My last camera was a Nikon Coolpix S7c, great camera with a huge screen and takes great pictures. Whilst I was on Holiday in Phuket earlier this year I took a few video clips and whilst the quality was OK the sound was awful. It was time for an upgrade, so I decided on a Sanyo Xacti CG65.

I had been looking at the Sanyo Xacti range for years, the downside was always that I don’t want to sacrifice quality on still images, and with movies the capacity of SD cards was an issue until recently.

The Xacti uses SDHC cards, and it just so happens that I have a 8gb SDHC that I bought on eBay recently, this allows me 5 hours and 40 mins of video in the high quality TV mode, and a lot more in web mode.

Image quality for both video and stills is amazing, especially indoors where I really did not expect it to perform well. It has the ability to snap a still whist making a video, this is more useful than it sounds.

It’s too early to say what battery life will be like, but it’s looking good so far.

Connecting this to a computer is a snap, on my computers itunes opens up and offers to import the movies and stills, on computers without itunes it’s still easy as it can connects in card reader mode, or of course if you have a SDHC card reader in your computer you can just pop the card in.

I wont go into the technical specs because you can read that anywhere, and my opinion on specs is that they don’t mean anything when it comes to cameras, the proof is all in the images and videos.

Buy one, you wont be disapponted! In Thailand these are 9,900 Baht (140 UK pounds, 280 USD)

Also dubbed the wind up iPod, the Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player is a great gadget for camping trips, long car rides, or anyone who wants to avoid the inconvenience of a dead battery. This multimedia player can run for a good 40 green minutes off of one minute of winding. Besides winding, it can also be charged with a standard USB cable.

When fully charged it is claimed to be able to hold a charge capacity of up to 20 hours, but when put test is was found to be capable of 32 hours of audio playback and a surprising 17 hrs of video.

A few good steps up the evolutionary scale than the windable torch (which is also available through Trevor Baylis), the Eco Media Player incorporates various other functions such as music and video player, FM radio, photo viewer, voice recorder, flashlight, and it can be used to charge a cell phone.

If you don’t want to listen with headphones you can use the built in mono speaker. It also comes with 2 GB of space which makes it useful as a storage device as well.

Although it has been out for awhile, it has received little competition and still remains the best of its kind in the market. It has its downsides though, firstly it’s a bit expensive - £129.95 new. It’s also quite difficult to arrange the audio files since it doesn’t support ID3 tag sorting.

The Sony VAIO VGN-AR61ZU is a good desktop replacement notebook with great performance and entertainment capabilities.

This VAIO is an impressive notebook sporting a large 17in display while clocking in at high speeds with one of the new Intel’s Penryn processors - a Core 2 Duo T8300 running at 2.4 GHz and 4 GB of RAM.. But on the downside, it’s a bit expensive, heavy (4kg), and has a short battery life.

In terms of entertainment, this notebook is enough to keep you satisfied. Turning out 29fps, its GeForce 8600M chip will support the needs of most gamers as well. It also comes equipped with an internal TV tuner that allows the user to watch and record programmes with the Media Center PVR applications which is standard with the Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Not to mention the internal Blue-ray DVD drive combined with the 1920 x 1200 high resolution display make a perfect combination for watching high-definition films.

The weakest point of this Vaio is a battery that lasts approximately 71 minutes. Seeing as it cannot be far from a power supply for long, it is not the most appropriate notebook for traveling. A larger touchpad would also have made it much easier to use. In fact, it’s hard to understand why Sony installed such a small touchpad on a notebook with so much space

Sony VAIOs have always been a bit spendy, and the VGN-AR61ZU is no different – priced at ₤1799. Nevertheless, it does offer reasonable performance and reliability for the price.

It’s getting harder and harder to find CRT monitors these days. vThe advent of liquid crystal displays (LCD) pretty much sentenced those old bulky CRTs to the landfill. Some creative individuals are coming up with alternative applications for the devices and a fish tank is a great example.

LCDs had a lot to offer compared to their over-sized counterparts, such as reduced radiation emissions and much lower drain on power. LCDs are also better for the environment by saving power and also saving space, since they are composed of much fewer materials, like plastic, metal, and glass.

Now LCDs are being overtaken by OLED – Organic Light Emitting Diodes. OLEDs are bringing the beneficial qualities of power and space saving to even higher standards. The actual thickness of an OLED is between 100 to 500 nanometers – that’s 200 times thinner than a human hair. This is made possible mostly by virtue of the fact that OLEDs don’t require backlighting to function.

Besides being thin, they are also flexible and can be rolled up to store when not in use. Some of the disadvantages of OLEDs are that costs of manufacturing are high, it can be damaged by water, and the different colored diodes have varying life-spans. The shortest of them is blue, which is at least three times less than that of red and green. To overcome this obstacle Sony is collaborating with Idemitsu to develop a higher level of internal quantum efficiency (IQE) and consequently increase the lifespan of blue. So far they have achieved a 3.5% gain in IQE.