Portable HD Radio now available

Q I am disappointed in the electronics industry regarding a specific niche that is being ignored by radio manufacturers. My wife and I listen to KSJN, the public-radio station in St. Paul, in the mornings. A great program has been moved exclusively to the HD Radio band, and we can only hear it in one of our cars, the one with the HD-enabled radio. We are unable to hear the show at home, because we like to carry our battery-powered portable AM/FM radio from room to room and there are no portable HD radios on the market that I am aware of. What I want is a portable, battery-powered radio that receives HD broadcasts. Is there such an animal?

BRIAN SIEMENS, HASTINGS

A Up until recently the chipsets required to tune HD Radio required too much power to be run from battery-powered devices. More efficient chipsets are now on the market, and battery-powered HD Radios are starting to appear.

Coby Electronics has exactly what you are looking for in the new Coby HDR700, a battery-powered, portable tabletop unit selling for $149. The batteries provide up to five hours of play time and it tunes AM and FM too. You can see the HDR700 at www.cobyusa.com.

An iPod-sized HD Radio was recently introduced by Insignia, Best Buy's house brand. The Insignia NS-HD01 sells for a mere $49 and is a great way for people to get their feet wet with HD Radio. If your current portable has an auxiliary input, you can connect the Insignia with a miniplug cable and listen through the speakers.

If neither of these radios suits your needs or tastes, there should be many more choices by the holiday season. HD Radio is really starting to come into its own and people are catching on.

How zooming works Q My question concerns using the zoom on digital cameras. My super-zoom lets me reduce the image size from 10 megapixels to 7MP or even 5MP in order to increase the optical zoom range. My Canon point-and-shoot does not give me this option. Is it doing the same thing, when I go past the 3x limits of its optical zoom and begin using the digital zoom, or does the image size stay the same and the image quality suffer?

A What the super-zoom is doing is the same thing as digital zoom. It is cropping down on the sensor to increase the effective magnification, but cropping also reduces the number of pixels used and reduces image quality. You can just shoot at full resolution and crop down in software to get the same effect.