How to digitize holiday photos and videos

The holidays are one of the few times when we still pull out the old family albums and childhood videos to share with the people we love. As long as they're out, it's also a good time to work on digitizing those memories—not just to protect the originals, but to share them on Facebook, Instagram, or sites like Picasa or Snapfish. Once digitized, you can even use the images to create new albums or other gifts.<p>You could outsource that work to a service, but you may already have most of the gear to do it yourself—and what you don't have is pretty easy and affordable to get. Here's everything you need to convert your old media into modern digital files and then prepare them for sharing with your friends and family.<p>Choose your photo scanner<p>Scanner technology has changed little over the years, so any scanner or multifunction printer (which has an integrated scanner) purchased even five or more years ago should be more than adequate for the job of converting your old photos. Just be sure it has a flatbed scanning surface, rather than a sheetfeeder that pulls media through a slot. Old pictures tend to suffer from warps, small tears, and surface blemishes that could cause a sheetfed scanner to jam—or worse, destroy the print.<p>PHOTO: MICHAEL HOMNICK<p>The Epson Perfection V550 can digitize slides and negatives as well as photos.<p>If you don't yet have a scanner, our buying guide will help you find a good model for your needs. To scan formats that your existing scanner doesn't support (such as slides and negatives), the Epson Perfection V550 is an excellent choice for about $150.<p>General-purpose scanners integrated into multifunction printers lack the ability to scan slides and negatives, but they perform well for regular photo scanning. I particularly like the $250 HP Envy 120, which produces beautiful scans and prints, and looks sleek and unobtrusive sitting in my living-room entertainment center. If you plan to do a lot of scanning, though, a dedicated photo scanner will make the job much easier.<p>ROBERTCARDIN<p>The HP Envy 120 can scan regular photos (but not slides or negatives), and it looks stylish in your<p>The overarching rule of scanning old photos echoes the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. After you've digitized the originals, safeguard them in a high-quality, acid-free archival box—and that would mean, not a shoebox.<p>Scanner tips and tricks<p>Scanners tend to be slow, and scanning software tends to take over your PC while it's active. Here are my two favorite tips for minimizing frustration and tedium while scanning photos.<p>First, take advantage of the features in your scanner's driver software, which will most likely offer a way to differentiate and automatically separate multiple photos during the scanning process. This will let you place as many images as possible onto the scanning surface with each pass, saving you a lot of time.<p>Second, choose the scanning resolution wisely. While you could use the highest resolution your scanner offers (for most these days, it's 9600 or 19,200 dots per inch), the scan will take forever—or possibly cause your PC to slow to a crawl—and the result will be a really huge file.<p>For a typical snapshot, a scan at 300 dpi will suffice. That doesn't sound like much, but if you try a scan at the next step up, usually 600 dpi, you'll likely not see a visible difference—we haven't, over our many years of conducting scanning tests. Save the highest resolutions for very small photos that you might want to scale up to a larger size.<p>Upgrade your photo software<p>When it comes to heirloom photos, good photo-editing software will make all the difference in the final digitized product. You don't need a full-blown copy of Photoshop, but neither should you entrust your precious memories to iPhoto or Windows' built-in Photos app. For $100, Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 offers tremendous editing power in an app that's easy enough for amateurs to learn quickly. For Windows or Mac, it's the best all-around choice for home photo editing.<p>Photoshop Elements offers a great blend of quick-fix tools and pro-quality editing options for touching up your scans. Photo-editing novices can start out using Quick mode for basic lighting fixes, red-eye removal, and touch-ups. These simple tools can go a long way toward preparing your pictures for sharing.<p>If you're feeling more adventurous and are up for some advanced touch-ups, here are a few useful tricks you can try:<p>Old snapshots often suffer from terrible underexposure, making them look dark and grainy. Here's a guide that shows you how to salvage an underexposed photo. If your subjects aren't looking their best in an otherwise priceless shot, try these tricks for touching up portraits. Check out this collection of easy photo-fixing tricks.<p>The Pinnacle Dazzle Platinum HD works with Windows PCs to convert analog videos to digital form.<p>Convert analog videos to digital<p>The quality of VHS, Betamax, and Super 8 tapes can degrade over time. If the tapes are still playable, digitize them sooner rather than later.<p>You will need a working video player or camera capable of playing back the original format. Once you have a working player, you'll need a digital video converter to connect it to your PC. The Pinnacle Dazzle Platinum HD is an excellent choice for Windows users. For the Mac, the $80 Roxio Easy-VHS-to-DVD is a great option. While their primary purpose is to convert VHS tapes to digital formats, these products work just as well with any kind of player that can connect via a composite video cable.<p>Both of these products include software for converting the video to a variety of digital file formats and making simple edits. They also include built-in sharing tools so you can automatically upload your videos to YouTube or Facebook from within the same app.<p>Consider compression<p>Depending on what you plan to do with the converted video, compression can be an important consideration. If your goal is to preserve the video indefinitely, you'll want to convert it with no compression at all. This will minimize digital artifacts, and you'll have a great starting point should you choose to share the video in other formats later on. Just be aware that importing an uncompressed movie requires a lot of storage space.<p>If you do choose to compress your video, go for the least-destructive encoding format you can get away with. MP4 is a very good choice for most purposes, offering high image and audio quality with relatively few artifacts. Chances are, if you're importing an old VHS or Super 8 video, the artifacts you'll get from the MP4 encoding won't be nearly as noticeable as those introduced by the original tape media the video came from.<p>For Mac users, the Roxio Easy-VHS-to-DVD is a good analog-to-digital converter.<p>Edit your videos<p>Once you've transferred your video from tape to your hard drive, you'll probably want to do some editing. The built-in video-editing tools in Windows and Mac OS X are generally fine for basic tweaks, but you may want to step up to something like Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premiere Elements to take advantage of a broader selection of tools and filters. (And if you're already buying Photoshop Elements, you can take advantage of Adobe's $150 bundle offer of both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements.)<p>Converting old videos and photos to digital form lets you share them online, print them, burn them to discs to give as gifts, or just curl up with your tablet by the fire and relive the good old days. It'll be interesting to see what we'll do with the new generation of family memories—trapped on phones, posted to one social site but not another, or stashed on a hard drive. Maybe put them in an album?

How to digitize holiday photos and videos

The holidays are one of the few times when we still pull out the old family albums and childhood videos to share with the people we love. As...

Read more »

How to digitize holiday photos and videos

The holidays are one of the few times when we still pull out the old family albums and childhood videos to share with the people we love. As long as they're out, it's also a good time to work on digitizing those memories—not just to protect the originals, but to share them on Facebook, Instagram, or sites like Picasa or Snapfish. Once digitized, you can even use the images to create new albums or other gifts.<p>You could outsource that work to a service, but you may already have most of the gear to do it yourself—and what you don't have is pretty easy and affordable to get. Here's everything you need to convert your old media into modern digital files and then prepare them for sharing with your friends and family.<p>Choose your photo scanner<p>Scanner technology has changed little over the years, so any scanner or multifunction printer (which has an integrated scanner) purchased even five or more years ago should be more than adequate for the job of converting your old photos. Just be sure it has a flatbed scanning surface, rather than a sheetfeeder that pulls media through a slot. Old pictures tend to suffer from warps, small tears, and surface blemishes that could cause a sheetfed scanner to jam—or worse, destroy the print.<p>PHOTO: MICHAEL HOMNICK<p>The Epson Perfection V550 can digitize slides and negatives as well as photos.<p>If you don't yet have a scanner, our buying guide will help you find a good model for your needs. To scan formats that your existing scanner doesn't support (such as slides and negatives), the Epson Perfection V550 is an excellent choice for about $150.<p>General-purpose scanners integrated into multifunction printers lack the ability to scan slides and negatives, but they perform well for regular photo scanning. I particularly like the $250 HP Envy 120, which produces beautiful scans and prints, and looks sleek and unobtrusive sitting in my living-room entertainment center. If you plan to do a lot of scanning, though, a dedicated photo scanner will make the job much easier.<p>ROBERTCARDIN<p>The HP Envy 120 can scan regular photos (but not slides or negatives), and it looks stylish in your<p>The overarching rule of scanning old photos echoes the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. After you've digitized the originals, safeguard them in a high-quality, acid-free archival box—and that would mean, not a shoebox.<p>Scanner tips and tricks<p>Scanners tend to be slow, and scanning software tends to take over your PC while it's active. Here are my two favorite tips for minimizing frustration and tedium while scanning photos.<p>First, take advantage of the features in your scanner's driver software, which will most likely offer a way to differentiate and automatically separate multiple photos during the scanning process. This will let you place as many images as possible onto the scanning surface with each pass, saving you a lot of time.<p>Second, choose the scanning resolution wisely. While you could use the highest resolution your scanner offers (for most these days, it's 9600 or 19,200 dots per inch), the scan will take forever—or possibly cause your PC to slow to a crawl—and the result will be a really huge file.<p>For a typical snapshot, a scan at 300 dpi will suffice. That doesn't sound like much, but if you try a scan at the next step up, usually 600 dpi, you'll likely not see a visible difference—we haven't, over our many years of conducting scanning tests. Save the highest resolutions for very small photos that you might want to scale up to a larger size.<p>Upgrade your photo software<p>When it comes to heirloom photos, good photo-editing software will make all the difference in the final digitized product. You don't need a full-blown copy of Photoshop, but neither should you entrust your precious memories to iPhoto or Windows' built-in Photos app. For $100, Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 offers tremendous editing power in an app that's easy enough for amateurs to learn quickly. For Windows or Mac, it's the best all-around choice for home photo editing.<p>Photoshop Elements offers a great blend of quick-fix tools and pro-quality editing options for touching up your scans. Photo-editing novices can start out using Quick mode for basic lighting fixes, red-eye removal, and touch-ups. These simple tools can go a long way toward preparing your pictures for sharing.<p>If you're feeling more adventurous and are up for some advanced touch-ups, here are a few useful tricks you can try:<p>Old snapshots often suffer from terrible underexposure, making them look dark and grainy. Here's a guide that shows you how to salvage an underexposed photo. If your subjects aren't looking their best in an otherwise priceless shot, try these tricks for touching up portraits. Check out this collection of easy photo-fixing tricks.<p>The Pinnacle Dazzle Platinum HD works with Windows PCs to convert analog videos to digital form.<p>Convert analog videos to digital<p>The quality of VHS, Betamax, and Super 8 tapes can degrade over time. If the tapes are still playable, digitize them sooner rather than later.<p>You will need a working video player or camera capable of playing back the original format. Once you have a working player, you'll need a digital video converter to connect it to your PC. The Pinnacle Dazzle Platinum HD is an excellent choice for Windows users. For the Mac, the $80 Roxio Easy-VHS-to-DVD is a great option. While their primary purpose is to convert VHS tapes to digital formats, these products work just as well with any kind of player that can connect via a composite video cable.<p>Both of these products include software for converting the video to a variety of digital file formats and making simple edits. They also include built-in sharing tools so you can automatically upload your videos to YouTube or Facebook from within the same app.<p>Consider compression<p>Depending on what you plan to do with the converted video, compression can be an important consideration. If your goal is to preserve the video indefinitely, you'll want to convert it with no compression at all. This will minimize digital artifacts, and you'll have a great starting point should you choose to share the video in other formats later on. Just be aware that importing an uncompressed movie requires a lot of storage space.<p>If you do choose to compress your video, go for the least-destructive encoding format you can get away with. MP4 is a very good choice for most purposes, offering high image and audio quality with relatively few artifacts. Chances are, if you're importing an old VHS or Super 8 video, the artifacts you'll get from the MP4 encoding won't be nearly as noticeable as those introduced by the original tape media the video came from.<p>For Mac users, the Roxio Easy-VHS-to-DVD is a good analog-to-digital converter.<p>Edit your videos<p>Once you've transferred your video from tape to your hard drive, you'll probably want to do some editing. The built-in video-editing tools in Windows and Mac OS X are generally fine for basic tweaks, but you may want to step up to something like Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premiere Elements to take advantage of a broader selection of tools and filters. (And if you're already buying Photoshop Elements, you can take advantage of Adobe's $150 bundle offer of both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements.)<p>Converting old videos and photos to digital form lets you share them online, print them, burn them to discs to give as gifts, or just curl up with your tablet by the fire and relive the good old days. It'll be interesting to see what we'll do with the new generation of family memories—trapped on phones, posted to one social site but not another, or stashed on a hard drive. Maybe put them in an album?

How to digitize holiday photos and videos

The holidays are one of the few times when we still pull out the old family albums and childhood videos to share with the people we love. As...

Read more »

HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One review: Home printer has print quality and cheaper inks in its favor

The $130 HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (copy/print/scan), will cover a low volume of home use nicely. It's exceptionally easy to use, surprisingly capable, and produces impressive output. On the downside are its lack of speed and pricey inks, but HP's new Instant Ink program might help that somewhat.<p>Svelte design with some surprising features<p>The HP Envy 5530 is rather compact for a multifunction printer. The scanner lid is so thin that at first glance, you might not recognize it as such. However, there's an A4/letter-sized scanner on-board, and it produces good-looking copies and scans. You can even push-scan to a PC across the network—not a feature you see in every printer at this price point.<p>The Envy 5530 offers automatic duplexing, which isn't a guarantee in this price range. Everything else about the paper handling is pretty modest: just 100 sheets (input) and 30 sheets (output)—if having printed pages fall right on top of blank pages counts as an output area. If you print any more than 200 pages per month, you should be looking at a more robust machine.<p>Setting up the HP Envy 5530 is easy whether you use USB or Wi-Fi, and thanks to a 2.65-inch touchscreen and exceptionally well thought out menus, so is operation. The display and all the controls are on the top left of the unit, and intuitively arranged. The only other feature worth mentioning is the SD card slot for direct printing and off-loading scans.<p>HP doesn't bundle a lot of software with the Envy 5530, but what's there is easy and capable. The driver and scanning utilities are nicely rendered and offer all the features most users need. There's also the now usual suite of remote printing options, including HP ePrint via email and Apple AirPrint.<p>While the assumption is that this printer isn't going to be used much, it still bears mentioning that the Envy 5530 is pretty slow. It managed an anemic 5.9 pages per minute (ppm) printing plain text and a few simple, monochrome graphics on both the PC and Mac platforms. Snapshot-sized, 4-by-6-inch photos printed at about 2.5 ppm to plain paper, but to glossy paper that slowed to 0.8 ppm. Full-sized photos printed at about 0.4 ppm on glossy paper, while copies exited at about 3 ppm. Scan times are bearable, albeit two to three times longer than what you'll see from top-shelf units.<p>Along with minimal paper capacity and slow performance, the Envy 5530 suffers (as most low-cost printers do) from expensive ink. At least if you buy on your own: The standard 61 series black and tri-color cartridges cost $15 and $21 respectively, yet last for only 199 and 165 pages. That's 7.5 cents per page for the black and 12.75 cent per page for the colors, or a daunting 20.15 cents per four-color page. You can reduce those costs considerably with the $30 black and $32 tri-color 61XL cartridges, to about 16 cents per four-color page, but black still comprises a high 6.25 cents of that amount.<p>Instant Ink Program could save you money<p>As to that "buy on your own" comment, the Envy 5530 is eligible for HP's new Instant Ink service. With Instant Ink, HP sells you massively capacious ink cartridges, then doles the ink out on a monthly basis. You can print 50 pages of anything—a bit of text, or a heavy-coverage photo for a flat fee of $3 a month (6 cents per page), while 100 pages costs $5 a month (5 cents per page), and 300 pages are $10 (3.3 cents per page). That's a whole lot cheaper than manual user replacement, but only if you print fairly close to the number of pages in the plan. If you barely print 100 pages a year, then just buying the cartridges on your own might be a better deal. Also, the whole Instant Ink deal depends on your printer having an Internet connection, and your being comfortable with HP's managing your printer in the background.<p>Along with ease of use, the Envy 5530's other major strength is its output quality. Text is clear and sharp, even in draft mode, and color graphics are also surprisingly accurate. You might want to tweak the photo settings a bit for a warmer color temperature on glossy photos, but other than that it's all good.<p>The HP Envy 5530 is in many ways a typical home printer: It's somewhat slow, with adequate features, and its low purchase price is balanced out by higher-priced inks. However, its Instant Ink program is intriguing for its savings potential, and its output quality and ease of use are distinctly better than usual for this price class. It's well worth considering for a home user.

HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One review: Home printer has print quality and cheaper inks in its favor

The $130 HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (copy/print/scan), will cover a low volume of home use nicely. It's except...

Read more »

Twitter simplifies messaging, adds photos to boot

Twitter has made its direct messaging service easier to use and added the ability to send photos, in an update to the Twitter app for Android and iOS released Tuesday.<p>The messaging service is now displayed prominently in the navigation bar at the bottom of the home screen, so it's only one tap away. Previously, users had to navigate to the "Me" screen and from there open the messaging service.<p>Twitter has also added the ability to send and view photos in direct messages. Those photos can also be viewed in messages on the desktop at <a href="http://twitter.com">twitter.com</a>.<p>Mobile-to-mobile messaging is a hot area right now. Facebook recently updated its own Messenger service to let people message each other even if they're not Facebook friends. Other services like SnapChat, WhatsApp and WeChat are also attracting users.<p>The changes to Twitter could make it more widely used for messaging and reduce the time people spend using those other apps. It doesn't yet offer some of the extra features, though, like SnapChat's vanishing photos.<p>Overseas, Twitter has identified South Korea's Kakao, a messaging service, and Line, a calling and messaging app popular in Japan, as among its biggest competitors. So Twitter's expanded messaging features could help it compete better there too.<p>The update also lets users swipe between different screens in Twitter. From the Home screen, you can now swipe to the Discover page to see trending topics and popular tweets, and the Activity page to see tweets and accounts that are popular among the people you follow.<p>There are also new features specific to different platforms. In the iOS app, in-app notifications now alert people when they receive a direct message or a tweet gets favorited or replied to. And on Android, people can turn on notifications for specific users.

Twitter simplifies messaging, adds photos to boot

Twitter has made its direct messaging service easier to use and added the ability to send photos, in an update to the Twitter app for Androi...

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Google feeds 'net giants India and China from data centers next door

Google Inc opened its first two data centers in Asia on Wednesday to cater to the world's fastest growing consumer technology markets, but the company has no plans to open one in China or India.<p>Choosing Taiwan and Singapore instead illustrates the problem that tech companies face in trying to feed data demand in the world's two most populous countries: With regulations in flux in India and cyberspace censorship in China, Google had to look next door.<p>Mobile data traffic in emerging Asia-Pacific countries will likely rise 68 percent in 2014, well ahead of the global growth rate of 48 percent and the fastest growing region in the world, according to Analysys Mason, a research consultancy. Tech companies normally try to keep data centers as close to the customer base as possible because distance hurts speed.<p>"While we've been busy building, the growth in Asia's Internet has been amazing. The number of Internet users in India doubled, from 100 million to 200 million. It took six years to achieve that milestone in the U.S.," Google's vice president of data centers, Joe Kava, said in a statement.<p>"And this growth probably won't slow for some time, since the majority of people that have yet to come online also happen to live in Asia," he said.<p>Kava said the cost of building the centers was one consideration for locating in Taiwan, but things like data privacy policies, a highly trained workforce and network infrastructure were equally important.<p>"It's no secret that the Taiwanese ecosystem for technology companies is outstanding," he told reporters. "Being close to the technology companies will give us opportunity to further some of our partnerships" in Taiwan.<p>The importance of a country's data policies was highlighted by the way Google opened its centers in Taiwan and Singapore and its decision to double spending in Taiwan to $600 million compared to $120 million in Singapore.<p>While Google brought out executives and media to celebrate its Taiwan opening on Wednesday, the Singapore launch received no such fanfare.<p>The company has expressed concern over a Singapore regulation announced in May that requires certain websites that regularly report on Singapore to be licensed, put up a S$50,000 ($40,000) performance bond and take down within 24 hours any content that authorities deemed objectionable.<p>Singaporean opinion news site Breakfast Network effectively shut down this week as a result, saying the "demand to register has created a wrinkle in our barely formed plans to become a sustainable and professional outfit".<p>Google also announced it abandoned plans to build a third data centre in Hong Kong, citing primarily a lack of land.<p>SERVING 2.5 BILLION<p>Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are all popular with global tech companies because they boast well-established privacy laws, reliable power and fiber broadband infrastructure, and skilled workforces, all essential to operating data centers.<p>Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp are also building data centers in Asia in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. But the real appeal is the giant number of Internet users in China and India.<p>Google left mainland China in 2010 after a cyber attack and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal last month that the company is in no hurry to return.<p>"China's censorship regime has gotten significantly worse since we left so something would have to change before we come back," he said.<p>That left an opening for China's Baidu Inc to further dominate the search engine market with a 66 percent share this year, according to web analytical tool StatCounter, and another local rival, 360 Search, to emerge, grabbing 21 percent. Google's share dropped to 9 percent from 41 percent in 2009 before its exit China.<p>"The regulatory environment in China is designed in a way to nurture local service providers such as Alibaba, so it makes it harder for foreign companies to enter the market," tech researcher IDC analyst Leon Kao, who is based in Taipei, said.<p>"But adding service support in Asia such as Hong Kong still increases a company's flexibility. For example, Amazon is able to deliver goods in a much shorter time now if there's a sudden surge in orders."<p>In India, Google dominates 97 percent share of the search engine market, data from StatCounter showed.<p>"In India, the challenge is mostly the cost of infrastructure and the ability of building infrastructure", said RadhaKrishna Hiremane, Intel Corp's Asia-Pacific regional product marketing manager of data centre business, based in Singapore.<p>He said putting an India-focused data centre in Singapore may not cost more, but it could affect speed.<p>"What matters is latency. At the end of the day, if a service provider is able to provide acceptable latency for the end customers by serving from outside the region and there's no conflicting regulation such as data sovereignty, then there's not anything in the APEC countries we know would be an issue right now."<p>($1 = 1.2495 Singapore dollars)

Google feeds 'net giants India and China from data centers next door

Google Inc opened its first two data centers in Asia on Wednesday to cater to the world's fastest growing consumer technology markets, b...

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HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One review: Home printer has print quality and cheaper inks in its favor

The $130 HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (copy/print/scan), will cover a low volume of home use nicely. It's exceptionally easy to use, surprisingly capable, and produces impressive output. On the downside are its lack of speed and pricey inks, but HP's new Instant Ink program might help that somewhat.<p>Svelte design with some surprising features<p>The HP Envy 5530 is rather compact for a multifunction printer. The scanner lid is so thin that at first glance, you might not recognize it as such. However, there's an A4/letter-sized scanner on-board, and it produces good-looking copies and scans. You can even push-scan to a PC across the network—not a feature you see in every printer at this price point.<p>The Envy 5530 offers automatic duplexing, which isn't a guarantee in this price range. Everything else about the paper handling is pretty modest: just 100 sheets (input) and 30 sheets (output)—if having printed pages fall right on top of blank pages counts as an output area. If you print any more than 200 pages per month, you should be looking at a more robust machine.<p>Setting up the HP Envy 5530 is easy whether you use USB or Wi-Fi, and thanks to a 2.65-inch touchscreen and exceptionally well thought out menus, so is operation. The display and all the controls are on the top left of the unit, and intuitively arranged. The only other feature worth mentioning is the SD card slot for direct printing and off-loading scans.<p>HP doesn't bundle a lot of software with the Envy 5530, but what's there is easy and capable. The driver and scanning utilities are nicely rendered and offer all the features most users need. There's also the now usual suite of remote printing options, including HP ePrint via email and Apple AirPrint.<p>While the assumption is that this printer isn't going to be used much, it still bears mentioning that the Envy 5530 is pretty slow. It managed an anemic 5.9 pages per minute (ppm) printing plain text and a few simple, monochrome graphics on both the PC and Mac platforms. Snapshot-sized, 4-by-6-inch photos printed at about 2.5 ppm to plain paper, but to glossy paper that slowed to 0.8 ppm. Full-sized photos printed at about 0.4 ppm on glossy paper, while copies exited at about 3 ppm. Scan times are bearable, albeit two to three times longer than what you'll see from top-shelf units.<p>Along with minimal paper capacity and slow performance, the Envy 5530 suffers (as most low-cost printers do) from expensive ink. At least if you buy on your own: The standard 61 series black and tri-color cartridges cost $15 and $21 respectively, yet last for only 199 and 165 pages. That's 7.5 cents per page for the black and 12.75 cent per page for the colors, or a daunting 20.15 cents per four-color page. You can reduce those costs considerably with the $30 black and $32 tri-color 61XL cartridges, to about 16 cents per four-color page, but black still comprises a high 6.25 cents of that amount.<p>Instant Ink Program could save you money<p>As to that "buy on your own" comment, the Envy 5530 is eligible for HP's new Instant Ink service. With Instant Ink, HP sells you massively capacious ink cartridges, then doles the ink out on a monthly basis. You can print 50 pages of anything—a bit of text, or a heavy-coverage photo for a flat fee of $3 a month (6 cents per page), while 100 pages costs $5 a month (5 cents per page), and 300 pages are $10 (3.3 cents per page). That's a whole lot cheaper than manual user replacement, but only if you print fairly close to the number of pages in the plan. If you barely print 100 pages a year, then just buying the cartridges on your own might be a better deal. Also, the whole Instant Ink deal depends on your printer having an Internet connection, and your being comfortable with HP's managing your printer in the background.<p>Along with ease of use, the Envy 5530's other major strength is its output quality. Text is clear and sharp, even in draft mode, and color graphics are also surprisingly accurate. You might want to tweak the photo settings a bit for a warmer color temperature on glossy photos, but other than that it's all good.<p>The HP Envy 5530 is in many ways a typical home printer: It's somewhat slow, with adequate features, and its low purchase price is balanced out by higher-priced inks. However, its Instant Ink program is intriguing for its savings potential, and its output quality and ease of use are distinctly better than usual for this price class. It's well worth considering for a home user.

HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One review: Home printer has print quality and cheaper inks in its favor

The $130 HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (copy/print/scan), will cover a low volume of home use nicely. It's except...

Read more »

Twitter simplifies messaging, adds photos to boot

Twitter has made its direct messaging service easier to use and added the ability to send photos, in an update to the Twitter app for Android and iOS released Tuesday.<p>The messaging service is now displayed prominently in the navigation bar at the bottom of the home screen, so it's only one tap away. Previously, users had to navigate to the "Me" screen and from there open the messaging service.<p>Twitter has also added the ability to send and view photos in direct messages. Those photos can also be viewed in messages on the desktop at <a href="http://twitter.com">twitter.com</a>.<p>Mobile-to-mobile messaging is a hot area right now. Facebook recently updated its own Messenger service to let people message each other even if they're not Facebook friends. Other services like SnapChat, WhatsApp and WeChat are also attracting users.<p>The changes to Twitter could make it more widely used for messaging and reduce the time people spend using those other apps. It doesn't yet offer some of the extra features, though, like SnapChat's vanishing photos.<p>Overseas, Twitter has identified South Korea's Kakao, a messaging service, and Line, a calling and messaging app popular in Japan, as among its biggest competitors. So Twitter's expanded messaging features could help it compete better there too.<p>The update also lets users swipe between different screens in Twitter. From the Home screen, you can now swipe to the Discover page to see trending topics and popular tweets, and the Activity page to see tweets and accounts that are popular among the people you follow.<p>There are also new features specific to different platforms. In the iOS app, in-app notifications now alert people when they receive a direct message or a tweet gets favorited or replied to. And on Android, people can turn on notifications for specific users.

Twitter simplifies messaging, adds photos to boot

Twitter has made its direct messaging service easier to use and added the ability to send photos, in an update to the Twitter app for Androi...

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Google feeds 'net giants India and China from data centers next door

Google Inc opened its first two data centers in Asia on Wednesday to cater to the world's fastest growing consumer technology markets, but the company has no plans to open one in China or India.<p>Choosing Taiwan and Singapore instead illustrates the problem that tech companies face in trying to feed data demand in the world's two most populous countries: With regulations in flux in India and cyberspace censorship in China, Google had to look next door.<p>Mobile data traffic in emerging Asia-Pacific countries will likely rise 68 percent in 2014, well ahead of the global growth rate of 48 percent and the fastest growing region in the world, according to Analysys Mason, a research consultancy. Tech companies normally try to keep data centers as close to the customer base as possible because distance hurts speed.<p>"While we've been busy building, the growth in Asia's Internet has been amazing. The number of Internet users in India doubled, from 100 million to 200 million. It took six years to achieve that milestone in the U.S.," Google's vice president of data centers, Joe Kava, said in a statement.<p>"And this growth probably won't slow for some time, since the majority of people that have yet to come online also happen to live in Asia," he said.<p>Kava said the cost of building the centers was one consideration for locating in Taiwan, but things like data privacy policies, a highly trained workforce and network infrastructure were equally important.<p>"It's no secret that the Taiwanese ecosystem for technology companies is outstanding," he told reporters. "Being close to the technology companies will give us opportunity to further some of our partnerships" in Taiwan.<p>The importance of a country's data policies was highlighted by the way Google opened its centers in Taiwan and Singapore and its decision to double spending in Taiwan to $600 million compared to $120 million in Singapore.<p>While Google brought out executives and media to celebrate its Taiwan opening on Wednesday, the Singapore launch received no such fanfare.<p>The company has expressed concern over a Singapore regulation announced in May that requires certain websites that regularly report on Singapore to be licensed, put up a S$50,000 ($40,000) performance bond and take down within 24 hours any content that authorities deemed objectionable.<p>Singaporean opinion news site Breakfast Network effectively shut down this week as a result, saying the "demand to register has created a wrinkle in our barely formed plans to become a sustainable and professional outfit".<p>Google also announced it abandoned plans to build a third data centre in Hong Kong, citing primarily a lack of land.<p>SERVING 2.5 BILLION<p>Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are all popular with global tech companies because they boast well-established privacy laws, reliable power and fiber broadband infrastructure, and skilled workforces, all essential to operating data centers.<p>Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp are also building data centers in Asia in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. But the real appeal is the giant number of Internet users in China and India.<p>Google left mainland China in 2010 after a cyber attack and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal last month that the company is in no hurry to return.<p>"China's censorship regime has gotten significantly worse since we left so something would have to change before we come back," he said.<p>That left an opening for China's Baidu Inc to further dominate the search engine market with a 66 percent share this year, according to web analytical tool StatCounter, and another local rival, 360 Search, to emerge, grabbing 21 percent. Google's share dropped to 9 percent from 41 percent in 2009 before its exit China.<p>"The regulatory environment in China is designed in a way to nurture local service providers such as Alibaba, so it makes it harder for foreign companies to enter the market," tech researcher IDC analyst Leon Kao, who is based in Taipei, said.<p>"But adding service support in Asia such as Hong Kong still increases a company's flexibility. For example, Amazon is able to deliver goods in a much shorter time now if there's a sudden surge in orders."<p>In India, Google dominates 97 percent share of the search engine market, data from StatCounter showed.<p>"In India, the challenge is mostly the cost of infrastructure and the ability of building infrastructure", said RadhaKrishna Hiremane, Intel Corp's Asia-Pacific regional product marketing manager of data centre business, based in Singapore.<p>He said putting an India-focused data centre in Singapore may not cost more, but it could affect speed.<p>"What matters is latency. At the end of the day, if a service provider is able to provide acceptable latency for the end customers by serving from outside the region and there's no conflicting regulation such as data sovereignty, then there's not anything in the APEC countries we know would be an issue right now."<p>($1 = 1.2495 Singapore dollars)

Google feeds 'net giants India and China from data centers next door

Google Inc opened its first two data centers in Asia on Wednesday to cater to the world's fastest growing consumer technology markets, b...

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Celkon C76 basic phone speaks 8 Indian languages, available now for Rs 1,899 Celkon C76 basic phone speaks 8 Indian languages, available now for Rs 1,899

The Celkon C76 feature phone has been announced for people in India who would like to operate their The Celkon C76 feature phone has been announced for people in India who would like to operate their devices in their mother tongues as it extends support to as many as 8 local languages. Those who wish devices in their mother tongues as it extends support to as many as 8 local languages. Those who wish to lay their hands on this basic handset can do so by shelling out Rs 1,899 for it. to lay their hands on this basic handset can do so by shelling out Rs 1,899 for it.<p>Languages supported by the device include Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu Languages supported by the device include Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu apart from English. And like its competitors such as the apart from English. And like its competitors such as the Maxx MX100 Leader Maxx MX100 Leader and the and the Penta Bharat Phone Penta Bharat Phone PF300 PF300 , the device lets you access the internet. A common feature that is found in most of the similar , the device lets you access the internet. A common feature that is found in most of the similar devices, that is, presence of dual SIM cards slots, has been tossed into this gadget. It can support two devices, that is, presence of dual SIM cards slots, has been tossed into this gadget. It can support two GSM SIM cards. GSM SIM cards.<p>It is a candy bar phone with an alphanumeric keyboard and a screen on the front side. The QVGA display on the front has a resolution of 240 x 320 It is a candy bar phone with an alphanumeric keyboard and a screen on the front side. The QVGA display on the front has a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and offers a viewing real estate of 2.8 inches. On the rear side, potential customers will find a 1.3MP camera that can be used for capturing video pixels and offers a viewing real estate of 2.8 inches. On the rear side, potential customers will find a 1.3MP camera that can be used for capturing video apart from clicking pictures. apart from clicking pictures.<p>And what's more, it has Bluetooth, a USB port and a 3.5mm audio jack for connectivity purposes and it strives towards keeping users entertained at all And what's more, it has Bluetooth, a USB port and a 3.5mm audio jack for connectivity purposes and it strives towards keeping users entertained at all times with its audio and video players. You can reject calls by SMS and increase its internal memory by up to 8GB via a microSD card. A 1400mAh times with its audio and video players. You can reject calls by SMS and increase its internal memory by up to 8GB via a microSD card. A 1400mAh battery fuels the device from within. battery fuels the device from within.<p>The Celkon C76 basic phone can now be The Celkon C76 basic phone can now be purchased purchased for a price of Rs 1,899.

Celkon C76 basic phone speaks 8 Indian languages, available now for Rs 1,899 Celkon C76 basic phone speaks 8 Indian languages, available now for Rs 1,899

The Celkon C76 feature phone has been announced for people in India who would like to operate their The Celkon C76 feature phone has been an...

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