Best Parents' Photo Printer

Frankenfight: Best Parents’ Photo Printer

The holidays mean two things: your family taking pictures, and your family recruiting you to print said pictures. This annoyance, coupled with the vast improvements in inkjet technologies over the past few years, means that most Gizmodo parents are ready for an upgrade.

Watch the sub-$200 HP Photosmart D7360 and Canon Pixma MP500 duke it out for all the affection you never had in our innovative bar graph. Then hit the jump for the Frankenreview: what happens when reviews from CNET, PCMag, PCWorld and PrinterSpot agree to live in a house and have their lives taped.

Design“The Canon Pixma MP500 is low, wide, and smooth, like an Italian sports car.”
“We like the dual-LED icon next to the feed switch, which helps you toggle between the paper trays.”
“It has a tilting 2.5-inch LCD screen and memory card slots so you can print without the help of a computer.”
“The Photosmart D7360 has a large 3.4-inch tilting LCD — that’s about an inch larger than typical displays currently on the market.”
“…you can keep both standard letter-size paper and 4-by-6 photo paper loaded and switch between them without having to change paper every time. Alternatively…you can keep two different sizes of photo paper loaded.”
“The HP Photosmart D7360 is on the bulky side for a single-function printer…”

Winner: Canon. It’s a much sexier design despite including all-in-one functionality.

Standalone Interface/Connectivity “If you’re printing directly from a PictBridge-enabled camera, use your digital camera’s memory card, use infrared via a device such as your phone, you can use the Pixma MP500 right out of the box…”
“Unlike several of its rivals and many photo printers, the MP500 doesn’t let you read images from a USB flash drive attached to its direct-print port.”
“One thing the MP500 won’t control directly from the printer is printing images smaller than 4 x 6 inches. It automatically scales the image to fit to the maximum paper size without giving you the option of printing at its original size.”
“[With the HP]…Plug in a memory card or USB key with photos on it, preview your photos, choose print options, and give the print command through the 3.4-inch touch screen.”
“You can watch the video play back on the LCD, stop it at the frame you want, then print. To find just the right frame, you can pause the video and slowly step through frame by frame, either forward or back.”
“You can even view animated demos of maintenance tasks, such as loading paper and cartridges, and clearing paper jams.”
“It’s the perfect interface for computerphobes…”
“…the easiest to use printer we have ever reviewed.”Winner: HP. Guess that extra bulk pays off somewhere.

Speed
“The MP500 averages 1:11 per print - substantially faster than two similar photo printers. For 8.5 x 11s, it took an average of 2:58.”
“On Premium Plus paper, the HP D7360 is slow, averaging 1:45 per 4 x 6-inch print….However, when printing on HP Advanced Photo Paper, the HP D7360 is the fastest in the market…”
Ed Note: With HP Advanced Photo Paper, the printer averages 53 seconds per print. 8.5 x 11s take 1:17.
“Performance [for the Canon mp500] is a strong point. On our business applications…the MP500 took 15 minutes, 17 seconds, total…”
“[The HP clocks] in at 15:08 on our business applications suite…”

Winner: HP. HP wins the photos, but due to the more expensive paper, we needed more to determine the winner. Then HP also won general office printing speeds with normal paper.

Photo Printing Quality
“[With the Canon]…On photo paper we saw beautifully sharp images with bold colors.
“On our graphics test print, curves were smooth and sharply rendered, but we saw quite a bit of banding in gradients, especially in the grayscale…”
“…with shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually…”
“…slightly cyan-biased skin tones…”
“[With the HP]…the only problem we found was noticeable graininess in blocks of color.”
“Most users will like its photo quality, but we’ve seen better. On photo paper, the darkest areas lacked some detail and exhibited a bluish tint, while skin tones looked too bronzed…”
“The printer recreated skin tones darker than the original with more saturation and contrast. The skin tones are realistic and the model actually seems more alive than the original image.”
“…oversaturated and a little dark.”Winner: Tie. Each printer seems to have its own problems. I’m scared of the Canon’s difficulties with gradients, but resentful that the HP won’t print with less contrast than it’s told (see above, original on left). But mom, she will love them both.

Overall winner: HP. Mom will like the HP because it has the best standalone interface, and let’s face it, she has no clue that her printer should be any smaller. Dad will like feeling cool that he can freezeframe videos of himself dancing nude in the bathroom mirror…to later give to mom. – Mark Wilson

Canon Pixma MP500 Specs
B&W Pages per Min.: 29 • Color Pages per Min.: 19 • Max. B&W dpi: 600 by 600 • Max. Color dpi: 9600 by 2400 • Max. Scanning dpi: 1200-by-2400 • Tray Capacity, pages: 150 • Price When Reviewed: $200

HP Photosmart D7360 Specs
B&W Pages per Min.: 32 • Color Pages per Min.: 31 • Max. B&W dpi: 1200-by-1200 • Max. Color dpi: 4800-by-1200 • Tray Capacity, pages: 100 • Price When Reviewed: $200

Source: Frankenfight: Best Parents’ Photo Printer - Gizmodo

KidRocket Web Browser

KidRocket is a free Web browser designed for kids to safely surf the Internet’s top children-related Web sites. Each human-edited, hand-picked site offers many fun, educational, and interactive activities for children and parents alike.  It has a password-protected lockdown mode that prevents kids from exiting the browser or switching to any other program on the computer.  Also has interactive math flashcards, art section, games, and Internet filter. Children will find it safe to learn, play games, and have fun with KidRocket.

Source: KidRocket Web Browser v1.0 ~ Windows Fanatics

Last-Minute Online Shopping

    Last-Minute Help for Those (Mostly Male) Holiday Shopping Slackers

By BOB TEDESCHI

IF women have any doubts that their men truly love them, this won’t help. According to at least one poll last week, nearly half of all men in relationships had yet to buy gifts for their spouses.

But forces of the corporate world are set to bail out shopping slackers yet again, only you wouldn’t know how unless you somehow noticed that delivery trucks were making fewer left-hand turns than ever.

Spurred by the growth of e-commerce, shippers like U.P.S. and others are shaving precious minutes from their delivery times by arranging shipping routes to avoid left-hand turns, among many other things. Online retailers, meanwhile, have tweaked their own product handling systems, thanks to improved technology and lessons sometimes painfully learned in years past.

The result is that many online merchants this year will still sell goods with standard shipping terms through Monday, Dec. 18, or Tuesday, Dec. 19, thereby lending a hand to late holiday shoppers and, e-commerce executives hope, stealing more sales from offline merchants.

Retailers and industry analysts said they expected the trend to help build sales, if not cure road rage, especially from procrastinators who in years past would have sped to the mall rather than go online and pay for expedited delivery service.

“There’s no question these sales are going to go right to our bottom line, because we’ve never been able to get the procrastinators,” said Shmuel Gniwisch, chief executive of the online jeweler Ice.com, which pushed its standard shipping cut-off date closer to Christmas by one day this year, offering free two-day FedEx shipping for orders placed by noon on Dec. 20. “They always went to the store.”

According to a poll by BizRate, a division of E. W. Scripps, 30 of 76 Internet retailers said they would guarantee standard shipping for orders placed by Dec. 18 or 19. That is double the number from last year, but the shift is even more profound, since in 2005 there were four business days between Dec. 19 and Christmas, versus three this year.

A few years ago, such promises may not have made much difference to consumers, who had fresh memories of late packages from ToysRUs.com, Macys.com and others back in 1999. But retailers have managed to deliver packages on time since then, even while pushing their shipping deadlines closer to Christmas.

“Consumers are forgetting the fiascos of 1999 and are starting to replace those with positive experiences,” said John Chandler-Pepelnjak, an analyst with Atlas, an online marketing technology company. “They’re brushing up against the tightest boundaries now, and they still have a reasonable expectation of getting their gifts.”

Mr. Chandler-Pepelnjak said that last year the peak online shopping day was Dec. 13, whereas in 2000 the peak came on the day after Thanksgiving. Another factor that could spur late sales this year, he added, was the propensity of consumers to shop online on Mondays and Tuesdays.

“I think people will do a lot of shopping on the 18th and 19th this year,” he said. “Although to me, that’s cutting it close.”

John Thompson, a senior vice president at BestBuy.com, said his company had improved its own shipping acumen, and had also benefited from better coordination with U.P.S. As a result, he said, BestBuy.com had extended its holiday shopping deadline by one day for each of the last four years.

“The Friday after Thanksgiving was a huge day for us, and because we share forecast information with U.P.S., we knew we had the right size trucks — and enough of them — outside our facilities,” he said. “That was huge, and it worked as well as we could’ve hoped.”

Among other things, Mr. Thompson said, BestBuy had gotten better at predicting the most popular items of the holiday season for various regions, and making sure those items were adequately stocked and ready for shipment from the closest distribution centers.

Norman Black, a U.P.S. spokesman, said the company had become more efficient in its own right, announcing in March a new routing system that reduced by one day the average transit time for many popular routes. That technology system is a refinement of one introduced last year, that, among other things, reduced the number of left-hand turns encountered by drivers.

“We’re aggressively trying each year to do more and more for our customers, largely because of e-commerce,” Mr. Black said. “As we do, and as our competitors do, customers start to trust you more and more, and that shows up in something as mundane as the date of the last recommended shopping day.”

FedEx has also improved its efficiency, said Mike Mannion, a senior vice president of FedEx Ground. Over the last three years, he said, the company had reduced by one day the time to ship a package across most of its routes.

The company has added shipping facilities in major cities, allowing employees in Cleveland, for instance, to load Orlando-bound packages on a trailer bound directly for that city. In the past, packages from Cleveland would have been collected in Columbus, then put on trucks to Orlando.

Increased volume has helped justify such expenses, Mr. Mannion said. In fiscal year 2006, FedEx Ground shipped more than 2.81 million packages daily, 8 percent more than the previous year. U.P.S., meanwhile, shipped 6.6 percent more packages during the first nine months of this year than during the same period last year.

Mr. Gniwisch of Ice.com said the later shipping deadlines would help the company cater especially to men, who tended to shop later than women, and spend more. (Ice.com polled 400 of its customers last Tuesday and found that 46 percent of men who were in relationships had yet to buy a gift for their partners.)

Ice.com this year had a comparatively conservative shipping deadline, of midnight Dec. 14, for those who chose free United States Postal Service delivery. But Mr. Gniwisch said the company was “pushing it to the limit this year” by offering two-day FedEx delivery for orders placed before noon on Dec. 20.

In part, Mr. Gniwisch said, that was because his company reduced the amount of time required to processes an order this year, from 6 hours to 2.5 hours. Two years ago, it took 26 hours to process an order.

“Everybody gets better at this the longer you stay in business,” Mr. Gniwisch said. “You work out the kinks.”

Source: Last-Minute Help for Those (Mostly Male) Holiday Shopping Slackers - New York Times

Shop by personality at Gifts.com

Shop by personality at Gifts.com

Not sure what to get your sister-in-law for the holidays? Gift recommending site Gifts.com lets you shop by the recipient’s personality type or interest.

From the Men, Women, Teen or Kids menus choose the recipient’s interest, like “sports nut,” “auto enthusiast,” “movie buff,” “bookworm” or “proud parent.” Alternately, choose your recipient’s personality type, like “Guy’s Guy,” “The Geek” or “The Urban Sophisticate.” Recommendations include a fondue fountain for a foodie or a gadget recharging station (previously-mentioned here on LH) for “The Achiever.” Not too shabby. — Gina Trapani

Gifts.com

Source: Shop by personality at Gifts.com - Lifehacker

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack

The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (whew!) will let you open, edit, and save the new default file formats created by Office 2007 programs (called Office Open XML, or OOXML) on your clunky old pre-2007 Office apps.

With the release of Vista just around the corner and Office 2007 hot on its heels, you can bet you’ll be seeing a lot more .docx (Microsoft Word’s new default filetype) and other OOXML files floating around. If you want to actually be able to read those files on your pre-2007 software, the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack will take care of you. The pack is freeware, Windows only. — Adam Pash

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats [Microsoft]

Source: Download of the Day: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack (Windows) - Lifehacker