I don’t care much for Las Vegas. It’s crowded, phony and designed to take your money as fast as you can dish it out. In spite of my feelings about the city, I spend a lot of time there, because that’s were a number of the major trade shows happen. Earlier in the month I spent a few days at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. PMA is where pro photographers gather to see the latest and greatest in cameras and printers, as well as a wide array of accessories from memory cards to digital picture frames to carrying cases to you-name-it-and-someone-has-it. It was an eye opening experience. As a semi-pro photographer and long-time Epson professional printer user, I was absolutely shocked to see how far both HP and Canon have come in the pro printer market. (Full article ‘Pro Printer Titans Clash in Vegas’)

We have been spending lots of time with the latest sound card from Creative, called the X-Fi. While it looks like an ordinary PCI sound card, the innards are completely new and improved and worth spending some time on. Here we give you plenty of the straight dope, based on our tests and living with various pre-production versions for over a year now. You might also want to review our two previous articles on the card that we published earlier this summer: Creative’s X-Fi: A New Age in Sound Card Power? Creative’s sound cards have undergone considerable development, starting with the days of the first Sound Blaster “PRO” card in 1991, which offered 8-bit sound. This was followed by the famous AWE 32 and Live!, and then the Audigy, which has been the standard for sound cards until now. But X-Fi represents an enormous leap forward in terms of power and capability for handling and processing digital audio. (Full article ‘Creative X-Fi: A New World of Sound’)

There is a term you may have heard in the 1980s and ’90s. It held the promise of the ultimate handshake between technology and entertainment. The term defined an idea that became very popular and actually brushed against pop culture for a time - they even made a movie or two about it. But after its initial surge of popularity, it became obvious that the technology needed to bring this concept into the hands of the public wouldn’t be available for some time. The term’s popularity waned, and now it’s gone out of style. The term was virtual reality. Virtual reality promised us the ability to explore virtual worlds in a way so convincing to our senses that we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from actual reality. (Full article ‘Wall-Sized 3D Displays: The Ultimate Gaming Room’)

Last March, we described in Skype for PPC: Free Phone Calls from a Windows Pocket PC? how to make free telephone calls using a PDA and Skype. In the meantime, Skype has introduced numerous enhancements to its offerings and has also grown its user base to exceed 3.1 million users (the day we translated this story into English, eBay announced its intentions to acquire Skype in a deal worth up to $4.1 billion). That history and Skype’s 46% share of the IP telephony service market also help to explain why Intel formed a partnership with Skype, which Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger formally acknowledged last month. Without exception, the most important of the new offerings that Skype has rolled out since the start of 2005 is its reasonably priced SkypeIn service. (Full article ‘Connecting With Skype’s Phone Service’)

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of buyer’s guides that focus on consumer-oriented PC printers. We cover some of the most popular black-and-white, or monochrome, laser printers, including two multi-function copier (MFC) models. We also look at a single printer that handles tabloid-size pages for those with plus-size output needs, in keeping with our emphasis on units suitable for home or SOHO use. Our previous installments covered 11 Color Inkjet Printers, 16 Multi-Function Inkjet Printers, and 12 Color Laser Printers Explored. Be sure to check them out as well.

The basic mechanics of a monochrome laser printer are much simpler compared to color, because only a single laser is needed. With a monochrome laser printer, pages are printed with only a single pass of a laser across a photosensitive receptor.

(Full article ‘12 Monochrome Laser Printers’)