My favorite electronic gadget

As you know, most products and technologies covered in Electronic Products magazine are electronic components that go into the end product. So besides our “What’s Inside” section and our online eebeat.com site we really don’t have the opportunity to talk about the end-user electronics we all enjoy in our everyday lives. This month is different. I’m going to use the fact that this issue features our Multimedia/Entertainment Electronic Special as an excuse to talk about an electronic product I really enjoy.

My favorite electronic device for almost two years has been the Canon PowerShot SD630 digital camera. I usually don’t leave home without it, since it is so tiny it can actually fit in a cigarette box. Previously, I was using disposable cameras that I would carry with me only if I could fit one in my purse.

The pictures I took with my disposable are stored in many different decorative photo albums that are placed on my coffee table for instant viewing while all my photo negatives are stored in a cookie tin.

Now my digital pictures are stored on my hard drive and I back them up on memory sticks that range in size from 264 Kbytes to 2 Gbytes. I even have older images stored on floppies, but I have no idea what I stored on them because none of my current laptops support floppies.

The beauty of digital photos is that they last forever and should always have the same resolution and colors that they have today. By going digital, I can also use Photoshop to correct, color, and modify an image.

Because the pictures I take with my digital camera are practically free, I tend to take a lot of them making my hard drive practically full. I worry about the day when the drive crashes and I no longer will be able to view them on my monitor instantly. To date I have never printed any of my digital photos.

As much as I love my digital camera, my only concern now is what will happen when technology changes (which I can guarantee it will), and, just like with the floppies, I will not be able to have access to my images and my memories that I have stored on the stick (my hard drive of course will be history by then).

For my New Year’s resolution I promise to pick and print my favorite images and put them in a nice album so I can stop worrying about my filing system being obsolete in the future. But I have a feeling I won’t, since I’ll be too busy taking more pictures to think about filing.

Feel free to e-mail me and let me know what your favorite multimedia/entertainment electronic product is.

Christina Nickolas