How Good Are Smartphone Cameras?

Did You Know? As any tennis player, amateur or professional, can tell you, a fresh tennis ball is important to good play, and the staggering number of tennis balls they go through at Wimbledon, the oldest and most prestigious tennis tournament in the world, reflects that. Over the course of the two week tournament, they burn through an average of 54,000 tennis balls. Geek Trivia One Of The Plot Lines Of Which Of These Animated Films Was Based On A Real Conspiracy? Who Framed Roger Rabbit? → Ferdinand → Beavis and Butt-Head Do America → The Secret of NIMH → Advertisement Download FREE Tip Card: Microsoft Office Keyboard Shortcuts These Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word shortcuts will reduce the errors you make when typing and boost your productivity. Did you know if you press F11 in any Excel cell, you can create a simple bar chart? Only know part of a name or email address? In Outlook, press Ctrl+K and it will take what you enter and offer you a list of likely choice. Want more shortcuts? Download this FREE tip card now!Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. The Best Wireless VR Setups, Current and Upcoming How to Connect the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con or Pro Controllers to Your PC How Good Are Smartphone Cameras? The Best Linux Distributions for Beginners How to Record a Phone Call on an iPhone The Difference Between Silent, Do Not Disturb, and Theater Mode on your Apple Watch (and When to Use Each) How to Share SkyBell HD Access with Other Users How to Change the Region On Your Nintendo Switch (and Play Games from Other Countries) How to Sync Your Browser Bookmarks, Extensions, and Other Data Between Computers How to Change Audio Outputs on a Chromebook How to Add a Different Reaction to a Facebook Post (Like a Heart or Emoji) The Best Cheap Mechanical Keyboards Under $40 Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Z-Buffer The Z-Buffer is a memory buffer area in graphics memory that is reserved for storing the Z-axis value (depth) of each pixel. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. What Interacting With Robots Might Reveal About Human Nature The most urgent question for people is not whether machines will take their jobs, but how machines will change the way they behave in society. [The Atlantic] StarCraft's 4K remastered version launches on August 14th Blizzard Entertainment has annoucned that StarCraft: Remastered, the 4K resolution version of its iconic real-time strategy game, will be launching for Windows and Mac on August 14th. [The Verge] See how fireworks injuries skyrocket on the Fourth of July Somebody is going to get their hand blown off this holiday---these charts help, statistically speaking, narrow it down to who it might be. [Stat News] The Best Wireless VR Setups, Current and Upcoming Virtual reality is the next big thing in digital gaming…and this time it might even stick around. But one of the biggest hurdles to adoption for VR systems like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive is that, at the end of the day, you’re strapping a screen to your face and tethering yourself to a computer. Having a thick bundle of cables rip off your headset just as you’re getting into the game is a long way from the immersive future we’ve been promised. Read This Article → How to Connect the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con or Pro Controllers to Your PC The Joy-Con and Pro Controllers for the Nintendo Switch work just like modern Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers. They support Bluetooth, so you can pair them with your PC without any special hardware. Read This Article → How Good Are Smartphone Cameras? Smartphone cameras have never been better. The technology has come a long way. They've been used by professional photographers to shoot magazine covers. Apple has built a billboard advertising campaign around photos taken with the iPhone. Obviously smartphone cameras can be used to take good photos in the right circumstances, but how good is the actual camera? Let's find out. Read This Article → The Best Linux Distributions for Beginners If you want to try Linux, you’ll need to choose a Linux distribution. There are hundreds of different Linux distributions, but some are better to start with than others. Read This Article → How to Record a Phone Call on an iPhone So you’ve decided you need to record a phone call. Maybe you’re performing a delicate sting operation…or maybe you just want to make sure you’re getting the best customer service possible. Whatever your reasons, things are a little difficult on an iPhone. Read This Article → The Difference Between Silent, Do Not Disturb, and Theater Mode on your Apple Watch (and When to Use Each) Since it was introduced, the Apple Watch has gained a number of different modes, but it’s not immediately clear when to use each. Let’s look at each mode, what it does and doesn’t do, and the best time to use it. Read This Article → How to Share SkyBell HD Access with Other Users If you want others in your household to see who’s at the door and when the doorbell was rung, you can share access through the SkyBell HD app on your phone. Here’s how to do it. Read This Article → How to Change the Region On Your Nintendo Switch (and Play Games from Other Countries) With the Switch, Nintendo has left behind a long legacy of region-locking its consoles. Now, if you buy a console in the US, you can buy cartridges from Japan, or browse other region’s eShops for new games or cheaper prices. Here’s how to change the region on your Switch. Read This Article → How to Sync Your Browser Bookmarks, Extensions, and Other Data Between Computers More and more, your interactions with computers are dependent on your browser and the web at large. So it’s incredibly handy to have your browser history and settings follow you around to other computers. The various makers of your favorite browsers know this, and all of them (with one predictable exception) have built-in tools to help your web experience stay consistent. Read This Article → How to Change Audio Outputs on a Chromebook Pretty much every Chromebook out there has speakers built in, and almost all of them have at least one other audio output as well—be it a 3.5mm headphone jack, or Bluetooth. Sometimes, however, you may need to let your Chromebook know where you want the audio to come from. Read This Article → How to Add a Different Reaction to a Facebook Post (Like a Heart or Emoji) Social media has a tendency to twist words and their meanings. Online, words such as "Friend", "Follow", and "Like" all mean subtly different things to what they mean offline. If someone posts about their granny dying do you ignore the post? Like it out of sympathy? Comment? Well now Facebook has gone somewhat towards fixing this by adding a series of different reactions. Read This Article → The Best Cheap Mechanical Keyboards Under $40 Mechanical keyboards are all the rage computer enthusiasts and gamers. If you’ve been using a rubber dome or scissor switch keyboard for your whole life, buying a new clicky keyboard might be intimidating, to say nothing of the considerable expense. Even the cheapest models from mainstream suppliers start at around $80, and go well into the hundreds for RGB lights and programmable extras—a lot of dough to drop on something you aren’t sure you’ll like. Read This Article → Advertisement Download FREE Tip Card: Microsoft Office Keyboard Shortcuts These Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word shortcuts will reduce the errors you make when typing and boost your productivity. Did you know if you press F11 in any Excel cell, you can create a simple bar chart? Only know part of a name or email address? In Outlook, press Ctrl+K and it will take what you enter and offer you a list of likely choice. Want more shortcuts? Download this FREE tip card now!Click here to download