that were never in the original movies or TV shows.

Cutting-edge HDTVs are confusing enough, but vendors torture us further when they fixate on some ambiguous number and beat us over the head with it. In past years, they challenged us to parse sexed-up estimates of viewing angles and contrast ratios. Then they bragged about wide color gamuts that allow the TVs to distort what we’re watching by adding neon-like hues that were never in the original movies or TV shows.

Living in a New York apartment, I barely have room for two stereo speakers – let alone 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 surround-sound rigs. So I may not be the ideal person for Dolby’s new Dolby Prologic IIz setup, which features up to 10 speakers, with two up in the air.

Just a year ago, Casio introduced its first high-speed camera, the Best of What’s New-winning EX-F1. The size of a small SLR, that camera captures up to 60 full-res photos per second. The rate is cut to 30 per second in Casio’s two newest high-speed models, but the size is also cut as low as 0.64 inches thick for the model EX-FS10 (and just an inch for the companion EX-FC100). They also capture high-speed video at up to 1000 fps at low resolution, or up to 720p high-def at a standard 30fps.

We at PopSci love Sonos, the wireless music streaming system that has won two Best of What’s New awards over the years. And since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Linksys division of Cisco seems to love Sonos too. They’ve come out with their own version of the product--with a few features that may be better.

Although they are starting to outsell plasma panels, LCD TVs have failed to impress true videophiles, who prefer plasma’s richer colors and deeper contrast. But Sony’s new XBR8 LCDs may have finally closed the quality gap.

Instead of using fluorescent tubes, Sony illuminates the screen with LEDs tuned to produce deeper shades of the red, green and blue that TVs mix to form colors. This allows it to match and possibly exceed plasma in the range of hues it can reproduce, going beyond even the current color palette in high-def TV broadcasts and Blu-ray movies.

Straight away, let me say: I am NOT an unquestioning fan of the iPhone—I have often come close to throwing my buggy iPhone 3G out windows when it locks up and crashes. But the idea of the iPhone is so compelling; it’s hard not to judge other phones by that standard—especially when they seem to be aping the design. So how does the G1 do?

OK, so it came as no big surprise that I loved the new Nikon D700. How could I be disappointed with a $3,000 professional camera (equipped with a $500 lens), based on the D3 and D300—two models that already wowed me in previous tests?

That’s projector, not protector. But geeks will rejoice nonetheless. The pocketsize projector has been the Holy Grail of gadgets for many years, and now we’ve got it. 3M sent us one of their first samples of their MPro110 mini projector a few weeks ago (but asked us to keep it on the down-low for a while). I immediately plugged it into a DVD player and watched Blackhawk Down on my desk—literally, on it, as I aimed it at my white Ikea desktop.

I recently saw the ThinkPad W700, and, well, it’s almost scary. Packing a brilliant 17-inch screen, the beast spreads across a desk like a beached whale. But amazingly, it weighs just 8.4 pounds—about 4 pounds lighter than I would have expected.

Remember when the iPod came out and you realized you could carry all your songs in your pocket? Sony aims to do the same thing for pictures with its new T700 digital camera. Along with a memory card slot, the T700 has four gigabytes of onboard memory—enough to store about 1,000 of its 10-megapixel photos.

Imagine a '57 Chevy cruising through the air, and you get an idea of what single-engine, propeller-driven airplanes do to the environment. The average private plane, such as the popular two-seat Cessna 172, is 30 years old. It carries a four-cylinder piston engine designed in the 1940s that burns leaded gasoline, has no catalytic converter, and gets as little as 12 miles per gallon. “It’s fair to say that small aircraft are gross polluters,” says Mark Moore, an engineer who has led personal-aircraft projects for NASA.

Years in the making, Will Wright’s Spore peeks out today with the release of the Creature Creator. The free download is a toolkit for designing the life forms that will inhabit the Spore universe when the full game launches on September 7.

While the MacBook Air showed how slim a laptop could be, the Voodoo Envy ($2,100; voodoopc.com) demonstrates how much can fit in that space. Using the same compact CPU as the Air, the carbon-fiber-clad Envy measures just 0.7 inch thick—a tad thinner than the Mac at its thickest point. And it packs in more features, including a slot for high-speed cellular data cards, two USB ports, and an HDMI port for attaching to a high-def TV.