I’m a geek in a lot of gadget areas, but with digital cameras I’d been feeling a few steps behind. Our family’s SLR camera, a Nikon that we bought almost 10 years ago, was showing its age. It didn’t shoot video, could only accommodate memory cards up to 2 Gigabytes and was producing lackluster photos I knew could be better with newer hardware.
When Nikon introduced its D5200 model earlier this year, I kept an eye on it until the price fell $100 from its original $900 list price. Soon after, when a Memorial Day online deal pushed it down another $150, I ordered.
So far, I’ve been thrilled with the photo quality. I get a lot fewer blurry photos of quick-moving kids and the camera shoots very high-quality 1080p video. It’s got enough novice features to keep me from getting overwhelmed and it works with the old Nikon lenses from our original camera. Even though it’s still a relatively bulky, heavy camera compared to, say, a compact point-and-shoot or a cell phone, the quality of photos I ended up with after a recently family vacation seemed worth the extra weight and price.
My biggest complaint: Nikon continues to make Wi-Fi an optional, add-on feature with a $60 adapter. When your biggest competition is incredibly cheap cell phone cameras, your $500-plus products should all have Wi-Fi, allowing them to easily transfer photos to online services or other devices to post on the web.
Otherwise, the camera, with its unique fold-out, twist-around screen, is highly recommended.
What is a ‘virtual machine?’
It’s not very easy to define the term “virtual machine,” a phrase you may have heard thrown around along with other words including “virtualization” or “emulation,” but we’re going to give it a try.
At its simplest, “virtual machine” refers to using software to create a system or app that would normally involve separate hardware to run. For instance, “Parallels Desktop” and “VMware Fusion” are two pieces of software you could buy to run Windows 8 on a Mac computer. The software creates a virtual version of Windows that works within the Mac’s operating system; you could do that to run Mac apps such as “GarageBand” and “iPhoto” alongside Windows-only software including “Word 2013” or video games that aren’t out for Mac.
“Emulator” software that mimics an old video game console like the Nintendo 64 is another example of a virtual machine, as is a virtual web server deployed by a website to handle an increase in traffic. No additional hardware is involved in that; a server is simply devoting resources to creating a new software-based machine. The process of simulating hardware or other systems in this way is called “virtualization.”
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