LAS VEGAS (AP) -- For a long time, the two choices in desktop printers have been inkjet and laser. This year, a significant twist on the inkjet is hitting the market and promises high speed - think one color page per second - at relatively low cost.

The company behind the new technology, Memjet, hopes to snag a significant share of the $250 billion-per-year worldwide printing market.

"We're bringing revolutionary change to the industry," said Len Lauer, Memjet's CEO.

Memjet can be several times faster than a regular inkjet because instead of having a small print head that sweeps across the page, over and over, Memjet's head is as wide as the page and doesn't move. As the paper travels underneath it, 70,000 microscopic nozzles spurt ink all at the same time.

High-end laser printers can match Memjet's speed but they cost more, both to buy and to use. Lauer expects Memjet-equipped printers to hit the market this year for $500 to $600. The ink will cost about 5 cents per page, compared with 12 cents to 25 cents per page for laser toner or consumer inkjet ink.

The page-wide heads and tiny nozzles are made possible by advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems, or MEMS. These are parts made out of silicon using many of the same techniques that go into making computer chips, so manufacturers can create tiny and very precise mechanical assemblies. MEMS are also used in digital cinema projectors and in the sensors that capture the motion of the Nintendo Wii's remotes and such smart phones as the iPhone. Other companies have demonstrated wide inkjet heads, but Memjet appears to be the first to make it a finished desktop product.

The inventor of the Memjet head is Kia Silverbrook, an Australian, but the privately held company is based in San Diego. Lauer comes from another San Diego-based company, wireless technology developer Qualcomm Inc., where he was chief operating officer.

The first Memjet for the office market will be sold by computer maker Lenovo Corp. in China early this year and by other partners in Taiwan and India, the companies announced this week. Memjet hasn't announced a partner for the U.S., but Lauer said the printer would be sold here this year as well.

In a demonstration this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a prototype of the office printer churned out color pages, one per second, of a quality indistinguishable from a good inkjet printer.

"It's a disruptor in that it's very fast for a very low price," said Keith Kmetz, a printing industry analyst for IDC. The technology "has had the market abuzz," he said, but he added that there's more to market success than technology. Memjet has still has to prove that its partners can market the printers effectively. Memjet has talked about its technology for years while it straightened out some kinks, so it won't catch well-established players such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Lexmark International Inc. and Canon Inc. by surprise.

"I haven't noticed in my conversations with them that they're gravely concerned," Kmetz said.

Memjet isn't targeting consumers with its printers, at least for now. The home printer market is even tougher than the office market, because manufacturers such as HP subsidize their products heavily, then make the money back from sales of ink cartridges. Fast printing isn't as important to consumers, who are also printing less and toting more information and pictures around on their smart phones.

Memjet is targeting commercial printing applications, such as photofinishing, with a unit that prints page-wide glossy photos. The goal is to replace drugstore minilab prints, which are still mostly created using light-sensitive paper and noxious chemicals. Memjet's unit is smaller, cheaper and faster. Prints from a prototype shown this week weren't as vividly colored as regular minilab prints, but Lauer said the technology is still being tweaked.

Label printers with Memjet's heads are already in use. This means that a company such as FedEx Corp., for example, that prints millions of barcode labels every day could now add color to them, perhaps for its logo or other information that should stand out, Lauer said. The technology could also be used in cash registers, which would let retailers print out coupons in color on receipts. However, the 8.5-inch wide Memjet head is too broad for a cash register, so Memjet would have to make a smaller one.

One customer, Lauer said, uses the label printer to print tens of thousands of personally addressed direct-mail envelopes every day, without needing to pre-print the color with standard, high-volume "offset" printing.

"Yes, you can now get your junk mail in color," Lauer said.

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NEW YORK (AP) -- To fight dwindling camera sales, manufacturers are slashing prices for point-and-shoots - often below $100 - and offering more features for the money.

Camera makers unveiled dozens of models this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the largest gadget show in the U.S. Here's what to look for once they go on sale over the next few months.

Lower prices

It used to be nearly impossible to buy a digital camera for $100. Now, Casio America Inc., Canon Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Olympus Corp. all sell them, and other big brands just jumped on the bandwagon.

Sony Electronics Inc., a company not known for discounted cameras, will sell the Cybershot DSC-W510 ($100), a 12-megapixel camera with a 4X optical zoom - more than what you'll find on most entry-level cameras.

Canon, the market leader, will sell the 10-megapixel Powershot A800 for $89, albeit with a bare-bones 3X zoom.

Kodak has two budget offerings: the credit card-sized EasyShare Mini ($100) and the EasyShare Sport, an $80 camera that can be immersed in up to 10 feet of water, which is the kind of durability normally found in a $200 camera.

Fujifilm NA Corp.'s FinePix AV200 ($90) shoots 720p (1280 x 720) high-definition video, another rarity for cameras this cheap.

HD video standard

It's not unusual for whiz-bang features to trickle down into lower-end products. Face detection, for example, used to be reserved for high-end cameras; today, shoppers have come to expect it. Now, high-definition movie recording is becoming a typical feature on point-and-shoots.

With the exception of some of those $100 cameras, almost every model Canon, Fujifilm, Kodak, Panasonic Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony announced this week records HD movies at 720p or even 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution.

Fujifilm's $90 HD number takes the cake in terms of value, but Canon's Powershot A2200IS ($140) also records HD video for a still-reasonable price.

While we can't vouch for the quality of these movies, the boost in resolution is an improvement because the videos will look sharp on high-definition televisions.

New ways to share photos

We've noticed several companies experimenting with new ways to free photos from the camera.

Samsung's SH100 ($200) isn't the first camera with built-in Wi-Fi, but it is unique in that it can send photos directly to a smart phone. Photographers can also use the Wi-Fi-enabled camera to back up their photos to websites such as Facebook.

People can also use their smart phone as a remote-control to trigger their camera's shutter, as long as they're within a Wi-Fi network. Here's the catch: The camera only does this with Samsung's own line of Galaxy smart phones, which run Google Inc.'s Android software.

Across its product line, Kodak has been emphasizing a sharing feature that lets people select photos stored on the camera to be automatically uploaded to sites such as Facebook when the camera is connected to a computer.

Eye-Fi Inc.'s memory cards can already wirelessly send photos from a camera to a PC or to websites such as Flickr. Now, they can also send photos to smart phones, tablets and other devices. It requires a one-time setup to connect the Eye-Fi card to the gadget over Wi-Fi. Android phone or tablet owners then download an app to see the photos.

Eye-Fi won't say if other devices, such as iPads and iPhones, will be supported. The new feature will be available as a free update to people who already own one of Eye-Fi's X2 cards, which start at $50 for 4GB of storage space.

More megapixels

For a while, camera makers had seemingly called off the megapixel arms race, taking a break from one-upping each other with higher and higher resolution. Now, they're at it again, cramming as many as 14 or 16-megapixels into new models.

This isn't necessarily a good thing: The more megapixels a camera has, the smaller each sensor is, meaning they can collect less light in dim shooting situations. Nighttime photos might also look grainer with more megapixels. This is all especially true of compact point-and-shoots, which have relatively small sensors to begin with.

But with higher resolution come cutting-edge extras, such as advanced image stabilization technologies, panorama shooting and the ability to shoot in slow motion, something the new Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR ($500) can do.

If you want those features, go for it. If you happen to see a 16-megapixel camera that costs $30 or $40 more than a similar one with lower resolution, though, pick the cheaper one. Even the cheapest cameras today have 10-megapixel resolution, which is more than enough to produce crisp 8 x 10 prints.

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LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Being able to watch live TV on the go sounds like an appealing idea. Indeed, Audiovox Corp. says its RCA-branded portable, battery-powered televisions sell well. But there's a problem: people return them at extremely high rates. Why?

"If you move, you lose the signal completely," said Audiovox Electronics president Tom Malone. That's because digital TV signals are designed to be received by stationary antennas. If the antenna starts moving, the signals become gibberish.

The solution is a new type of TV signal known as Mobile DTV that TV broadcasters are starting to roll out. Many cities already have a couple of stations live. Audiovox said this week that it will build receivers for those signals into its 7-inch and 9-inch portable TV sets this year, joining several other manufacturers in trotting out Mobile DTV gadgets at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That means that this year, consumers will for the first time have an array of Mobile DTV gadgets to choose from. The technology's future is far from certain, and this year's sales figures might well be crucial.

Most of the Mobile TV gadgets at the show add a receiver to a device that already does something else. For instance, Valups, a Korean company, is making an antenna that plugs into the iPad's connection port, turning it into a 9.7" inch portable TV, no Internet connection necessary. It expects to sell it in June for $99. One wrinkle: the Tivizen, as it's called, has a battery of its own and needs to be charged to provide two to three hours of viewing.

iMovee Corp. of San Diego was at the show with the Mobeo, a gadget the size of a smart phone that grabs a Mobile DTV signal and rebroadcasts it over Wi-Fi so that it can be picked up by iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It gets three hours on a charge and is expected to cost $149 when it launches in June.

Cydle, another Korean company, has a Mobile DTV receiver that doubles as an external battery for an iPhone, providing both a TV signal and extra power. It also showed a car navigation unit that doubles as a TV set, presumably not for use while driving (taxi drivers watching TV while driving is a common sight in some countries, including Taiwan).

Other manufacturers showed antennas that plug into laptop USB ports. Unlike the iPad antenna, they don't contain batteries and don't need charging.

Apart from Audiovox, the only big-name manufacturer betting on Mobile DTV is LG Electronics Inc., which launched the first Mobile DTV gadget in the U.S. late last year, a portable DVD player that did double duty as a TV set.

At the show, LG displayed Android smart phones with extendable antennas. They're able to receive Mobile DTV without any add-on gadgets. However, no U.S. wireless carrier has signed up to sell the phones, pointing to a big problem for the adoption of Mobile DTV. The carriers are focused on selling wireless broadband, which can also be used to watch video, and they don't have much interest in providing customers with a way to tune into free signals.

Some carriers have experimented with paid mobile TV. AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless teamed up with Qualcomm Inc. to sell a subscription-based service, FLO TV. It's been available on a few phones and on portable TV units. But the companies never found enough people willing to pay $10 to $15 per month for the dozen channels that were available, and Qualcomm is shutting down FLO TV this year.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition, which represents broadcasters and equipment makers, points out that Mobile DTV is different because it's free and it has local channels, including valuable news, traffic and weather reports. Participating broadcasters retransmit their main signals as Mobile DTV, so the programming is the same as on regular TV. For broadcasters, it's reasonably cheap to add a mobile signal to their towers.

In a trial with about 350 users in Washington, D.C., last summer, it found people watched Mobile DTV a lot in a surprising place: the home. Users found it convenient to have a small portable screen for casual viewing in the kitchen and other places away from the living room TV.

If Mobile DTV is going to catch on, it had better do so fast. Because few people watch broadcast TV compared to cable or satellite, the Federal Communications Commission has started to look at ways to encourage or pay broadcasters to shut down their TV towers and turn their space on the airwaves over for mobile broadband use. Wireless broadband is an incontrovertible success, and carriers will eventually want more spectrum.

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LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Big tablets and small tablets, white ones and black ones. Cheap ones and expensive ones. Brand names famous and obscure at the starting line of a race where the iPad is already a speeding dot near the horizon.

It's impossible to walk the floor at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show without stumbling across a multitude of keyboard-less touch-screen computers expected to hit the market in the coming months. With Apple estimated to have sold more than 13 million iPads last year alone, the competition is clearly for second place, but even that prize is worth pursuing.

Technology research firm Gartner Inc. expects that 55 million tablet computers will be shipped this year, most of them still iPads, but there will be room for rivals to vie for sales of the remaining 10 million to 15 million devices.

A bevy of consumer electronics makers, including major names such as Motorola Mobility Inc., Toshiba Corp. and Dell Inc., showed off their tablets in Las Vegas at CES, betting 2011 will be the year the gadgets finally take off.

Companies tried for years to popularize tablets, but the frenzy began only with the release of the iPad in April. Now companies whose names don't include the word "Apple" are doing everything they can to differentiate themselves from the tablet front-runner.

They're adding bells and whistles the iPad doesn't yet have - such as front and back cameras for video chatting and picture taking and the ability to work over next-generation 4G data networks - in hopes of taking on the iPad, or at least carving out a niche.

Motorola's Xoom sports a screen that measures 10.1 inches diagonally - slightly larger than the iPad's - and dual cameras for video chatting and taking high-definition videos.

It will also include the upcoming Honeycomb version of Google Inc.'s Android software. Honeycomb has been designed for the larger touch screens on tablets; current versions of Android, used in many of the tablets at CES, are meant more for the smaller touch screens on smart phones.

For example, Gmail on a Honeycomb tablet shows a list of e-mails in one column and the body of the one you're reading in a second column. On a current Android phone, you'd only see one column at a time.

Motorola, at least, is confident that its offering is more full-featured than the iPad.

"A lot of people have been waiting for the definitive tablet," said Paul Nicholson, Motorola's marketing director. "This is the definitive tablet."

The tablet, which will start selling in March for an as-yet-unknown price, will also work on Verizon Wireless' existing, 3G network at first and later be upgradeable to work on its faster 4G network.

Tablets that work with a wireless carrier's high-speed data network may be a key to success in the tablet space, said Ross Rubin, an analyst for NPD Group, a market research firm. While a version of the iPad can use AT&T Inc.'s 3G network, Apple has not yet announced a plan for it to use any of the new 4G networks.

"Today we see a lot of tablet usage in the home. Perhaps tying it to a faster network can ... really expand the on-the-go use case for these products," Rubin said.

No matter how well any of the new contenders are received, though, analysts expect Apple to dominate in the tablet market for at least two years. With Apple's habit of annually refreshing its products, chances are the iPad will gain new features early this year that could launch it even further ahead of the competition.

And the company has something no one else has been able to match: mind share. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said consumers are buying the iPad because they see their friends and colleagues with it, not because of its specific features.

"Just because Android tablets may have more features doesn't guarantee they will sell," Rotman Epps said.

But if the market opened up by Apple's other mobile triumph, the iPhone, is any indication, they will. Since its 2007 debut the iPhone has been immensely popular, but it also sparked increased consumer demand for other smart phones - eventually including those running Android.

For AsusTek Computer Inc., the most important focus right now appears to be hardware and software diversification. The Taiwanese computer maker unveiled a number of tablets at the show, including the Eee Pad Transformer, which is a laptop that splits in two to function as a tablet, and the Eee Pad Slider, a tablet with a keyboard that slides out of its left side.

The Transformer is set to begin selling in April for $399 to $699, depending on its configuration. And the Slider is set to be sold starting in May for $499 to $799.

This puts its cheapest Transformer $100 below the most inexpensive iPad, which sells for $499 to $829, depending on its configuration. Several other companies unveiled even cheaper tablets at CES, which could pique consumer interest, though lower prices could come with less-vivid screens and older software.

Richard Shim, a DisplaySearch analyst, said Asus' tactics point to a wider trend in tablets: The market is branching out extremely quickly in an effort to appeal to a wider range of consumers.

This extends to operating software, too: Some tablets shown ran Microsoft Corp.'s PC software, Windows 7. Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of BlackBerry phones, demonstrated its forthcoming PlayBook tablet, which is geared toward business users and runs new software built by QNX Software Systems, which RIM took over in 2010.

RIM plans to start selling a Wi-Fi version of the PlayBook early this year, and a version that operates on Sprint Nextel Corp.'s 4G network is due to arrive in the summer.

Android was clearly the software of choice at CES, though, and Honeycomb in particular. Rotman Epps sees this as the software for the first "real" Android tablet, despite the arrival of several non-Honeycomb Android tablets such as Samsung Electronics Co.'s Galaxy Tab last year. She thinks Honeycomb will help new tablets make their mark.

That's hard to judge now, however: Honeycomb hasn't been released yet. Many tablets at CES that will be released with that software were not showing off live versions of it at the show.

Several analysts said software - and the apps developed for it - are what will set winning tablets apart from the pack, but for now it's too soon to tell how compelling they will be.

"At the end of the day, that's what's going to sell the device," Shim said.

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NEW YORK (AP) -- Verizon Wireless said Friday it will hold a press conference on Jan. 11, reigniting rumors that it will become the second U.S. carrier to sell Apple Inc.'s iPhone.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, Verizon already made news with phones and tablets that will run on its high-speed, next-generation 4G wireless network. So it's significant that Verizon will still have an announcement big enough to warrant a press conference in New York a week later, with Lowell McAdam, president and chief operating officer of Verizon Communications Inc., in attendance.

Verizon would not give any further details as to what the event was about. Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said she could not comment on rumors and speculation.

Rumors that Verizon would carry the iPhone have been circulating since before Apple Inc. unveiled the smart phone in 2007. Those rumors lingered over the years, but have become louder in recent months, as AT&T Inc. is believed to be nearing the end of its exclusive hold on the iPhone.

Although the iPhone has long been the crown jewel of AT&T's smart phone portfolio, the carrier in recent months added more than a dozen phones that run Google Inc.'s Android software. Until now, Verizon made up for not having the iPhone by selling Android phones such as the Motorola Droid.

Apple, as usual, did not attend the gadget show in Las Vegas. The company tends to make big product announcements at its own press conferences.

Shares of New York-based Verizon Communications Inc., which owns Verizon Wireless in a joint venture with Vodafone Group PLC, closed on Friday at $35.93, down 30 cents. The company gained 10 cents in after-hours trading. Apple' stock closed at $336.12, up $2.39, and gained 67 cents in after-hours trading.

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When the personal computer revolution began decades ago, Latinos and blacks were much less likely to use one of the marvelous new machines. Then, when the Internet began to change life as we know it, these groups had less access to the Web and slower online connections placing them on the wrong side of the "digital divide."

Today, as mobile technology puts computers in our pockets, Latinos and blacks are more likely than the general population to access the Web by cellular phones, and they use their phones more often to do more things.

But now some see a new "digital divide" emerging with Latinos and blacks being challenged by more, not less, access to technology. It's tough to fill out a job application on a cell phone, for example. Researchers have noticed signs of segregation online that perpetuate divisions in the physical world. And blacks and Latinos may be using their increased Web access more for entertainment than empowerment.

Fifty-one percent of Hispanics and 46 percent of blacks use their phones to access the Internet, compared with 33 percent of whites, according to a July 2010 Pew poll. Forty-seven percent of Latinos and 41 percent of blacks use their phones for e-mail, compared with 30 percent of whites. The figures for using social media like Facebook via phone were 36 percent for Latinos, 33 percent for blacks and 19 percent for whites.

A greater percentage of whites than blacks and Latinos still have broadband access at home, but laptop ownership is now about even for all these groups, after black laptop ownership jumped from 34 percent in 2009 to 51 percent in 2010, according to Pew.

Increased access and usage should be good things, right?

"I don't know if it's the right time to celebrate. There are challenges still there," says Craig Watkins, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Young and the Digital." He adds: "We are much more engaged, but now the questions turn to the quality of that engagement, what are people doing with that access."

For Tyrell Coley, engagement mostly means entertainment. In December, the 21-year-old New York City supermarket clerk launched a Twitter conversation about "(hash)femalesneedto." The number sign was a "hashtag" that allowed others to label their tweets and join the discussion.

Within a few hours, (hash)femalesneedto was the top trending topic on Twitter meaning more of the site's 17 million users were talking about it than anything else. Most comments came from black users and focused on relationships, advising women to do things like "learn sex is not love" and "learn how to love themselves."

"There's always something happening on Twitter, some drama, people talking about something," says Coley. "Twitter is a great social network to kill time. When you're bored, get on Twitter. Next thing you know you'll be out of work or whatever. Twitter makes my day go by. That's why I'm on almost every day."

Coley is black, and so are most of his 3,756 Twitter followers. So are about 25 percent of all Twitter users, roughly double the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population, according to a February 2010 survey by Edison Research and Arbitron.

Many of Twitter's trending topics have been fueled by black tweets. Coley has been responsible for several (hash)youcantbeuglyand and (hash)dumbthingspeoplesay also sprang from his iPhone. He has a desktop computer at home, which he used to apply for his supermarket job. But he uses his phone for 80 percent of his online activity, which is usually watching hip-hop and comedy videos or looking for sneakers on eBay.

This trend is alarming to Anjuan Simmons, a black engineer and technology consultant who blogs, tweets and uses Facebook "more than my wife would like." He hopes that blacks and Latinos will use their increased Web access to create content, not just consume it.

"What are we doing with this access? Are we simply sending e-mail, downloading adult content, sending texts for late-night hookups?" Simmons says. "Or are we discussing ideas, talking to people who we would not normally be able to talk to?"

Simmons has made professional connections and found job opportunities through social media. But when he first started using Twitter, the first thing he looked for was other black faces to connect with.

"The African-American community has a built-in social layer," Simmons says. "We tend to see other African-Americans as family. Even if we haven't met someone, we often refer to other black people as

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