SAN FRANCISCO - Think your home inkjet printer is just for printing out boarding passes and driving directions? Give it a new lease on life. Here’s how to use your printer to label things, play games, design a clothing line, and more. Whether you’re feeling productive, playful, crafty, or creative, there’s a project here for you–and it won’t require specialized (or expensive) equipment.

Make Super Models

You don’t need to buy a huge kit or a set of expensive tools to start building models. Just look into Papercraft, a do-it-yourself modeling community that uses nothing but printers, paper, and tape. All you have to do is print out the model sheets, cut them out, and follow the instructions, though they can be as simple as a basic box shape or as complicated as this papercraft replication of a classic IBM Thinkpad laptop, complete with accurately modeled internal parts.

Paperkraft.net is a good place to start–this papercraft blog is updated daily with all kinds of new models, including plenty of contributions based on retro tech, sci-fi, and video game themes. My personal favorite is the official Street Fighter II set.

Print Your Own Posters

You don’t need to break the bank at your local music store to plaster your wall with pics of your favorite band. Here’s a faster, cheaper, and easier way to do it: Just pull a few high-resolution images from Google Image Search, run them through a poster-printing app, and you’ll be able to print them out on letter-sized pages from your printer and assemble them yourself. Some printers have their own poster-size printing functions (look in the Page Setup dialogue box), but I prefer to use the Rasterbator and Easy Poster Printer–apps that can take an image and blow it up into readily printable letter-sheet-size chunks you can tape together.

This is particularly useful for students who have a small dorm-decorating budget (and some extra printer credit at the end of a semester) and really want some larger-than-life LOLcats on their walls. Of course, you’ll have to shell out for some photo-quality paper if you want your posters to have that glossy look, but it’s still cheaper than buying posters from the store, and you’re not limited to a store’s selection, either.

Get Organized

Whether you need to label your file folders, stick name tags to your personal possessions, or simply remind yourself that a stapler is, in fact, a stapler, your printer can get the job done.

Load up any inkjet printer with a label sheet, and you can guarantee that everything in your house or home office has that clean, organized look. With the right templates, your printer can push out everything from address labels to name tags. If you’re using Avery label sheets (or cheaper brands with the same dimensions, like Worldlabel), don’t forget to grab the Avery Wizard app for Microsoft Office–using the manufacturer-supplied templates can help you avoid misprints and save you time and money.

But why stop there? Your stack of burned discs with the barely-legible permanent marker tags are so 1998. Give your carefully crafted mix CDs some extra street cred with print-out disc labels. If your printer is one of certain models from Epson or HP (the HP Photosmart D5360 and C5280, or the Epson Artisan 50/710/810 and Stylus Photo 1400 and R1900), your printer may have a special tray that supports direct printing onto special CD/DVD disks, saving yourself the hassle of buying separate disc labels and the risk of messing up an optical drive if a label comes off or gets stuck.

Home brewers, on the other hand, will want to grab some waterproof labels to class up their operation a bit–it’s no fun being a do-it-yourself beer or wine snob if you’re still using masking tape and Magic Marker to label your bottles. (This also makes your homemade hooch more appropriate gift for a house call.)
Get Your (Old-School) Game On

A printer might not be much of a match for an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but with a little imagination on your part, it can be a pretty solid game machine in its own right. Simple print-and-play games like word searches, crossword puzzles, and dot-and-boxes sheets are readily available on Google if you’re looking for a low-tech way to amuse yourself (or the kids) during a long car ride. HP even has a printable version of tabletop football available, in case you feel like your finger-flicking field goals need more flash.

However, you can find plenty of printer games that cater to the more discriminating gamer. Start by hunting through BoardGameGeek.com, a Web site devoted to the art (and craft) of making and playing board games, many of which are free to download, print, and play. Just use the site’s Advanced Search button, click Filter on Board Game Category, and check the Print and Play box to see a full list of games with instant gratification.

Your printer can also supplement your existing gaming habits, too. Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts can use the D&D Character Builder app (free demo available) to keep track of your characters and loot, complete with readily printable character sheets. Feel like getting back into Magic: the Gathering but don’t want to fork over obscene amounts of money on cards? MagicCards.info has printable proxy images of every card in every single series, so you won’t need to take out a second mortgage to get back in the game.
Conserve Ink on Web Print-Outs

By now, any decent Web page should have a link to a “printer-friendly” version of its content, especially for things like reservations, e-tickets, articles, or maps. Sometimes, though, they’re just not that great. Maybe you’re running low on ink and it simply won’t print without the images, or the formatting is off and you’ll waste paper.

Never fear, PrintWhatYouLike.com is here. Just plug in an URL (or use the handy-dandy bookmarklet) and the site will open up a copy of your desired Web page, with a sidebar that lets you pick and choose which text fields, images, and other page elements to print and how it should look.
Design Your Summer Line

Funny T-shirts may be plentiful, especially from online stores like Threadless or BustedTees. But at $20 pop, the cost-to-chuckle ratio is laughable. Making your own out of plain T-shirts and iron-on inkjet transfers, however, costs significantly less: Iron-ons are about $6 apiece.

Such do-it-yourself designs can be a great way to liven up your T-shirt wardrobe without spending more than what you do on work clothes–and if you find some designs that really stick, you can opt to get those T-shirts printed in a more permanent fashion elsewhere. (Read “Design Your Own T-Shirt” for more tips on T-shirt design and printing.)

Of course, you don’t need to stop at t-shirts, either. Most iron-on transfer sheets work with any fabric blend that is at least 50 percent cotton, so you can print your own tote bags, trucker caps, and more.

Throw a Party

“Party” might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of printers. However, the amount of free printable party decorations on the Internet is absolutely mind-boggling: Epson’s CreativeZone, HP’s Creative Studio for Home, and Canon’s Creative Park are good places to start for party kits for everything from pirate parties to Kung Fu Panda lanterns. You can also download plenty of home decorations to spruce up your home or party venue, including a collection of projects by Martha Stewart. Banners, invitations, place settings, nametags–it’s all here for your kids and adults parties alike.

Take Close-Up Photos

If you have a multifunction printer with a built-in scanner, here’s how to go beyond boring old document scanning: Use them to take close-up shots, just by putting stuff directly on the scanner glass. It’s called “Scanography,” and the results can be both beautiful and bizarre.

Scanners typically have a rather shallow field depth (generally about half an inch at most), and they take much longer to process an image than a digital camera, so the clearest images come out with flat inanimate objects, like flowers and leaves, which can yield a very vivid high-resolution image that a camera cannot. Of course, these shortcomings can be used to artistic effect, as well. Scanning a human face, for example, will obscure most of the face in shadow (due to the field depth), and if the subject moves at any time the image will be “wavy” and distorted.

Have your own printer projects (or pictures) you’d like to share? Post them in the comments!

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SAN FRANCISCO - Much as I love Windows 7’s window-preview thumbnails, which pop up when you mouse over any running program in the taskbar, I find them almost useless. Why? Because the thumbnails themselves are too small.

This is especially true on systems with large, high-resolution monitors. On my 22-inch LCD, for instance, the thumbnails rarely give me a clue as to what’s actually inside the program. So what’s the point of having them?

Fortunately, I’ve discovered the awesome Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Customer 1.1 (W7TTC for short), a free utility that lets you make thumbnails just about any size you want.

There’s nothing to install: Just run the program, then drag the Maximum Size slider somewhere north of its default. (I tried doubling it to 400, then went all the way to the maximum: 512.) Click Apply Changes, then mouse over a running taskbar to see the results.

Yay! I’ve been waiting for a solution like this, which has been available for Vista for quite some time. And as you can see in the screenshot (click to make it larger), W7TTC offers several other taskbar adjustments as well, including spacing, margins, and delay time (i.e. the wait before thumbnails actually appear).

Amazingly, this little app was developed by 12-year-old Kishan Bagaria. He just made this 41-year-old Windows user very happy.

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A Filipino technoprenuer and two other local professionals were recently honored by the Swiss-based World Economic Forum, earning the Young Global Leaders (YGL) for 2010 tribute.

The honorees were Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO of Global Gateway Innovation Exchange (G2iX); Karen Davila, news reporter/anchor of ABS-CBN; and Major Dennis Eclarin, founder of Hometown Corporation. All three took the stage along with 197 YGL winners for 2010, all belonging to 72 countries and are stakeholders of society.

Damarillo, who currently chairs three companies which include Exist Global, Morphlabs and MaestroDev, said the honor is a testament to how Filipinos can help shape the future of the world.

“It is also a good opportunity for information technology to be in the forefront of global development,” Damarillo said. “More importantly, this is an opportunity to serve as a global citizen. I am truly humbled and excited to be part of the active community of the World Economic Forum.”

All three companies that Damarillo now heads have been described as innovative leaders in the respective IT industries they are in. Morph Labs is a cloud computing provider, while MaestroDev is an innovative tooling-automation company. G2iX serves as his latest venture that unifies the portfolio to deliver a complete innovation platform. 

Damarillo now joins an elite company of past YGL honorees from the information technology sector which include Google co-Founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page; YouTube co-Founder Chad Hurley; Twitter and Blogger founder, Ev Williams; as well as Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com.

Damarillo last year was also given recognition from eServices for his numerous contributions as a key driver for the development of the Philippine IT industry as board member and international marketing director for the Philippine Software Industry Association. The latter is a non-profit organization that aims to promote the growth and global competitiveness of the Philippine software industry. He is also a trustee of the Ayala Foundation USA, an organization committed on delivering social development initiatives for the Filipino in the Philippines and around the world.

Yet for Davila, the Forum honored her as a media personality who has made an advocacy for the creation of documentaries for children and poverty in society as well. Eclarin, however, was recognized for providing loans to micro-entrepreneurs in remote provinces.

The 2010 Filipino honorees have now joined past Filipino YGL invitees, which include Senators Mar Roxas and Chiz Escudero as well as social entrepreneur Iliac Diaz and Paolo Benigno ‘Bam’ A. Aquino IV. 

Since 2005, the Forum recognizes and acknowledges up to 200 outstanding global young leaders from different disciplines for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world through their inspiring leadership qualities.
 
A big YGL event at the World Economic Forum will took place in Latin America at Cartagena, Colombia on April 6 to 8, 2010 and then followed by the YGL Annual Summit at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on May 2 to 7, 2010.

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FRAMINGHAM - The unabated plundering of online bank accounts belonging to small and mid-size businesses is raising significant questions about the authentication and fraud detection mechanisms now used in financial institutions.

Such cyberthefts have led multiple businesses to file lawsuits against their banks, and prompted government regulators to call on financial institutions to improve security systems.

The FDIC recently disclosed that during the final 2009 quarter alone, cyberthieves stole mre than $150 million from small and mid-size business accounts.

In most of those cases, the FDIC said, thieves obtained a business’s valid banking login credentials by illegal means. The hackers used the stolen credentials to send money from the accounts to overseas bank accounts via wire transfers.

Banks, by and large, have mostly contended that the thefts occurred because the victims failed to adequately protect their banking credentials.

Since banks are not required to reimburse commercial accounts for losses resulting from such thefts, most of the impact on them has come from a public relations standpoint.

On the other hand, the thefts have led to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for numerous small businesses, which now have little hope of recovering the money. Some have filed lawsuits against banks charging that they failed to detect and stop transactions that were patently fraudulent.

Earlier this month, for example, Hillary Machinery Inc filed a lawsuit against its bank, PlainsCapital, after online crooks used stolen credentials to transfer more than $800,000 from its account last year.

The bank later recovered about $600,000 of the stolen funds, but has so far refused to pay the remaining amout to compensate the Plano, Texas-based manufacturing firm for the remainder.

In its lawsuit, Hillary charged that PlainsCapital did not stop wire transfers that involved foreign bank accounts and dollar amounts completely out of norm for Hillary. The company claimed that it had a reasonable expectation that its money would be properly protected by the bank. The company also argued that a small business cannot be expected to hold significant expertise on data security issues.

In a similar case, a Sterling Heights, Mich.-based manufacturing firm is suing its bank after online crooks stole some $560,000 from the company’s online bank account via a series of unauthorized wire transfers last year. The lawsuit that Experi-Metal Inc. filed late last year blamed the theft on loss on Comerica Bank’s alleged failure to heed signs that should have alerted it to the fraudulent activity.

Though it’s unclear yet how courts are going to rule on such lawsuits, the attacks have prompted many questions about the authentication and fraud detection mechanisms used by many banks.

As far back as 2005, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council issued guidelines to banks on implementing stronger authentication for online transactions. Among other things, the Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment report called on banks to upgrade current single-factor authentication processes — typically based on user name and passwords — by adding a stronger, second form of authentication by the end of 2006.

The unceasing attacks on small business accounts shows that many banks, especially small community banks, have still not deployed such controls, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner Inc. analyst.

“The good news is there are plenty of effective fraud detection and authentication solutions that can and are thwarting these attacks when employed by the banks.” she said. “The bad news is that many banks are not using these solutions and the bank regulators are not paying adequate attention to this.”

Regulators such as the FDIC and the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have so far not enforced their own recommendations for strong authentication. “The bank examiners are really behind the 8-ball on this,” Litan said.

Paul Smocer, vice president of security at BITS, an industry consortium representing the 100 largest financial institutions in the U.S, said there’s been a “real uptick in sophistication” in cyberattacks targeting commercial accounts over the past six months or so.

Such attacks are seriously testing token-based authentication measures used by banks for many years, Smocer said.

“Until fairly recently, token-based authentication was considered to be very strong,” he said. However, as banking malware get increasingly sophisticated, “token methodology is not as strong as it has been historically.”

Smocer said there is a rapidly increasing need for context-aware and out-of-band authentication tools as well as monitoring tools that are capable of detecting fraud by comparing current transaction patterns against historical behavior. “We are starting to see a lot of our members move in that direction,” he said.

BITS has started advising members on ways to identify accounts where so-called “money mules” have moved to transfer stolen money to overseas bank accounts. “By working with law enforcement we are seeing patterns beginning to emerge with regard to the nature of the activity that mules often engage in,” Smocer said.

The attacks are pushing bodies such as the American Bankers Association to ask members to review internal security controls.

In a February alert, for example, the ABA asked banks to be on the alert for funds-transfer fraud involving small and medium-sized businesses. The alert specifically cited “large-value” payments to previously unknown payees, unusual international payments and new accounts “with high-value, high-volume transactions [and] previously unfunded accounts with large-value incoming funds that are cashed out as soon as funds are cleared.”

The bankers association is “strongly recommending” that banks review existing controls, such as their anti-money laundering tools, to determine whether features can be added to fulfill the recommendations, said Doug Johnson, senior policy advisor at the ABA. The ABA is also advising members to implement multiple layers of security for detecting fraud in much the same way that credit card companies have been doing for years, he added.

“Cybersecurity is always an arms race. It is incumbent upon financial institutions to be vigilant. If the exploits change the defenses have to change with them,’ said Johnson who is the ABA’s representative on Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council. “We are obviously very much concerned about the potential for these exploits to really damage the relationship between the customer and the bank and we will do everything in our power,” to alleviate the situation he said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld . Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan , send e-mail to jvijayan@computerworld.com or subscribe to Jaikumar’s RSS feed .

Read more about security in Computerworld’s Security Knowledge Center.

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WASHINGTON - The Chinese government is likely behind recent cyberattacks on U.S. government Web sites and on U.S. companies in an apparent effort to quash criticism of the government there, an expert on U.S. and Chinese relations said Wednesday.

There’s no conclusive proof that recent attacks on Google and dozens of other U.S. companies are directed by the Chinese government, but logic would point to official Chinese involvement, said Larry Wortzel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer.

Google complained in January that it and several other U.S. companies were victims of recent cyberattacks coming from inside China. It is “not clear” who ordered the attacks, but it appears the Chinese government was involved, said Wortzel, who has served in the U.S. embassy in China.

There is a group of skilled hackers in China that routinely attacks systems to spy on political dissidents, said Wortzel, speaking during a U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. Chinese government agencies and Communist Party organizations would be the likely recipients of information obtained by hackers, he said.

“I concede that I cannot prove this beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law,” Wortzel added. “There may be a group of patriotic hackers in China who just hate criticism of the Communist Party and would take such action. But I believe such persistent, systematic and sophisticated attacks, some of which have taken place in the United States, in China, in Germany and in the United Kingdom, most likely are state-directed.”

Multiple efforts to reach the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., for comment by telephone Wednesday were met with busy signals. Information on the “contact us” page on the embassy’s Web site has been deleted.

In addition to attacks on Google and other U.S. companies, attacks from inside China are targeting U.S. military, technical and scientific information, Wortzel said.

“Not all of this cyber-espionage may be government-controlled,” he said. “There may be plenty of cyber-espionage entrepreneurs in China who operate outside government control that could be working on behalf of Chinese companies or the 54 state-run science and technology parks around the country.”

But the U.S. Department of Justice is prosecuting several espionage cases involving defense and other U.S. technology being turned over to unidentified Chinese officials, Wortzel said. “Let us be candid,” he said. “A logical person would conclude that some of this activity is directed by the Chinese government.”

Several members of the House committee used the hearing to criticize the Chinese government’s filtering of Web content or its tracking of online dissidents. Wednesday’s hearing was the second in Congress this month on other countries’ efforts to censor the Internet.

More than 70 people are in prison in China for posting information online, said Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican. Other countries have put bloggers and Web journalists in prison as well, he said.

Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, suggested the U.S. should suspend imports of Chinese goods in protest of widespread copyright violations and theft of intellectual property. U.S. businesses should tell Congress to “get tough” with the Chinese government, he said.

“When you ask them for specifics, they basically ask that we beg in a louder voice, which is not effective with China,” Sherman said. “The business community is totally unwilling to say, ‘Well, why don’t we have a week where we block our ports to Chinese imports?’”

Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Business Software Alliance, said a “record needs to be built very quickly” on the effect of intellectual property theft by the Chinese on U.S. businesses. The U.S. government should then file trade complaints against China, he said.

Sherman said he doubted that tactic would work. “Are you proposing action that would, in any way, diminish Chinese access to U.S. markets?” he said. “I guarantee delay and failure unless you’re willing to support, and the business community is ready to support, action at the ports. In these bilateral [discussions], we’ll throw paper at them, and they’ll throw paper at us.”

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican and outspoken critic of the Chinese government, suggested the U.S. government set new ground rules for U.S. businesses to operate in China. He didn’t detail what new ground rules he wanted, although he said China should not have the same trading rights that other U.S. trade partners have.

“You can’t treat gangsters and tyrants as if they are the same as democratic leaders and honest people and expect there not to be some problems developing,” he said. “We have our business community stepping on themselves trying to get over there to make a profit.”

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LONDON - Google, Facebook and eBay are among the tech giants that have slammed the government’s plans to tackle internet piracy, claiming it will “threaten freedom of speech”. 

In a letter to the Financial Times, the group of companies, which also includes UK ISPs such as BT and TalkTalk, said the amendment to the Digital Economy Bill has “obvious shortcomings” and will lead to an “increase in internet service providers blocking websites accused of illegally hosting copyrighted material without cases even reaching a judge”. 

The amendment to Clause 17 of the bill, which was passed by the House of Lords last week, gives High Court judges the power to force ISPs to block access to any website with a “substantial” amount of copyright infringing content, such as YouTube. 

“Endorsing a policy that would encourage the blocking of websites by UK broadband providers or other internet companies is a very serious step for the UK to take”, the companies said.

“There are myriad legal, technical and practical issues to reconcile before this can be considered a proportionate and necessary public policy option. In some cases, these may never be reconciled. These issues have not even been considered in this case.”

The companies claim the amendment has been rushed through without consultation with industry or consumers.

The letter comes at BT chief executive Ian Livingstone suggested web users accused of illegally downloading should be fined rather than face a temporary suspension from the web.

The Digital Economy Bill also sets out a ‘three strikes’ rule that will see web users accused of illegally file-sharing issued with warning emails and letters.

Repeat offenders will face technical measures, which the government said would be in the form of ” a bandwidth restriction, a daily downloading limit or, as a last resort, temporary account suspension”.

Livingstone told the BBC the proposals go against natural justice, and instead they should be fined, which they could chose to pay or fight in court. 

He said this method would “create a fund”, although he didn’t specify what the cash would be used for, an would create “some good, rather than getting some hurt out of people infringing copyright”.

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At least 2GB of backup space that users can now access anytime and anywhere has been included in version 4.0 of Norton 360, the company’s all-in-one security and utilities software, a company executive revealed Tuesday.

Included in the offering is Norton Tiki, a free application which iPhone, iPad, and Android phone users can install to access their backed-up data wherever they are.

Norton said security issues are not as prevalent on smartphones compared to PCs, but remarked that “there are still opportunities” in the mobile space for security vendors like them.

The fourth coming of Norton’s all-in-one brand hopes to address the exponential rise of malwares in recent years, which has victimized one in five Internet users worldwide.

In August to October 2009 alone, Norton detected around 17.4 million drive-by downloads of malware across PCs worldwide. That’s about the same amount of threats detected for the entire period of 2008.

“We are trying to combat consumer apathy, when they think that cybercrime won’t happen to them,” said Effendy Ibrahim, business lead, Norton Asia South region. “Yes, it can. And the probability is actually very high.”

Effendy said Norton is coming out of a recent change in malware detection methodology, which uses the reputation approach in order to combat threats. “We are now taking the strength in numbers by using reputation technology and Norton Community Watch in order to detect a large number of unique malware files,” he explained.

Norton Community Watch takes the wisdom of participating Norton users by sending reputation ratings of files on their computers to a central repository. This can then be used by other users to countercheck malicious files on their own machines, reducing the amount of false positives the software returns.

Since its launch last year, at least 177 billion reputation ratings have been sent by Norton users. “That’s about 26 times the world’s current population,” Ibrahim quipped. Norton’s reputation technology has also protected one in two users from malware, he added.

Norton 360 version 4.0 is available in a three-license package for P3,190, while a single-use license can be obtained for P1,995, both with a one-year subscription to the product and other Norton services.

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BEIJING - Twitter launched a new link-screening service on Tuesday aimed at preventing phishing and other malicious attacks against users of the popular microblogging service.

Part of the new service is a new Twitter tool to shorten URLs, so users will see some links in e-mail notifications and direct messages from other users written as twt.tl, Twitter said in a blog post.

“By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links,” the blog post said. “Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe,” it said without elaborating.

Phishing scams on Twitter usually involve attackers trying to obtain the login credentials of Twitter users, and then sending spam messages from the stolen accounts in a bid to make money, Twitter said on its blog last month. Twitter also fights phishing scams by watching for affected accounts and resetting passwords, it said.

Phishing attacks ballooned on Twitter last year as the service grew in popularity. Twitter’s new link-screening service comes after it last year started using Google’s Safe Browsing API to check for malicious content in links posted by users.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Aiptek’s versatile PocketCinema V10 Plus pico projector has features that its rivals lack, along with some limitations. Its best attribute is its ability to display presentations, photos, and videos without being attached to an external device.

With a brightness rating of 10 lumens, the V10 Plus can put on a show for a small audience in a room with minimal ambient light. Its small metal tripod and useful remote control simplify setting it up and controlling your presentation from anywhere in the room.

Weighing 5.6 ounces (with battery), the 0.9-by-2.2-by-4.9-inch V10 Plus is not much bigger than a thick candy bar. It has a native VGA resolution of 640 by 480, dual 0.5-watt speakers, and a battery life of 90 minutes.

The projector’s strong suit, however, is its extra features: A card slot reads 32GB SDHC memory cards, and a media player has 4GB of internal memory for storing presentations, photos, movies, and video clips. No other pico projector we’ve tested can capture video (up to 1.7GB per clip) via its A/V input port from an external source such as a camcorder or DVD player.

Unfortunately, the lifetime of the V10 Plus’s LED light is just 10,000 hours, half that of 20,000-hour models. Its LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) technology uses 3M’s older, first-generation MM100 projection engine, rather than its newer MM200 version, which delivers higher-quality images and consumes less power. And the V10 Plus lacks a VGA input, relying instead on an included S-Video cable to connect to computers that have an S-Video out capability (which is not as common as VGA).

In low ambient light at a distance of 3 feet from the screen, the V10 Plus displayed a viewable 23-inch-diagonal image. In a darkened room, it displayed a 48-inch-diagonal image at 6 feet from the screen. Larger screen sizes were possible but looked less bright.

In our performance tests, the V10 Plus earned a rating of Good for overall image quality. Its text and graphics screens weren’t impressive. The V10 Plus’s text slides weren’t quite sharp, and its color graphics looked pale. In our motion tests, the V10 Plus projected viewable podcasts from a fifth-generation iPod nano and YouTube videos from an iPhone 3GS reasonably well, but during fast action sequences of the Monsters vs. Aliens DVD, the video displayed some jerkiness that wasn’t apparent with other pico models. The V10 Plus’s sound was quite audible; still, we’d want to use a separate sound system for watching a feature film.

The V10 Plus comes bundled with a USB cable for transferring files (photos, videos, and music) from a computer to the projector, and a composite (RCA-type) A/V cable for connecting it to any device that has video signal output. You’ll need a third-party cable, however, to use it with an iPod or an iPhone. Alternatively, you can leave all the cables behind, and use the V10 Plus’s built-in media player to project your presentations, photos, and videos. The projector also comes loaded with ArcSoft Media Converter 2.5 software for converting images, videos, and audio files to formats that the V10 Plus supports–but the software is Windows only.

Aside from its lens adjustment wheel, all of the V10 Plus’s controls (for turning it on/off, adjusting the volume, and accessing the on-screen display) are located on the unit’s top; all are easy to use. The remote control is handy for operating the media player.

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NEW YORK - Samsung on Tuesday introduced new 3D home entertainment devices and said it is researching new 3D technologies while finding new ways to deliver 3D movies to TVs.

Samsung rolled out new devices including 3D TVs with screen sizes from 19 inches to 65 inches. The TVs, announced at an event in New York, will play back 3D content while providing the option to play back 2D content. The TVs will be available worldwide.

A basic 3D model — the UN40C7000 with a 40-inch screen — is priced at US$1,999 with availability in May. The most expensive model — a 55-inch UN55C9000 — is priced at $6,999 with availability in April. The pricing relates to the slimness of the TVs — the C7000 Series measures about an inch thick, while the LED C9000 series is 0.3 inches thick. Samsung uses the term “LED” TVs to describe its ultra-slim TVs, which are LCD (liquid crystal display) panels with LED (light-emitting diode) backlighting.

There is growing interest in watching 3D content on TVs, said Dan Schinasi, senior marketing manager at Samsung Electronics. People love to watch 3D movies in theaters, and would like to bring that experience to TVs, he said. The company is trying to stream movies to 3D TVs, while also researching autostereoscopic technology to improve the 3D viewing experience.

Samsung is working with online movie providers to stream 3D movies from the Internet to television sets, Schinasi said. He declined to provide the names of service providers, but said that 3D movies may start streaming as early as the fourth quarter. Users will be able to launch an application on the TV through which a movie and provider can be selected. Online movie rental services like Netflix can already stream movies directly to some Samsung TVs.

More 3D movies will make it to theaters this year, which will ultimately trickle down for streaming to TV screens, Schinasi said.

Samsung is also working with cable providers and satellite providers like DirecTV on 3D content. A number of other consumer electronics companies are also putting their weight behind 3D. Sony will be broadcasting the 2010 FIFA World Cup in 3D this year and has already launched a Blu-ray 3D player. A major 3D home theater announcement is expected from Panasonic this week.

3D will ultimately come down to how users adapt to it. Watching 3D programs at home may be reserved for special occasions like watching movies or sports events, Schinasi said. An average viewer may watch TV for up to eight hours a day, and keeping the glasses on for that long may be uncomfortable.

To tackle that, the company is researching autostereoscopic technology that it may ultimately bring to 3D TVs, Schinasi said. The technology could reduce the need for glasses to watch 3D programs, but the technology is in its infancy, Schinasi said.

The autostereoscopic technology involves adding a lenticular lens that provides a 3D effect from different angles depending on a viewer’s position. Adding an extra lens to the 3D screen however could degrade image quality and add to the cost of a TV.

Current autostereoscopic lenses may also not generate 3D images from different angles, so users have to stand in particular spots to view true 3D images. Samsung will continue to research the technology, and Schinasi predicted autostereoscopic 3D TVs to reach the market in four to five years.

The company also launched eight plasma TVs of which six can play back 3D content. The 3D plasma models range in size between 50 inches and 63 inches with prices starting at $1,799. The TVs will become available in May. Samsung also announced a range of new home electronics, including a Blu-ray 3D player and home entertainment system.

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