Sony announces two new Cyber-Shot digital cameras

Sony announced a pair of new digital cameras in its Cyber-shot line today. The two cameras are the Cyber-Shot DSC-H50 and the Cyber-Shot DSC-W300. Both of the cameras are packed with interesting features.

The W300 is designed to withstand scratches with a titanium coating. The slim camera also boasts 13.6 effective megapixels. Sony uses its BIONZ processor to power features like Smile Shutter which triggers the camera shutter when a smile is detected on people in the frame.

Other features for the W300 include improved Face Detection and a D-Range optimizer along with intelligent scene recognition. The lens used in the W300 is a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar with 3x optical zoom. The camera uses 2.7-inch Clear Photo LCD and ISO sensitivity of up to ISO6400 and Super SteadyShot is included as well.




The Cyber-Shot DSC-H50 sports a 9.1-megapixel resolution with a Carl Zeiss 15x optical zoom lens. The main feature of the H50 is an advanced sports shooting mode that increases the shutter speed up to 1/4000 of a second.

Sony also uses a long distance flash on the H50 that can illuminate subjects over 55 feet away when using ISO 3200 and wide angle. Sony says extensive manual controls are included to allow for customization and creative shooting. A NightShot mode allows image to be taken in nearly lightless conditions.

The W300 is expected in the U.S. in May at about $350, while the DSC-H50 will be available during the same time frame for around $400.

Source from DailyTech

Fujitsu to offer standard height half-terabyte notebook drive

The capacity war in the hard drive industry is in full force and desktop drives are not the only ones benefiting. Current notebook hard drives are at the 500GB mark with recent launches from Hitachi and Samsung when only about 6 months ago the highest capacity notebook drives weighed in at 250GB.

Today, Fujitsu announced its MHZ2 BT line of notebook drives which includes 400GB and 500GB capacities to compete with the capacity of the front-runners in the notebook drive market.

The MHZ2 BT line features a SATA 3.0 Gb/sec interface and an 8MB buffer. The rotational speed clocks in at 4200RPM which may prove to be a bit slow compared to the 5400RPM, 500GB drives from Hitachi and Samsung. Despite the rotational speed, the average seek time while writing is 14ms while average read seek times clock in at 12ms which is comparable to the competition.

The MHZ2 BT drive dimensions conform to the standard 9.5mm drive height which fits all notebook computers as opposed to the 12.5mm drive height of Hitachi's 5K500 and E5K500 series drives. The reason for the 3mm of extra height on the Hitachi drives are mainly due to the extra platters required to reach the 500GB capacity, whereas Fujitsu fits three 166GB platters in its drives.

Fujitsu's MHZ2 BT line of notebook drives shines in the power consumption area as it consumes only 1.8W of power during read/write operations in a SATA 3.0Gb/sec setup, and 0.5W and 0.13W in idle and standby modes respectively.

Fujitsu is aiming for an late May 2008 launch, around the same time-frames as Samsung's planned launch of its SpinPoint M6 series and pricing has not yet been released. Fujitsu also projects sales of the MXZ2 BT line to hit 20 million units within the 2008 fiscal year.

Source from DailyTech