Digital Technology News, Camera, Camcorder and Cool Gadget Reviews

Gigabyte’s 890GPA-UD3H is a full ATX AM3 motherboard with a whopping six SATA3 ports, plus an extra two SATA2 ports that are served by the same chip that handles the board’s legacy IDE port.

There are two PCI-E x16 slots, which run at x8 if both are populated with cards, three PCI-E xl slots and two PCI slots. Installing a graphics card with a large cooler will block the slot below. Four memory slots allow you to install up to 16GB of memory at a maximum speed of 2,000MHz.

There are just six USB ports on the back panel, including two USB3 ports. There are another four USB headers on the motherboard, which can supply up to eight more ports, but you’ll need brackets or case connectors to use them. There’s also a PS/2 port and a FireWire port on the back. Read the rest of this entry »

This latest incarnation of the Ultra HD has a host of improvements, including 50fps video and image stabilisation, so it handles motion on the part of the operator or the subject far better.

The rechargeable battery lasts for around 90 minutes, and the 8GB memory stores two hours of footage.

Next to the micro HDMI connector is the new FlipPort for connecting accessories.

The smaller Flip Mino 3rd generation is similarly priced and specified, but lacks the FlipPort.

Nvidia and AMD (formerly ATI) are certainly fighting for the attention of gaming enthusiasts, releasing numerous cards around the £200 mark. Back in July 2010, Nvidia launched the excellent GeForce GTX 460  for just shy of that amount. More recently, AMD waded in with its HD 6870 for around £180 and the Radeon HD 6950  for £220. Now Nvidia is back with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, again at around £200.

In fact the 560 Ti is available at a range of prices. This is because Nvidia has encouraged manufacturers to produce overclocked versions of the card, so much so that there are few stock versions available. Our benchmarks below were run on the reference card from Nvidia, which has a core clock speed of 822MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1GHz. However, cards with higher clock speeds are available at the same price as the reference cards.The Palit GeForce GTX 560Ti Sonic Edition, for example, has a core clock speed of 900MH. Read the rest of this entry »

The PicoPix looks like a miniature version of a standard projector and is designed to be carried everywhere. It uses an LED lamp and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) technology to project a 52in diagonal image at 7ft. It can run on batteries for two and a half hours, and play MP4 videos from USB drives.

LCoS is much like digital light processing (DLP) technology, but where DLP uses an array of moving micro-mirrors to reflect a light source either through the lens or away from it, depending on whether the pixel is on or off, LCoS uses liquid crystals on top of a reflective surface. These block light or allow it to reach the reflective surface below – if light is allowed to hit the mirror, it’s reflected out through the lens. In DLP projectors, the light then passes through red, green and blue filters in a spinning colour wheel to produce three colour images, one after another. The fast speed of the wheel tricks your eyes into seeing a full-colour image. Read the rest of this entry »

Sony’s latest external Blu-ray drive supports dual-layer burning, so you can write a massive 50GB of data to a single disc. The BDX-S500U will play Blu-ray movies on a laptop or PC and supports 3D content on a compatible display.

Disc writing speeds were very close to Sony’s estimates, managing 4x when writing 25GB of files to a Blu-ray disc. A 50GB, dual-layer disc took around 45 minutes to burn, which is average for a 4x writer. DVD write speeds were also reasonable, taking 12 minutes for single-layer and 25 minutes for dual-layer discs. Read the rest of this entry »

Kingston HyperX MAX is an external version of the V+100 internal SSD, with USB3 support for lightning-fast data transfers.

It manages a rapid 105.8MB/s write and a very quick 161.4MB/S read according to our test. The demanding small files test produced slightly slower results, but 49MB/s write and 82.2MB/S read speeds are still fast. It’s a shame it doesn’t come with backup software; at these speeds, it would be the ideal backup drive.

The lack of moving parts makes the drive perfect for carrying around, as dropping it won’t mean losing all your data. To get the best speeds you’ll have to use USB3, and the drive is prohibitively expensive, but if speed is all you need this is one of the best options.

JVC is claiming a world first for its 3D camcorder – It is the first to offer 3D Full-HD 1080i recording at 30fps.

A pair of 3.3 Mp Cmos lenses are slightly offset from each other to creat the 3D illusion.

The JVC GS-TD1 has a 5X optical zoom and uses a Falconbird CPU to process the image. JVC also cites the camcorder’s 3D sound recording capability, 3D time-lapse feature and ability to take 3D stills.

Once you’ve snagged some memorable footage, you can preview it using the bundled Everio 3D Media Viewer. Images can be recorded to its internal 60GB memory, but you’ll need to invest in some capacious SDHC memory cards.

The Galaxy Player 50 is an Android-based MP3 player that features a 3.2in touchscreen and comes in 8GB and 16GB capacities — support for microSD lets you expand this by up to 32GB. As well as downloading apps, you can take photos on its 2Mp camera or surf the web using the integrated Chrome Lite browser (with support for Flash).

Samsung described the portable player as an extension to its popular Galaxy family, which includes the Galaxy S and Samsung-developed Nexus S smartphone.

A 7in touchscreen tablet PC running Android 2.2. The Streak 2 will dwarf the current 5in model.

T-mobile said it will be priced below existing tablets but didn’t reveal an exact figure – nor did it say when the Streak will go on sale.

The tablet runs an nVidia dual-core processor and has an SD Card slot to permit storage of as much as 32GB.

Research In Motion (RIM) announced their latest offering, the Blackberry PlayBook. The tablet which RIM CEO, Mike Lazaridis described as “the first professional tablet” has a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 multi-touch screen, a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM and either 16GB or 32GB onboard storage capacity.

The PlayBook sports a 3MP front facing camera and a 5MP rear camera. It has got a microUSB jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an HDMI port. No word on when it will be available and at how much, but it looks quite promising.