September 2008 came and went and along with the downturn in the economy and the increasingly agitated political campaigns, there were plenty of interesting news in the Gadget World that took their spotlight turn.

The top stories we covered included the upcoming HTC G1 Google phone, the latest drama from Apple's App store client base, and the InterBike conference in Las Vegas.

Once again, we calculated all the diggs, added all the Reddit points, and looked for the most commented stories with the most page views to come up with the list. If you read these stories before, we invite you to enjoy them once again. If you missed them, cuddle up to your tiny netbook and check them out over the weekend. As always, please send us your comments at our emails, or through Danny's hairstylist/life guru.

The Most Popular (Non-iPhone) Stories:

• Five Antisocial Gadgets That Should be Banned
• Photo Gallery: Robot Hands Get a Grip on the Future
• Scariest Toy Concept Ever: The Epidermits Thing
• T-Mobile G1 Carries High Expectations + T-Mobile's G1 Android Phone: Neither Open nor Exciting
• Briton Invented iPod, DRM and On-Line Music in 1979
• Natural Materials Making a Comeback in Tech Cycling World

The Month's Top Reviews:

• Review: 4th Gen iPod Nano — We Want Our Square Form Factor Back!
• Review: Archos Internet Tablet Blinds Its Flaws With a Brilliant Screen
• Review: Nikon D90 Takes World Champion DSLR Title Belt
• Review: Slacker G2 Media Player a Bit of an Overachiever
• Review: Upstart Sony DSLR Pops Nikon and Canon on the Chin
• Review: TiVo HD XL DVR Proves Bigger Is Sometimes Better

August's Top iPhone Stories:

• IPhone Can Take Screenshots of Anything You Do
• iPhone Developers Go From Rags to Riches
• Let's Rock: Apple Unveils New iPods, Genius Playlists, HDTV, NBC
• IPhone 2.2: Safari Redesign, Possible Cut and Paste
• Is Steve Jobs Really E-Mailing Apple Customers? Grammatical Analysis Raises Doubts
• Android Welcomes App Store's Rejects With Arms Wide Open

The Best of The Rest:

• Discs Meet the Internet in Next-Gen Blu-ray Players
• Bamboo Bike Maker Grows His Frames, Bonsai Style
• Google Patent Could Kill Off Cellphone Contracts
• Fujifilm's Real 3-D Camera Is Just the Beginning
• Researchers Demonstrate How to Spoof GPS Devices
• Is It Possible to Live Without a Cellphone? + The Results
• Bike Geek: Cross Vegas
• Best Buy Customer Service Punks Customer, For Real

For the first time, professional-grade single-lens reflex cameras are gaining the ability to record high-definition video. That capability, photographers say, has the potential to transform both still photography and moviemaking -- and it's largely thanks to advances in the semiconductor technology used to make the image sensors inside these cameras.

"I think this is the holy grail for news photography," says Randall Greenwell, the director of photography for the Virginian-Pilot, a newspaper in Virginia.

Greenwell says photojournalists are already shooting both stills and video, but using separate equipment for each medium, which is awkward, cumbersome and requires additional training. With a single camera that can do both stills and video, he says, the job of the new-media journalist will be greatly simplified.

"With that kind of flexibility, it's going to be a real game changer," Greenwell says.

While compact digital cameras have had video-recording capabilities for years, the image quality provided by these cameras has been disappointing because of their small image sensors and comparatively poor, miniaturized optics. High-end video and movie cameras produce top-notch HD video and their interchangeable lenses give filmmakers the creative control they crave, but the cameras are big and expensive. Even the RED ONE, a super-high-definition movie camera that records digital video that's comparable in quality to that of film stock, rings up at about $17,000. That's a bargain compared to movie cameras, but it's still a lot of dough for most people.

By contrast, the 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II, which shoots 1080p HD video, will cost $2,700 (plus the cost of lenses) when it becomes available later this year. The 12-megapixel, highly rated Nikon D90, which records 720p HD video and is available now, costs even less: a mere $1,300 gets you the body plus a basic zoom lens.

Both cameras deliver extremely high visual quality for both still and moving images -- and just as important, they allow photographers to use a wide complement of interchangeable lenses, from macro lenses for extreme closeups of insects to long telephoto lenses for shots of offensive plays on the other end of the football field. That's important to pro photographers, for whom lens choice is a critical component of the creative process.

"The single biggest difference between still photography and a movie, aside from motion, is lens choice and depth of field," says Vincent Laforet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who is part of a Canon marketing program, "Explorers of Light."

Laforet also touts the Canon's ability to capture images when there's not much light, an impression confirmed by other photographers. "That you can actually capture in available light is going to be a big difference," says Greenwell.

Laforet predicts that this low-light sensitivity will lead moviemakers to dispense with expensive, bulky, and obtrusive lighting equipment, shooting their movies entirely with available light.

In addition, the new cameras are small compared to professional video cameras, enabling photographers to shoot in a variety of situations with relative ease. Laforet, for instance, shot a demonstration video using the Canon camera over the course of a weekend, incorporating shots that required him to lean out of the open door of a helicopter.

The key to the Nikon's and Canon's incredible image quality lies with the large image sensors they contain. Whereas a typical compact camera might have an image sensor measuring about 5mm by 7mm, the sensor on a "full frame" SLR like the Canon 5D Mark II is the same size as a frame of standard camera film: 24mm by 36mm. That's a more than 24-fold increase in image area. (The Nikon D90 uses a smaller 16mm by 24mm sensor, but even that is 11 times the area of a compact camera's imaging chip.)

A larger sensor also means it's easier for photographers to control the depth of field. Compact cameras have short focal-length lenses to match their small sensors. The laws of optics dictate that these lenses have a large depth of field.

"As image sensor size decreases, effectively you are getting more and more depth of field," says Chuck Westfall, a technical advisor at Canon. For point-and-shoot cameras, that's convenient, because it's harder to get an accidentally out-of-focus snapshot. But for creative photography, being able to control the depth of field is essential. That's how you get those portraits where a person's face is sharply in focus, while the background is pleasantly blurred.

So why has it taken so long for digital SLRs to add video-recording capabilities? The answer has to do partly with the physical design of SLRs, and partly with the type of imaging chips used.

Inside every SLR is a flip-up mirror that directs light either to the viewfinder or to the image sensor, but not both at the same time. In order to record video (or provide a live image on the LCD), the camera has to "lock up" the mirror, blocking the viewfinder. The pros who until recently defined the digital SLR market were initially loathe to do that because of the better optical quality afforded by the viewfinder.

"The viewfinder is arguably the best way to see your picture as you compose it, and it also offers the best, most stable platform for shooting SLR pictures," says Steve Heiner, a senior technical manager at Nikon.

But perhaps the most critical component of the new generation of cameras is the imaging chips inside.

For most of the past decade, consumer cameras have used a kind of imaging chip technology known as charge-coupled device (CCD). Recently, a competing imaging technology known as complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) has come to the fore, largely because of its lower power requirements. CMOS chips appeared first in SLR cameras aimed at the high end of the market and have only recently started appearing in point-and-shoot cameras, which are still dominated by CCD technology. What drove the transition to CMOS was the large sensor size of SLRs.

"The power consumption of a CMOS is so much lower [than CCD] at the full frame size that this is the only way you could come up with a reasonable battery life," says Westfall.

But CMOS chips initially had trouble delivering live video images due to overheating, the need to come up with a way of resampling images on the fly (converting them from the sensor's maximum capacity to the smaller resolution of HD video) and other problems.

It wasn't until 2006 that Olympus first offered a digital SLR with a "live view" option, which kept the imaging chip in constant use while delivering a live image to the LCD. The feature proved popular, and other manufacturers soon followed suit.

Once they'd added live view, it was a small step for manufacturers to add the ability to record the video coming off the sensor instead of merely directing it to the screen on the back of the camera.

Now, experts say, CMOS imaging technology is developing much faster than CCD, partly because CMOS imaging chips are built with the same basic processes used in producing other kinds of semiconductors, like memory chips and processors. CCDs, by contrast, are less familiar to the majority of semiconductor engineers.

And thanks to Moore's Law, the power and speed of semiconductor technology keeps increasing exponentially. That means CMOS image sensors are getting better and better, incorporating more sophisticated noise compensation, shrinking the size of the gaps between each light-gathering pixel that are devoted to wiring and other electronics, and adding image and video processing features to the chips themselves.

"I'm amazed myself at how quickly the tech developed a life of its own and how fast it's evolving," says Eric Fossum, an entrepreneur and engineer who developed the type of CMOS imaging technology used in most modern cameras while he was a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early 1990s. "It's kind of mind blowing to me."

According to Amazon, the 5 most wished-for items when it comes to electronics are a portable GPS, a solar gadget charger, an iPod Touch, a pocket camera and a wide-angle zoom lens. 

Here’s how we compare to the average Amazon shopper nationwide:

What is with all the iPods? Nationwide, the typical Amazon electronics shopper is obsessed with Apple and has three types of iPods in the five most wished-for items (and eight out of the top 20 spots).

One notable tidbit: Everyone loves Canon cameras. Eight of the top 20 items on both the national and O.C. wish lists are Canon camera products. One possibility is that Amazon frequently offers rebates and discounts on Canon products, including this current offer.

While Amazon provided the data to me, they had no one who could tell me the conversion rate of how many items on a wish list do get purchased. That left me questions such as: Do people really want that many iPods?  Do wish lists get fulfilled? Should I be investing in Apple and Canon stock?

What’s on your wishlist?

After the jump, see the top 20 items in Orange County’s wish list v. national rankings:

Post from: Alt+Save with the Gadgetress

What’s on O.C.’s Amazon wish list?

According to Amazon, the 5 most wished-for items when it comes to electronics are a portable GPS, a solar gadget charger, an iPod Touch, a pocket camera and a wide-angle zoom lens. 

Here’s how we compare to the average Amazon shopper nationwide:

What is with all the iPods? Nationwide, the typical Amazon electronics shopper is obsessed with Apple and has three types of iPods in the five most wished-for items (and eight out of the top 20 spots).

One notable tidbit: Everyone loves Canon cameras. Eight of the top 20 items on both the national and O.C. wish lists are Canon camera products. One possibility is that Amazon frequently offers rebates and discounts on Canon products, including this current offer.

While Amazon provided the data to me, they had no one who could tell me the conversion rate of how many items on a wish list do get purchased. That left me questions such as: Do people really want that many iPods?  Do wish lists get fulfilled? Should I be investing in Apple and Canon stock?

What’s on your wishlist?

After the jump, see the top 20 items in Orange County’s wish list v. national rankings:

Post from: Alt+Save with the Gadgetress

What’s on O.C.’s Amazon wish list?

Rather than using RF (radio frequency) wireless technology to create a wireless data network that consumes a good deal of power and is vulnerable to eavesdropping/hacking, the new LED light-bulbs would transmit data with imperceptibly-fast pulses of visible light. Initial bandwidth is expected to range anywhere from 1-10Mbps.

LED smart lighting as optical wireless network

“Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires,” said BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little. “This could be done with an LED-based communications network that also provides light - all over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference. Ultimately, the system is expected to be applicable from existing illumination devices, like swapping light bulbs for LEDs.”

Each LED light-bulb would work as a wireless access point, offering greater bandwidth and significantly reduced power consumption. And, because the LED-based optical communications networks uses pulses of visible light, people outside the network’s line-of-sight (through a wall, floor, etc.) are completely cut-off - reducing the possibility of network-leeching and nefarious hacking.

We could one day be connecting to our home or office’s wireless network with a flip of the light-switch. Imagine that.

[Via: CellularNews]

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Here’s a cool hack that shows you how to install a GPS seamlessly into your Dell Mini Inspiron 9 netbook.

I started by tearing the Mini down and seeing if it was even possible. Luckily, there’s a bit of space around where the Bluetooth adapter is located. It wasn’t much, but it looked like enough, so I ordered the smallest USB GPS receiver I could find. It’s a nice unit with a SkyTraQ chipset and support for AGPS. Once I used the included utility to download an AGPS update into the unit, it gets a location fix in about five seconds after a reset.

via laptop blog, Hack Page

Brought to you by: Zedomax.com

Dell Mini Hack - How to install a GPS!

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$62.50, - Microsoft SideWinder X6 Keyboard - USB
$65.99, WACOM MTE450
$50.99, Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
$319.99, LINKSYS 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Workgroup Switch 5 ports
$269.00, Canon PowerShot SD880IS 10MP Digital Camera

More deals at www.Uberbargain.com

Add a comment | From: Deals of the Day | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals

$62.50, Microsoft SideWinder X6 Keyboard - USB
$65.99, WACOM MTE450
$50.99, Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
$29.99, LINKSYS 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Workgroup Switch 5 ports
$269.00, Canon PowerShot SD880IS 10MP Digital Camera

More deals at www.Uberbargain.com

Add a comment | From: Deals of the Day | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals

What does this picture of a completely dissassembled Canon 17-85mm lens say? It says "Not user serviceable," is what it says!

Thread [Fred Miranda forums via Gizmodo]

While everyone was displaying their products at the CEATEC Tradeshow in Japan, Canon was displaying their products at the International Vision Expo West, in Las Vegas. Among all the devices was Canon’s flagship projector, the REALiS SX7. This projector features 4000 ANSI lumens, SXGA+ (1400 x 1050) resolution and a 1000:1 contrast ratio. The SX7 is built for offices and for portability. It weighs only 10.6 lbs, making it light enough for traveling presenters. The SX7 also comes with a versatile array of inputs including s-video, composite, component, VGA, DVI, BNC, and audio connections. In addition, the SX7 comes with an Auto Set-up feature. By touching the Auto Set button, located next to the power button, the SX7 corrects distortion, balances the color, focuses the image, and automatically detects the input signal.

[via Market Watch]