There are many manufacturers that produce memory cards: Delkin Devices, Eye-Fi, Fujifilm, Hoodman, Kingston, Kodak, Lexar, Olympus, Panasonic, SanDisk, Sony, Transcend, etc.

And right now, I’ll talk about Sandisk, being my favorite memory card.

Aperture

An iris like diaphragm opening that can expand and contact the lens to let you control the amount of light that passes through it, thus affecting the exposure.

The term ” f-stop” is used interchangeably with aperture, especially among professional photographers  and videographers.

Burst mode – A camera mode that lets you capture several shots consecutively after pressing the shutter only once.

Depth of field – The area that is in focus in front of and beyond the subject of your photo.
Larger aperture (wider opening) will give you blurred background (first image below)
Smaller aperture (smaller opening) will give you sharper background (second image).

Digital Zoom – Magnifies an image digitally by cropping it and filling it the rest with interpolated pixels, thus degrading the quality. Even if the numbers are very impressive, never choose a camera based on digital zoom. With another words the better the optical zoom integrated within the lens, the better the image quality will be.

ISO – For digital cameras, the ISO setting measures the sensitivity to light (similar to how it does it with film). Digital camera ISO settings, such as 200, 400, 1000, etc., should capture photos as if one were using film with such a speed. Lower ISO settings mean you need more light and vise versa. Personally I never thought digital will ever replace the 35 mm film (I’m talking here about 6-7 years ago) when manufacturers were struggling with the digital format. The reason why, was that many time in the past they have tried to replace the 35 mm (with formats like 126, 110, APS, etc.) and the digital photos were very weak and slow progressing. But, within the last dozen years the digital era had exploded and film is in endangered species.

Megapixel – Approximately 1 million pixels. The higher the megapixel count, the higher the resolution and the more you can crop, which means (in general) better quality photos. Now this doesn’t mean you should go out there and buy a Hasselblad Camera that has 50 megapixels (I think the starting price of 27,000.00 should be a good reason not to) so you can have better quality photos. It all depends what are you going to use your photos for, how often do you use your camera, how much you know about taking photos (for SLR cameras) etc.

Memory card – Because digital cameras have very little onboard memory, they need flash memory cards to store more than a dozen or so images. The type of memory card you need depends on the make and model of your camera. Some of the most popular memory cards are Secure Digital(SD Cards), MultiMedia Card, Compact Flash(CF cards), and Sony Memory Sticks.

What does a CMOS and CCD do?

CMOS and CCD are types of camera image sensors. When you snap or record video, they convert an image into photo data tath is saved to the camera’s memory. Currently neither sensor type is superior to the other. Both CMOS and CCD sensors can be found in low and high-end imaging devices.

What is the relationship between megapixels and an image sensor?

Image sensors feature a given number of pixels, and the number of pixels equates to the digital camera’s or camcorder’s megapixel rating. One megapixel is 1 million pixels.

How does the size of the image sensor affect a digital camera’s image quality?

Larger image sensors have more pixels and provide a bigger surface to collect photo data. The more photo data your digital camera can collect, the more detailed and true to life your photos will be.

Do point -and-shoot cameras offer the same image sensors as D-SLRs?

Typically, the image sensors in D-SLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras are much larger than those in point and shoot cameras. D-SLRs have a bigger camera body, which allows room for large image sensors and other high-end camera technologies.

Why do some digital camcorders feature three CCDs?

Instead of using one sensor to capture red, green, and blue hues, camcorders with three CCDs use one CCD for each color. A three-CCD camcorder will produce lifelike video with more accurate and brighter colors.

I recently purchased Samsung UN40B7000 40″ LED TV and hooked up a Panasonic -1000W 7.1 Channel Home Theater System with Blu-ray Disc Player. Picture Quality beats by far all of the LCD’s Plazmas and projection TV’s. I got it on labor day for 1,299.00 (price cut from 2,300.00) but you can still find it now for about 1,599.00.

Samsung’s LED TVs use 40% less power than conventional LCD TVs and are mercury free.

LED TVs use Light Emitting Diodes to light the LCD panel. In the Luxia line of Samsung LED TV’s, the LED lights are surrounding the edge of the panel and this arrangement allows for the very slim depth of those models.  Traditional LCD televisions always have their backlight on when the TV is on. With the controlled backlighting the LEDs can be dimmed in dark areas of the picture to create darker blacks and better detail in dark scenes. As far as COLOR ACCURACY With white LED backlights the difference between the two technologies isn’t very significant, but with RGB colored lights or a color wheel to affect the backlight color the LED TVs have an advantage in displaying realistic color.

VIEWING ANGLES While traditional LCDs have improved their useable viewing angles over the years this is still a shortcoming of the technology itself and even the best LCDs will suffer from contrast degradation when viewed from angles wider than around 30 degrees off center. The LED backlit LCDs we’ve seen have done a fantastic job of correcting this issue and have viewing angles that rival plasma TV’s.

The Panasonic -1000W 7.1 Channel Home Theater System with Blu-ray Disc Player, has also an iPod dock, and you can browse and command your iPod or iPhone with the home theater remote control. (Don’t get too excited though, you cannot make phone calls trough the surround sound with your iPhone, because you have to switch your iPhone to an airplane mode in order to play your songs or videos on your TV). You will need to hook up your Theater System with an ethernet cable if you want to  use the Panasonic Viera Cast feature. This will allow you to watch videos from Youtube, Amazon video on demand, Picasa, Weather and Bloomberg TV and stock quotes. And one more thing, to enjoy all of this features you have to find some time (sold separately), and stop working so hard so you can enjoy life for a change.

Panasonic’s P4HD technology performs IP conversion at the pixel level for the finest details by utilizing a pixel-management-task. This advanced video processing samples over 15 billion pixels per second to create a detailed picture with life-like textures, and 16-level motion detection ensures on-screen movement stays blur-free.

• Top-Notch Video Processing

This player utilizes a 148MHz/12-bit video D/A converter that provides high quality 4x over-sampling for 1080i/720p output. Noise-shaping video processing, shifts the noise component to an unused area to further enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. By incorporating these technologies, it realizes super-fine, high-definition images with over 4400 billion colors.

• Multi-Format Playback Capability

It offers a full-range of playback capabilities for enjoying movies, music and images. It will playback Blu-ray Disc, BD-ROM (BD-Live Profile 2.0/Profile 1 Ver 1.1/Final Standard Profile), BD-MV (BD-RE Ver 3), BD-MV (BD-R Ver 2), DVD-Video, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-R DL, DVD-RAM, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-VR, AVCHD (H.264), CD, CD-R/RW, MP3, and JPEG (HD).

Samsung UN40B7000 40″ LED TV Features:

• 3,000,000:1 Mega Contrast

With a contrast ratio of 3,000,000:1 you’ll see what “breakthrough picture quality” really means. The true to life range of picture brightness enables the purest of blacks and pristine whites.

• Auto Motion Plus 120Hz Image Processing

Enjoy a crisper, clearer picture with reduced motion blur in fast moving scenes.

• Advanced Color Processing

Fully saturated, true-to-life colors that make you feel more like you’re looking through a window, rather than looking at a screen.

• Ultra Slim Design

With the optional wall mount you can hang the UN40B7000 much like you would hang a picture—less than two inches from the wall.

• Media Play

Watch and listen to content like movies, music or up to 10,000 pictures from a USB thumb drive or hard disk drive. You can create slide shows of selected pictures with music. You can even watch movies on your PC via Ethernet (wirelessly with the optional wireless Internet adapter that plugs into one of the set’s two USB ports).

• Internet@TV

Once you’ve set up you Internet connection you can use The Yahoo! Widget Engine to view snippets of information such as weather, stock prices, news and more.

• Anynet+

Anynet+ is a function that enables you to control all of your connected Samsung devices that support Anynet+ with your Samsung TV’s remote.

• Content Library

The UN40B7000 comes with a Content Library that’s fun and useful for the whole family: recipes, games health information and children’s content are some of what’s available. Connect your set to your high-speed Internet connection and the library will be periodically updated.

• Eco-Friendly Design

Samsung LED TVs are easy on the planet as well as the eyes. Samsung’s LED TVs use 40% less power than conventional LCD TVs and are mercury free. So you can put your feet up and relax knowing you’re leaving a smaller carbon footprint.

As a last note get yourself a credit card with cash back rewards and go shopping for new tech gadgets.

What does it really support?

Digital sources and HDTV technology continuously improve, and here you’ll find what level of technology is supported by Monster’s new cables.

Monster Cable     Speed rating     Video Quality    Refresh rate      Color Quality

700 THX                     10.2 Gbps                1080p                  60/120 Hz                  8.8-bit

900 THX                     13.8Gbps                 1080p                  120 Hz                         12-bit

1000 THX                   15.8Gbps                 1080p                  120/240 Hz                14-bit

As far as Sound Quality All of the above support 7.1 Dolby & DTS HD

HDMI Cables are the best way to keep all of your components connected, as they deliver high-definition audio and video through a single cable.