Stuff Geeks Want

Convenience. That’s the only thing driving sales of compact photo printers, since you can get much better quality prints for less money from a commercial printer at your drugstore, supermarket, or elsewhere.

For Canon’s new Selphy CP770 photo printer, convenience is just what the engineers ordered. Consider these specs:

• prints 4″x6″ prints in less than a minute
• 2.5-inch LCD
• supports all memory cards
• computer-free printing
• USB (if you want to use it with a computer)
• Bluetooth (with optional $49.99 adapter)
• built-in controls for tweaking photos, correcting red-eye, etc.
  
• a really cool bucket for catching your prints

In fact, the only we don’t like about the Selphy CP770 is that it doesn’t have a battery, so you’ll need to be tethered to a power outlet to use it. But that’s not at all unusual in the realm of these affordable compact photo printers.

The Selphy CP770 was just announced this week and goes on sale later this month. While you can pre-order the Bluetooth adapter, no one is taking orders for the printer yet. We’ll update this post with buying info when it’s available!

Earlier this year we told you about the Eye-Fi wireless SD card, a 2GB Secure Digital (SD) card for your camera that features built-in Wi-Fi for easily and automatically uploading your photos.

Today, the same folks unveiled their latest masterpiece: the Eye-Fi Explore. The Explore packs the same features as the standard Eye-Fi card (now called the Eye-Fi Share), but adds unlimited Geotagging support.

For those not in the loop, Geotagging is the latest and hottest buzzword in photography. Geotagging attaches the location you took a photo to the photo’s metadata information, so you not only have time, date, and camera settings, but also a note on the general vicinity where the picture was snapped.

The Eye-Fi Explore pulls off this neat trick by leveraging its Wi-Fi capability, searching for networks nearby and determining approximately where you are. Of course, this means if you’re somewhere where there’s no Wi-Fi, you’re probably out of luck. But cities and most developed areas are fair game, even in some foreign countries.

To make things better, Eye-Fi is including a 1-year account to Wayport hot-spots, so you can upload your photos from any of their 10,000+ hotspots across the U.S., all without ever touching your computer. Access to Wayport hotspots in subsequent years will set you back $19 a year, but—c’mon—in a year they’ll be an even niftier SD card out there.

The Eye-Fi Explore was just announced and isn’t yet being sold online. We’ll update this post with a link to the best price when it is!

The PowerShot G9 is the newest high-end point-and-shoot from Canon with the same styling nod to the 35mm film cameras of days gone by as its predecessor, the G7.

The G9 packs some of the same features as the G7 while improving on others, including:

• image stabilized optics
• an impressive 6x optical zoom (and 4x digital zoom)
• Digic III processor
• 3-inch true color LCD
• RAW format option (like more expensive DSLRs)
• 3200 max ISO
• 12.1-megapixel CCD

What makes the G9 more special than your regular crazy-high-megapixel camera is that it boasts all the same manual adjustments and features of an SLR, so you won’t have to sacrifice any shooting options if you don’t feel like lugging your brand new Canon XSi with you everywhere you go.

The G9 is significantly bigger than its new cousin, the diminutive SD890, but is still a good back-pocket size and well worth the extra dimensions for packing DSLR-like capabilities in a little point-and-shoot.

And fear not, the G9 is priced like a quality point-and-shoot should be: $449 from Amazon with free shipping, meaning it will take just enough money out of your back pocket to make room for itself to fit in there.

Photographers know their lens is their lifeline: a sub-par piece of glass will create sub-par photos, and dust or dirt on the lens will result in undesirable artifacts or blurring.

Nikon’s Lens Pen Cleaning System won’t upgrade your lens, but it will help you keep dust and dirt off of it. The tiny, self-contained apparatus features a super-soft brush for on-the-go dusting and a tiny polishing disk for removing smudges.

Prices fluctuate in the $8-$10 range, but Amazon is currently stocking it for less than $6, making this purchase a no-brainer.

On Sunday we showed you that not all Secure Digital (SD) cards are the same, as SanDisk’s Ultra II Plus line features a slick built-in USB 2.0 connector.

Today, we’re raising the SD bar even higher, with the Eye-Fi wireless memory card.

In case the name didn’t make it apparent, the Eye-Fi mates a 2GB SD card with Wi-Fi support, doing away with the need for USB altogether.

The benefit is equally obvious: you can download photos to your computer without cables and, even better, the Eye-Fi software can automatically upload them to photo sharing sites like Flickr. I guess you could think of it as a wireless one-click wonder.

The only thing not so wonderful is the price: at $99.99 basically everywhere, including Amazon the Eye-Fi card is some 4x more expensive than the 2GB SanDisk Ultra II Plus SD card and up to 10x more expensive than some no-name regular 2GB SD card.
Update (5/13/2008) – Eye-Fi has released two new cards: the Eye-Fi Home ($79.99) and the Geotag-supporting Eye-Fi Explore ($129.99). The original Eye-Fi has been renamed the Eye-Fi Share and remains priced at $99.