Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and the topic is poverty. The goal of this online coordinated event is to have as many people blog about one topic on the same day to bring awareness to an issue. While poverty is a serious and complex issue to tackle, I will just explore a few ways that technology is having a positive impact.

For many of us, a cell phone is a daily convenience that we are not often without. They have, however, become a thriving business for those in poverty-stricken villages. The Village Phone Project has brought phones to remote villages, eliminating what in the past might have been a six-mile trip to use a phone. Phone operators charge others for the use of their phone within the village, which benefits everyone.

Locally, you can visit the public library and use the computer to access the Internet. This simple convenience is easy access to information that can improve the life of someone in need. Someone looking for a job can save the money on gas or public transportation by applying online in most cases. Again, a simple convenience for me or you may make a big impact for someone living in poverty.

The Dell (PRODUCT) RED is another way that technology is helping improve the lives of those in poverty. Purchasing your own (RED) branded product from Dell contributes to efforts to help eliminate AIDS in Africa, where life-sustaining treatment for an individual costs only 40 cents a day. Helping keep people with HIV/AIDS healthy and productive also fights poverty by enabling those individuals to continue supporting themselves and their families.

While technology now plays a role in all aspects of life, it is the impact that it has on one’s life that makes it a gift. With the state of our global economy and the uncertain outlook for the future, making readily available and affordable technology will continue to have a positive impact for those who need it.

Most of us can remember the days when a photo enthusiast spent a fair chunk of change with a professional photo lab. A good lab not only developed your negatives and slides but would also put a great deal of effort into printing them. Getting color balance, brightness and contrast, and other tonal features of a photograph right were not the easiest tasks to accomplish in an amateur’s darkroom.

In the digital age, things aren’t all that different. Most of us aren’t exactly experts with photo editing software and the fact is minor differences in how LCD displays show us color can throw off your results. Photo quality paper isn’t cheap so every time your photo printer spits out an image with unexpected differences between what you wanted to see and what shows up on the printed page, it costs time and money and proves extremely frustrating.

This is why I am excited about the launch of Dell’s newest color photo printer, the P703w All-In-One Printer. This color inkjet printer uses Kodak Color Technology to provide outstanding 1,200 dpi color printing on Dell Premium Photo Paper. It uses a separate print head and ink tanks to produce superb color accuracy and excellent ink and paper economy. It also comes with an internal wireless network adapter for convenient use from anywhere in your home and if you have a router capable of Wi-Fi Protected Setup, the P703w supports that simple and secure method of getting it connected to your home network.

One of the best features of the P703w is the Dell Imaging Toolbox software. While this software is on our more conventional inkjet printers launching this year, the version packaged with the P703w has some unique features designed to take advantage of the printer’s superior photo capability.

The photo editing and printing features of the Dell Imaging Toolbox offer an array of very simple one-click tools that produce outstanding photos. The Kodak Perfect Touch feature instantly provides excellent contrast and brightness adjustments to your photos but you can also go in and tweak your pictures in great detail if you feel the need.

The P703w is an excellent high-speed inkjet printer on plain paper, but make no mistake – the reason you will want this printer is for printing outstanding quality photographs on photo paper.

In my experience, you can’t find a better photo-quality printer without spending several times the $189199price. The Dell Imaging Toolbox software and the wireless network adapter are included in that price.

Can you remember a time when you weren’t on the go? Me either! According to WomenTravelTips.com, women now constitute almost 50 percent of all the business travel in the United States, and we know moms pick up much of the carpooling duty. So whether you are stuck at the airport or waiting during gymnastics class, here are some great gadgets to help you stay connected and productive.

The new Polaroid PoGo pocket printer is a pocket-sized, ink-free digital photo printer that produces full-color photos wirelessly from Bluetooth-enabled cell phones or from your digital cameras. At only 4.7 x 2.8 inches, everyone has room to take this on the go.

Laptop accessories are essential for someone who can’t always be stationed in one place. I keep a wireless mouse and power supply in my bag at all times. Now you can protect your accessories too. This great Belkin Mouse Trap holds your accessories and unzips to double as a mouse pad. I know, cool beans!

A Flash Card digital Camcorder is another great on-the-go accessory. It’s petite enough that you can always have a quality video camera with you. Of course, you do not want your cool stuff to become a Disappearing Laptop Statistic, so you will want to get a lock.

This Combination lock is a self-coiling cable for easy travel and it comes in red. The increased color options have really made taking technology everywhere a little more enjoyable. Are you finding that it is easier or more fun to get around with your gadgets lately? What is your favorite?

I just received my latest Pottery Barn catalog and on the front is a beautiful chair in a print called Serafina.  I absolutely love it!  When I went online to see what other things they had in that material, I found that you can buy the fabric by the yard. 

Between Natalie’s sewing post earlier this week and this new great fabric find, I’ve gotten the urge to get creative.  Spoonflower is printing custom fabric designs that are submitted as image files.  They are still in beta, but you can sign up now to be invited.  This got me thinking about how to create the perfect design for my own custom fabric.  My preference is to draw (using a technique I call doodling) my design, so all I need is a scanner to get the file I need.

I also use my scanner to make a file of my toddlers’ artwork.  This has helped reduce the clutter on the fridge and has been a nice addition to my computer wallpaper selection.  I am sure there is a ton more I can do with my scanner.  Have you gotten creative with your scanner?

Last summer Dell released the 1320c Color Laser Printer, which was and still is one of the most affordable true color laser printers on the market. The printer went on to garner some very impressive reviews and is perched at the number 2 position on the PC World List of Top 10 Color Laser Printers. Given that a few years ago color laser printers still had four-digit price tags, the $249 1320c looks like an amazing amount of performance for the price.

The 1320c is a fairly basic printer. It has no copy or scan features and while there is network upgrade available, it is definitely a very basic printer. For those wanting full-color laser capability for a home office or small business, you’ll need a machine that’s a bit more capable.

Enter the new 2135cn Multi-Function Color Laser printer. The 2135cn offers a powerful array of functions that make it capable of replacing a lot of office machines. In addition to being a high-quality color laser printer, it offers scan, copy, and fax capability in full color with an automatic document feeder to handle large multi-page documents.

Dell 2135 cn Multi-Function Color Laser Printer

The 2135cn offers professional-quality color printing in 600×600 dpi resolution and it can crank out up to 16 pages per minute monochrome or 12 pages per minute in color. It even optimizes image quality without user intervention. It offers full networking capability and a host of convenient fax-handling features.

Naturally, you can save a lot of energy as well as office space when you replace your scanner, copier, and fax machine with a single piece of equipment like the 2135cn. But these days, it’s definitely good to know that this printer has been designed with Dell’s emphasis on environmental impact in mind. The 2135cn is fully Energy Star certified, which means that, on average, it is 25% more energy efficient than conventional models. On top of that, Dell provides prepaid return mailers to allow you to easily recycle toner-cartridges when they run out.

Both quality and environmental impact benefit from Dell’s Emulsion Aggregation Toner Technology. This technology allows for more precise imaging by using smaller toner particles. This can also reduce energy consumption during the printing process as well as allowing the printer to warm up and print more quickly. The 2135cn is a printer designed from start to finish to make your home office or small business more efficient, more economical, and more environmentally friendly and carries a price tag of $599.

This week, Dell launched three new Photo Inkjet All-in-One printers, the V105, V305, and the V305w. The V105 is a low-cost, ultra-simplified full color scanner, copier, and printer. The V305 offers a more flexible all-in-one printing solution and the V305w includes the option to connect the printer to your home office network wirelessly.

  V105 

V305

But one of the most exciting new features on these printers, from my perspective, is a powerful new piece of software that comes with them. It is called the Dell Imaging Toolbox and it not only offers basic print handling and maintenance features, it opens up a world of powerful tools to use with your digital photos.

The Dell Imaging Toolbox gives you extensive tools for editing the size, brightness, contrast, color balance, saturation and a host of other variables in your digital photos.  Easy-to-use scaling tools provide a simple way to make your pictures look exactly the way you want them to look.

There are also some fun photo sharing tools built right into the software. For example you can create multi-page posters at the click of a button or two and turn your favorite shot into a wall-sized display.

There are also 89 different templates for the creation of customized greeting cards. The card templates match virtually any occasion and allow you to attach your own message in whatever color, font, and type size you prefer. It even has an e-mailing tool to let you send the cards in a variety of file sizes to all the important people in your life.

The V105 and both versions of the V305 are capable of supporting 6-color photo printing with the installation of the optional Dell Photo Ink Cartridge and the use of Dell Premium Photo paper.

I have more than a decade of experience with digital photography and I’ve used the top of the line in photo editing software, Adobe® Photoshop®, since 1996. Obviously, there are tons of things in Photoshop that you will never find in the Dell Imaging Toolbox. But if you want to quickly re-size, crop, and retouch your photos and either print them or distribute them to friends and family, I think you will be impressed with the easy-to-use software that comes with the latest Dell Photo Inkjet printers.

For more detailed information on the Dell Imaging Toolbox, you can find my how-to article in the Dell Solutions Network.

When you see the word “photo” in the description of a color inkjet printer, it is natural to assume that printer is going to give you some high quality photo printouts. So you may be surprised when the quality of what they print on the first try is somewhat lacking. With that in mind, here are a few tips to help you get the best photographic quality out of your color inkjet printer.

Number 1: Paper matters.  Most people realize that plain bond paper doesn’t really produce great photo quality. The colors do tend to bleed a bit into the fibers of the paper, resulting in a softer and sometimes muddy image. Printing on glossy photo paper will always result in a sharper and more distinct photograph.

Number 2: Ink also matters. Dell photo printers have two cartridge carriers that hold a color and a black and white ink cartridge. But when you’re printing your photos on glossy photo paper, you will want to replace the black cartridge with a photo cartridge. The photo cartridge adds a wider range of color to the finished print.

Number 3: Size really matters. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to print all your images in the largest possible size. Far from it! Each image contains a total number of pixels and the more pixels you have, the more information there is for the printer to use in printing your photo. So a 5X7 with 300 pixels per inch is going to have more detail and better sharpness than one with 72 pixels per inch. Keep that resolution fairly high to get the best results from your printer.

Number 4: Check the settings on the printer. When you set up a printing job, it pays to go in and manually select the image quality and paper type. Most printers have default settings that are designed to produce a standard document on normal bond paper. Using those default settings, photos will look washed out with noticeable banding. Changing to photo quality setting on photo/glossy paper can make a world of difference as you can see in the scanned images below:

The left side, above, was printed on default settings. The right side was printed with the photo quality setting and with photo/glossy paper selected.

Number 5: Edit those images before printing. Getting the light balance right is more than just a matter of setting the camera on auto and pointing it. Sometimes you have to open the image in software and adjust the brightness and contrast or even the color balance to get it right. Printers often produce a slightly darker image than what you see on the camera LCD. It pays to practice a little and get used to the differences between your camera’s display and what comes out of your printer.

More tips for printing photos on inkjet printers can be found in Robin Raskin’s post over at Yahoo! Tech.

In the months ahead, Dell will be releasing some new printers with an exciting new piece of software called the Dell Imaging Toolbox, a program that offers easy one-touch photo editing for those in a hurry as well as detailed editing tools for those who sweat the details. This software also provides some creative and fun options for making the most of your digital photos online. Watch for it on our upcoming printer releases!

Dell has been featuring internal wireless network adapters on most of our inkjet printers since 2006. This year, it will be a feature on most inkjets and on most of the personal and small business laser printers we launch.

Wireless networking has moved beyond the point where it is a cool new feature and started to become a necessity. But we know from experience that many customers find that the task of connecting a wireless accessory like a printer to their home network can be a difficult process. I’ve heard from plenty of customers who are frustrated with how complicated that task can be.

We want our customers to know that the future looks brighter. In early 2007, the Wi-Fi Alliance approved a new standard for wireless configuration called Wi-Fi Protected Setup, usually abbreviated as WPS. This technology makes the process of setting up a wireless network much easier.

Here’s how it works: A customer with a WPS-capable router and a WPS-capable printer pushes a button on the printer control panel or enters a PIN number and then presses a button on the router and the two devices connect themselves together with a minimum of fuss.

We’ve been doing a lot of testing with Dell’s newest inkjet printers and one of the more popular WPS-capable routers.  Right now, this technology is still in its infancy and has proven to be a bit inconsistent. But when it works, it greatly simplifies wireless configuration.
 
Based on our research, this technology is improving and we expect that before the end of the year, WPS is going to be a very reliable way to configure your wireless devices. While it may not be a reason to rush out and buy a new wireless router just yet, it is nice to know that Dell inkjet printers will be ready to utilize the technology when it is perfected.

Dell has quietly added an exciting feature to its All-In-One Photo inkjet printers. On models with full photo-printing capability and memory card slots, this feature makes it fun and easy to print exactly the photos you want.

It starts when you take the memory card from your digital camera and insert it into the memory card slots on the front of the printer. These slots accommodate all memory types currently in use. When the card is inserted, the printer will immediately open the photo menu and offer to print a proof sheet of the photos on the card. This proof sheet contains thumbnails of the images on the memory card, but also includes barcodes and markup circles along with step-by-step instructions for using this feature.

The first step is to select the size of photos you want to print. (You have to choose only one size per print order, but you can print multiple proof sheets to handle multiple sizes). Next, you simply choose how many of each picture you want to print. You can mark 1 to 4 copies and even select red-eye reduction for portraits, if needed.

After you’ve chosen the size and the number of prints you want, simply place the proof sheet face down on the scanner bed and use the Scan Proof Sheet command. The printer will then prompt you to make sure you have the right size of photo paper loaded. When you’re ready, press the Start button and the printer will automatically print the photos you ordered on the proof sheet.

This new feature makes it quick and easy to get copies of your favorite shots out of your camera and onto photo paper in record time! This feature is currently available on the Dell All-In-One 926, 966, 948 and 968 printers. Look for it on new inkjet models in the year ahead.