On their stand at IFA 08 in Berlin, Texas Instruments had two different demos on show ... follow the arrows:


To the left: Lamp-Free projection

These home cinema projectors work without a lamp, much like today’s pocket projectors, except that the quality is much better.  The incredibly expensive bulb found in regular projectors, which can easily cost between 400 and 600 euros, is instead replaced with three diodes in red, green and blue.

The demo was very convincing, apart from with a few bright shades which tended to leak a little.  The manufacturer went on to explain that the lifespan of the diodes would not necessarily be made available in the product’s technical specification, just the lifespan of the projector itself.  No need to worry about long the diodes would last – that will all be sorted out, they said. 
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As for the leaking colors, they too will be fixed before the end of the year.  The problem was apparently caused by the transition from the normal gamut colors in the clip that was being shown to a wide gamut projection, whose brighter shades were meant to impress.

These projectors should arrive at the start of 2009, and will be a little more expensive than current models, although TI eventually wants this new system to replace all of its current DLP range, which is based on color wheels and expensive lamps.  And because there is no more color wheel, the manufacturer claims we will see the end of the ‘rainbow effect’ which viewers of DLP images sometimes complain about.

TI do acknowledge one problem with this technology: diodes don’t yet allow for the same amount of lighting power as lamps do.  Users will have to make do with a maximum of 2000 Lumens, which is more than enough for a home-cinema, but which won’t work in a well-lit meeting room, for example.

To the right: 3-D Cinema

In their other demo, TI were showing clips from the recently-released film Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 3D.



You don the glasses, take a seat, and then, well, try to struggle through.  The effect really isn’t as good as it was in the cinema.  About half of the clips seem to have real depth, but the others appear doubled, which is very disorientating.  TI admits that while their Lamp-Free technology is mature and ready to come to market, the same cannot be said of their 3D system, which is a very optimistic way of looking at it.

Google is getting ready to launch its own browser, called Chrome.

The new software is apparently a reinvention of the browser, starting from a blank slate to consider all of the things the web is used for today but which were never even dreamt of by the developers of the first generation of browsers.  Nowadays, even average users download and upload huge files, watch videos and run complex applications from within their browser.

Assured stability

These new applications have brought with them new problems.  A single JavaScript on one page can slow down or even crash the whole browser, a frustrating phenomenon which is well known to those of us who have several tabs open at a time.

Google has proposed a logical solution to this problem, forcing every tab and every plug-in to run as a separate process, so that if any one page hits the buffers, the others won’t be affected.  Chrome users will be able to ‘kill’ a single tab without losing data on any of the others that are still working.

A brand new open-source JavaScript engine, called V8, should also speed up the execution of the most complex of the new generation of complex web-based applications.

Modern protection

Elsewhere, the browser promises to include a number of fashionable features, including an address bar which can suggest pages based on keywords (like in Firefox 3), a home page that brings together a user’s favorite sites (like in Opera) and a ‘private surfing’ mode which does not accept cookies or record the history of pages visited, not unlike the InPrivate feature promised for Internet Explorer 8 we covered yesterday.

It will also allow online applications to function as if they were independent pieces of software, in their own window and without a navigation bar.
By thinking about everyday problems on the web today, such as phishing and malware attacks, Chrome’s developers claim it will be better protected against such threats than older browsers to which protections have been added after the fact.

Chrome didn’t come out of nowhere though, and its website recognizes that “ we owe a great debt to many open source projects … we’ve used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others.”  Google is an official partner of Mozilla’s, because Firefox uses the company’s search engine by default in exchange for a subsidy which has recently been extended for three years.  WebKit, meanwhile, powers another well-known browser, Apple’s Safari.

Chrome was debuted yesterday in a comic drawn by Scott McCloud, which includes no fewer than 38 panels which present the new browser from both a technical point of view and the perspective of an average user, proving that Google has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about what an ideal browser might look like.

The beta version for Windows should be available at some point today.

> The blog post announcing Chrome

The latest addition to the µ family (it's pronounced 'mew') , the Olympus µ1040 is different to its brothers and sisters.  It combines good looks with the performance made popular by this line of waterproof cameras.  Another way of looking at it is that it’s a cheaper version of the µ 1050 SW without the waterproofing.

Considered that way, this camera is in fact the descdendant of the µ 730, brought to market in September 2006.

With a 10 Megapixel sensor, a 38-114 mm periscopic zoom built into the case and a 2.7 inch screen, it matches up to the standards of the µ 1040 and the µ 1050 SW.

It’s also blessed with the latest electronics: automatic modes, face detection for up to 16 people, shadow adjustment.

Nevertheless, this new camera is still lacking two key features: there’s no wide-angle option, and the ‘digital stabalization’ touted by Olympus isn’t really up to the job.

The fact that it only uses xD cards might also hold this camera back – it’s a memory format that remains less common and more expensive than SD, even if it is becoming more affordable.

These gripes notwithstanding, the 1040 promises to be a very small camera, and in particular a thin model, at around 2 cm front to back.  It comes in a range of metallic colors, including a deep red and a golden yellow.

For the time being, the price remains uncertain, but we imagine that it will be judiciously placed on the right side of the 200€ psychological barrier.

> Our survey of digital compact cameras

Here's something else we ran into the IFA.  It's a television, which, when switched off, becomes a mirror.  This design by Ami Life, a Danish company, is very pleasing to the eye as well and it works surprisingly well.


One last thing: to really get the effect, you'll need to feed your cables through the wall rather than letting them trail out of the bottom …

The case is as small as ever, but there's a 18x wide angle zoom there.  Round the back, a very big 2.7" screen.  Inside, a new sensor and processor allow for 10 Megapixels and HD video.   Add the 1 cm macro mode and this new bridge from Panasonic seems to have it all!

> Product test: Panasonic DMC-FZ28