Tuesday, February 4, 2003

I was researching my last column and I ran across this tidbit on battery performance, but didn't have room to put it in. Since getting a CoolPix 5000 and a small collection of Nikon EN-EL1 Lithium Ion batteries, I thought these were going to be immune from the famous NiCad memory problem where the battery loses capacity if you don't discharge it completely before recharging. After a few months, I noticed the camera would show low battery after shooting for only ten minutes or less, and the battery had been charged up in the recharger. Only not recently! Well from all the sources I read, both NiMh and Li-On type batteries do not suffer from the "memory" problem. However they do "self-drain" -- losing 1 to 3% of their charge every day they sit on the shelf. After a month, the battery could easily be almost completely discharged. So what battery makers recommend is topping off the charge before you head out with these batteries. Also keep in mind that these batteries can only be recharged 400 times. 7:00:00 AM

Digital Photography Review: New Nikon Coolpix coming. Nikon is building interest in a new CoolPix camera by posting teasers on its website 6:45:36 AM

The Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA) announced they are establishing "PictBridge" as an industry standard for printing directly from digital cameras. 6:40:29 AM

MacWorld reviews CorelDraw Graphics Suite 11 and discovers it has a stitching/VR tool: "Just when we thought Photo-Paint had pulled all the tricks from its sleeve, we found the Stitch tool, which lets you use a simple drag-and-drop process to create a panorama out of any number of images. But Photo-Paint does even more: it lets you create QuickTime VR movies, too. We could hardly believe how easy it was to make a 360-degree walk-around of an office and an interactive object movie." 6:37:57 AM

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