The Green Show: Cleaner than a car wash Video

The Green Show: Cleaner than a car wash Video Transcript

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>> Mark Licea: Hey everyone. I'm Mark Licea and this week we get to look at a monitor that responds to light. We have software that saves paper, and we explore a high-tech car battery charging station. The Green Show starts now. ^M00:00:14 [ Music ] ^M00:00:20

>> Mark Licea: It might look like a carwash from the outside, but actually it's a lot cleaner. The company Better Place is behind this electric car battery swapping center in Japan. Electric-powered Nissans drive in, a robot changes out the depleted battery and a fully-charged one is put in all in about a minute. ^M00:00:36 [ Music ] ^M00:00:50

>> Mark Licea: The station uses solar energy to charge the batteries that can last for about 100 miles. Better Place is already in the works to set up charging stations in Israel and has agreements to launch the technology in San Francisco, Denmark and Australia. To read more about this, go to CNET.Com/Greentech. If you're tired of printing out extra pages with nothing but a URL or a Banner Ad, GreenPrint World is a software that solves the problem of unwanted pages. Plus, it's free. Seth Rosenblatt has the details.

>> Seth Rosenblatt: If you're looking for effective ways to save paper, save printer ink and just possibly save the earth, GreenPrint World is a printing filter than can help you with two out of those three. The program comes with preset but customizable filters that look at documents you've sent to your printer. Before they come out on paper, it opens up a viewer that compares the document to its filters and red-flags potential places you can save on page length. Removing text, images and pages are what it does best, but it lacks the ability to micromanage margins and line spacing. Still, it's a good way to save paper on print jobs big and small. For CNET's Green Show, I'm Seth Rosenblatt.

>> Mark Licea: To download the Windows version of GreenPrint yourself, head over to download.com. Here's a great gadget if you're an iPhone user that wants to track your power usage. It's the UFO from a company called Visible Energy and it's a power strip and a surge protector. Although it looks like it could double as a snack bowl. The device tracks the energy usage of your electronics by changing color depending on how much juice is being used. Best of all, iPhone owners can take advantage of the UFO ap that lets you monitor energy usage, but also switch each outlet on and off just using your iPhone. It's due out this summer and it costs about 200 bucks -- a lot. But hey, it changes color. That totally makes up for it. Handheld electronics might be small, but together, they suck up a lot of juice. In fact, the International Energy Agency, an industry watchdog group, predicts handheld electronics will triple energy consumption by 2030. To meet that increased demand, the IEA says more than 200 nuclear power plants will have to be built worldwide. No, we're not saying don't use consumer electronics, that's just crazy talk. But if you want to get ahead of the game, there is some very cool tech that can help minimize your energy consumption. Our own Eric Franklin got to review a desktop monitor that auto adjusts depending on the amount of light in the room. Take a look.

>> Eric Franklin: Today we're looking at the Dell G2210. This is an LED backlit display that gives the monitor better control of the amount of light that emanates from it. This monitor has a very unique onscreen display with an energy gauge on it. The energy gauge gives you an idea of how much power you're pulling in real time. The first is a standard preset, which allows a user to set their own brightness. The second is an energy smart preset which caps the brightness at a lower level. The third is energy smart plus, which is the same thing as the energy smart preset, but it activates the dynamic dimming feature, which adjusts the brightness based on the amount of ambient light in the room. Here's hoping other vendors pick up on this and start implementing easy ways for users to determine exactly how much power they're using.

>> Mark Licea: And that does it for this week. Send in your feedback and tips. Greenshow@CNET.com. I'm Mark Licea. Thanks for watching. ^M00:04:02 [ Music ]