Monthly Archives: January 2003
Hitachi – CML174SXW
If you have been planning to buy a LCD monitor, there is no better time than the present, as the technology behind them is improving and, most importantly, the price is dropping to very affordable levels. This has been most noticeable in the 15-inch display market, but now it’s beginning to affect the larger 17-inch…
Epson – EMP-TW100 Home Theatre Projector
Home theatre installations are becoming ever more popular in the UK, following on from a similar situation in the USA which started about a decade ago. Television screens are getting bigger, sound systems more powerful – with even more speakers – and playback definition sharper. The associated price tags tend to have at least four…
SonicBlue – Rio Sport S30S
The Rio range of MP3 players, now made by SonicBlue, virtually invented the solid-state music player market and are still the devices to which most others are compared. The new Rio Sport S30S (and S35S – the only difference is the amount of internal memory) shows that the company has lost none of its urge…
Philips – DVDRW228K
Philips is traditionally an early-adopter of new technologies, particularly those involving the CD and DVD standards which it has helped to specify from the start. This DVD+RW drive is compatible with the DVD+R standard, as well as the rewritable format, and is also capable of reading, writing and rewriting CD-based media. It can’t handle DVD-R,…
HP – StorageWorks Ultrium 460
Manufacturers of high-end tape drives aim to double capacity and performance every couple of years. Which is exactly what HP has managed with its Storage Works Ultrium 460, the first of the new generation LTO Ultrium drives to be released by the LTO consortium of HP, IBM and Seagate. The capacity figures are impressive, with…
HP – Photosmart 850
Somewhere in the depths of the huge HP corporation there is a team that desperately wants to develop a 35mm film camera. Instead they’ve been told to sort their act out and develop a digital camera fit for 2003, so here it is: the HP Photosmart 850, a digital camera that looks just like a…
Samsung – SM152T
The first thing that strikes you about this flat panel monitor is just how thin the thing is. In addition, it is one of the few “15in” panels that are actually 15 inches diagonally; just the job if you’re really tight for desk space and need to fit more into less. Because of its two-hinge…
Sony – CRXP-90MU
With the arrival of the USB 2.0 specification and its 480Mb/sec transfer rate (40 times faster than USB 1.0), high-speed peripherals such as hard drives, CD-RW drives and so on are viable alternatives to adding another internal drive to your system. There’s the added bonus that some – but by no means all – are…
Acer – TravelMate 273X
Notebooks for under £1,000, even including the VAT, are no longer a rarity, but finding a really good one can be far from straightforward. This is simply because notebooks cost more to manufacture than desktop PCs, so the finished product is more likely to show the effects of any cost-cutting more dramatically. The list of…
Canon – Ixus v3
It is entirely possible that ‘Q’ never issued a Canon Ixus digital camera to James Bond, and we feel that is a terrible oversight. The Ixus v3 is a 3.2 megapixel update to the original Ixus and it looks for all the world like a small block of brushed stainless steel that measures 90mm x…