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" I like to take pictures in low light. The general rule is that you need a shutter speed roughly equal to the focal length of your lens to avoid blur due to camera shake: If you&amp;#039;re shooting with a 200-mm lens, you need a shutter speed of at least 1/200 second. That&amp;#039;s fine for photos in sunlight, but indoors and in other low-light conditions a fast shutter speed results in an under-exposed photo. Fortunately, I have steady hands, and I can often get a good picture with a slower speed--1/125 second, or even 1/60, at that focal length. But not always, as even the slightest disturbance will blur the image.  Camera and lens manufacturers have tried to solve this problem two ways. One is to make film--or, nowadays, digital camera sensors--more sensitive, allowing a higher shutter speed in lower light. For a variety of reasons, though, this becomes steadily more difficult as image resolution increases, and as photographers become less tolerant of image noise and other artifacts. (For some reason, the spy-photo graininess created by &amp;quot;push processing&amp;quot; films to higher sensitivities bothers people less than the digital noise created by pushing camera sensors to the same levels.)  The other approach is to help people stabilize the image. A tripod or a monopod is an obvious solution: Screw the camera onto a steady support and exposures of several seconds become possible, though of course people moving in the image are blurred by their own motion. The other is a sort of &amp;quot;virtual tripod,&amp;quot; a technology that compensates for camera movement so that the image remains stable even if the camera does not.  That&amp;#039;s what Nikon does with its VR (&amp;quot;Vibration Reduction&amp;quot;) technology, and I recently purchased their new 18-200-mm VR zoom lens. The technology is simple in concept, though somewhat complex in execution: Camera pitch and yaw sensors detect movement, and a microprocessor instructs tiny motors to move lens elements so as to compensate. (A longer description can be found here.).  How does it work? Very well. I focused on a bookshelf and photographed it from across my study in available light. The focal length was 200 mm (equivalent to a 300-mm lens on a traditional 35-mm film camera) and the shutter speed was about 1/6 second. With the VR mechanism turned on, the image was quite sharp. With VR turned off--notwithstanding my steady hands--it was rather blurry. The VR technology also allows for continuous focus on moving objects. I haven&amp;#039;t owned mine long enough to try it out on birds in the Smoky Mountains, but professional photographer Rick Lee has had his for a while, and has posted some amazing photos of birds in flight, illustrating what the VR lens can do under the right circumstances. Nikon&amp;#039;s new 18-200VR lens is also quite compact, unlike earlier models. It&amp;#039;s not much bigger, in fact, than the 18-70-mm zoom lens that comes packaged with some Nikon D70 and D50 cameras.  PODCAST: Glenn Reynolds reviews the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet PLUS: Read (and watch) all of Glenn&amp;#039;s PM columns, reviews and blogs in one place Nikon&amp;#039;s 18-200 VR lens (top right) is only slightly larger than the 18-70 zoom lens (top left), though it is considerably more expensive. But the results of using VR (bottom right) are much sharper. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a1461/4213221/>