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Fair features newest gadgets

www.cebit.de

Simone Doerrlinger displays the SX45 smartphone by Siemens, above, at the CeBIT computer fair in Hanover, Germany. The SX45 combines a color display pocket PC and a mobile phone.

The CeBIT  the world’s biggest fair for information technology and telecommunications  continues through Wednesday.

Book a welcome primer on home theater systems

There are millions of DVD players, surround-sound speaker systems, audio-video receivers, videocassette recorders and color televisions but only a handful of books that explain how they work, how to set them up properly and how to sift though the stupefying jargon of home theater.

“Practical Home Theater” (1stBooks, $19.95) by Mark Fleischmann succeeds as both a primer on existing technology and a preview of emerging technology, such as digital television. The reader with a newly purchased home theater not only learns the differences among the dueling Dolbys  Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic and Dolby Pro Logic II  but also why the picture from your DVD player looks better with an S-video connection than with a composite-video connection.

“Practical Home Theater” is available at Amazon.com and www.practicalhometheater.com, but it’s least expensive ($11.95) at 1stbooks.com. For less than the cost of a DVD, it’ll remove the power of intimidation from your home theater.

New Photosmart printer offers some improvement

www.hp.com

Hewlett-Packard’s Photosmart printers are some of the best photo printers available. The series’ latest model, the HP Photosmart 1315 ($400), above, improves a bit on the 1215 model with a tiny monitor for editing pictures saved on your digital media card.

The 1315, which works with Windows 98 and later editions and with Mac OS 8.6 and above, smoothly installs in minutes, thanks to the ubiquitous “walk-through” diagrams that come with most printers. You can use a parallel port or USB cable (neither of which comes with the printer). And you can send photos and text from your laptop computer to the printer’s infrared port.