Home & portable entertainment

The secret to my quick portrait edits is that I'm directly linked to my Spyder3Studio SR. I hate to admit it, but color calibration was last on my work-flow priority list.  With a very tight schedule, I found it a pain to go through the lengthy steps that most calibration systems require. 

Speed is an attractive feature whether you're looking to recalculate a massive spreadsheet or drive a souped-up roadster along a virtual racetrack. The trouble is that an over-clocked PC tends to overheat. Enter CyberpowerPC, a company that has mastered the art of manufacturing desktop and gaming systems with built-in liquid cooling.

Creators of digital media, both professional and amateur, have voracious storage requirements. They require high-performance storage for  photo and video editing with programs like Aperture, iPhoto, Photoshop and Lightroom, Final Cut Pro and iMovie. Additionally, creators need secure storage to back up and protect their work. Digital-media creators are not Information Technology (IT) experts, and selecting storage systems is not their primary focus.

Consider it a heavy-duty portable workstation for the photographer, designer, video editor or architect who spends far too much time tweaking pictures. The Lenovo ThinkPad W701ds (the "ds" stands for dual-screen) features a 10.6-inch screen that slides out from under the wide 17-inch display, both LED backlit. There's an integrated Wacom digitizer tablet. An nVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M GPU compliments the 1.73GHz Intel Core i7-820QM processor. Weighing a hefty11.4 lb, the W701ds could be the Hummer of notebooks.

I recently wrote about Drobo RAID storage arrays. They provide expandable storage with redundancy for the safekeeping of your data. The units that I reviewed are all available with instant savings from B&H until the end of June, 2010. I've just been made aware that there is an 8-bay unit that comes with free hard drives. 

Solid-state hard drives have always been faster than their disk-based counterparts. With no heads to move or platters to spin, solid-state hard drives offer the fastest storage space money can buy. Solid-state hard drives also use less power than traditional drives, making them ideal for mobile use. SanDisk’s G3 2.5-inch solid-state hard drives are intended for use in notebook computers. 

Just in time to thwart the heat and humidity of summer comes a USB-powered fan embedded in a bamboo stand for your notebook. Finally, you don't have to type fast to create a soothing breeze. The Macally Adjustable Bamboo Cooling Stand is made from bamboo, so no trees died in the manufacture of the product. Dual 2.5-inch fans are built in, the air circulating through the bamboo slits.