Gadgets: Wireless from laptop to TV

Watching Internet video on your living room TV shouldn't be hard. The stuff already plays on your laptop, so why not just connect your laptop to your TV? A new $99 gadget called Veebeam promises to make that easy to do.

Veebeam comes with two parts. One is a hub that plugs into a TV. The other is a USB dongle that plugs into a laptop or desktop computer. The dongle and the hub communicate via Wireless USB.

You control Veebeam from your laptop rather than with (yet another) remote control. To watch TV from your PC, you install a Veebeam application on your laptop and plug in the dongle.

Over the short distance between your couch and your TV, Wireless USB can stream at up to 480 megabits per second -- more than enough bandwidth to play any video format without falling behind.

Now that so many people watch television with laptops across their knees, it seems smart not to add yet another video-playing box to the mix, but to make use of the one already in your lap.

Panasonic has put some impressive horsepower under the hood of its new Lumix DMC-GH2 Micro Four Thirds camera. And it will need all that processing capacity to handle an interchangeable 3-D lens -- the world's first -- designed for Panasonic's MFT cameras.

The Lumix DMC-GH2 sports a new three-core engine that enables it to produce full 1080 video at 60 frames per second, shoot bursts at 5 fps, and handle 3-D image processing (sorry, no 3-D video).

Panasonic says the new Venus FHN engine also enables the camera to focus in as little as a tenth of a second. Its autofocus is impressively fast and accurate, at least in the context of conference room shooting.

The GH2 will ship in late November at a cost of $900 (body only). Panasonic will offer two kits: a $1,000 package with a 14 mm to 42 mm lens, and a $1,500 kit with a 14 mm to 140 mm lens with a silent zoom for video.