noise

What's the difference between noise-cancelling and noise-isolating headphones?

Digital Living What's the difference between 'noise-isolating' and 'noise-cancelling' headphones? Both 'noise-isolating' and 'noise-cancelling' headphones aim to reduce how much sound from the outside world gets into your ear and subtracts from your listening...

19 April 2007, 10:52

Blu-ray and HD DVD: The facts

Digital Living Watch the standard DVD edition on a big TV and Kong's fur will be a largely indistinct mass of dark grey and black; the buildings and streets of Manhattan, lying in the background, will be slightly fuzzy; and behind them, you'll notice little...

1 June 2007, 17:40

Build the ultimate quiet PC

Digital Living The biggest culprits of noise pollution are the heatsink and fan that cool a PC's central processing unit (CPU). The oft-forgotten power supply unit (PSU; see picture 1) is a major contributor to PC noise.

7 September 2006, 16:49

Do I need to pay more than £30 for earphones?

Digital Living As sound-isolating earphones, they also help block out external noise such as conversation, keyboard tapping, etc. Noise-cancelling headphones can cost around £300 -- Sennheiser's PXC 450s, for example -- but offer a unique technology: they...

Tags: noise, compressed, speaker, pair

17 October 2007, 15:30

Can camcorders take great stills?

Digital Living Camcorders that give good colour and low noise can provide scaled-down stills that have comparable image quality to a higher-resolution camera or camcorder with noise or colour issues. I'm new to the world of hard disk camcorders and I want to get...

Tags: megapixel, colour, noise, frame

21 November 2007, 14:15

Is a film SLR camera better than a digital SLR camera?

Digital Living Functions such as noise reduction and compression can cause problems. Over-vigorous noise reduction can soften detail in images, while excessive compression results in smaller file sizes, but can lead to horrible artefacts showing up in the picture.

28 September 2007, 15:48

Hacking Napster with Winamp

Digital Living An approved sound card then strips the noise from the file and plays it, evidently with no effect on sound quality. As CNET News.com's John Borland brilliantly pointed out, Microsoft has offered one solution to this industry-wide problem since the...

9 May 2005, 15:48

Spam TV, You TV, Global TV

Digital Living Technology is making this ambient video noise ever more pervasive. It's horrifing to consider the signal-to-noise ratio here: these treasures bob about on an ocean of mediocrity. We are drowning in video content.

4 October 2005, 17:57

Sony NW-S703F

Digital Living It's such a simple idea, it's a wonder no-one has thought of it before -- an MP3 player with noise cancelling built in! But is it a Shuffle beater?

16 February 2007, 9:47

Lost on the Underground with my PVR

Digital Living With a good set of headphones, even the noise from an Underground train fades into the background with a dedicated video device. Are people going to want to watch video in public? I've tried it for a while and it's good fun.

26 September 2005, 10:38

Living with infinite digital choice

Digital Living We've taken our seat in the global culture-cafe -- and the noise is deafening. Imagine you're a well-fed consumer of the future. You spend a third of your day working, a third of the day sleeping, and you have another eight hours a day to spend on...

26 October 2005, 12:48

Should I buy a camera or a camera phone? review

Digital Living Because they're so small, most of these sensors aren't very good at working in low light, so shots taken in dimly lit bars and clubs suffer from a great deal of digital noise. I've got an old compact digital camera that has just given up on me, so...

Tags: compact, digital camera, lens, cameras

26 November 2007, 8:00

What's the best type of image stabilisation?

Digital Living The problem with this is higher ISO levels generally lead to grainy speckles, or noise, in the final image. I'm looking to upgrade my digital camera for a new one, but this time around I want something that will take less blurry pictures.

25 July 2007, 13:16

Better digital photos

Digital Living Keep in mind that you will get a little more image noise in the higher ISO settings. Built-in camera flashes are convenient, but they can produce deadly results -- from red-eye to a nuclear-looking, unnatural glow -- when used to take pictures of...

3 August 2006, 16:09

Bluff it as a fashion photographer

Digital Living By setting the ISO low, you're getting the best signal-to-noise ratio. The idiot So, this is you, a clueless fool with a basic digital camera. You don't look like much in your silly hat, do you? Who's going to let you shoot the next Kate Moss...

10 November 2006, 15:23