As usual this Christmas there’s the best part of naff-all on the main channels, so for some real techie viewing it pays to look around the schedules – which is precisely what I’ve done. First, a disclaimer: I have absolutely no idea how good these programmes will be, I’m going in blind with the rest of you. So fingers crossed, here’s some geek content you might not have spotted…

Christmas Eve

Mythbusters covers all sorts of topics, but one stands out on Christmas Eve. The team conduct an investigation into viral videos on the internet, dissecting the content of many famous examples and asking whether viewers should believe everything they see. (13:00, Discovery)

The sprawling Wing Commander games franchise got the big screen treatment in 1999, starring the acting chops of, ahem, Freddie Prinze Jr. Its Wikipedia entry says it “diverged significantly from the established Wing Commander universe, and was a critical and commercial failure.” Set the Sky Plus! (23:35, Sky Movies Family)

Christmas Day

If you have Sky you’ll have been battered round the head with this one for the whole month, but it’s worth including anyway. The film that brought 3D to the masses, and had studios thinking they could slap it onto any film for the rest of the year whether it needed it or not: Avatar. Also in 3D, if you’re one of the seven people in the country with a 3D TV. (15:10 and repeated throughout the week, Sky Movies Premiere/3D)

The tiny Corbett’s back with friends for The One Ronnie, and it’s worth catching for one particular sketch that’s been doing the rounds on YouTube: Ronnie teams up with Harry Enfield to discuss a problem with his BlackBerry. Better than it sounds. (17:10, BBC1)

And deep into the night, set the video for the first episode of Sci-Fi Saved My Life, which takes an irreverent look at the science behind the Terminator films, from real-life cybernetics to secret military robots. (02:00 [morning of the 26th], Discovery Science) On consecutive nights in the same time slot, it also examines The Matrix, Men In Black and Stargate.

Boxing Day

There’s precious little to watch if you’re not a sports fan, so I suggest you nip to your local picture house, load up on popcorn and take your pick from two very different nerd gems.

Tron: Legacy takes the classic (although not actually very good…) original, in which a hacker finds himself digitised inside a mainframe, and updates it with 3D and some startling modern visuals.

But the real techie pleasure is to be had with the quite brilliant Monsters. Former BBC visual effects man Gareth Edwards directed and shot it in Mexico with a permanent cast of two and a crew of only seven people in one van. The titular monsters were added in afterwards by Edwards in his bedroom, using only a laptop, some Adobe software and 3dsMax. That it looks better than most blockbusters is testament to what’s possible with today’s hardware and software.

December 27th

The horrific iPad episode of Modern Family isn’t showing over Christmas, so you can be spared a half-hour of aggressive product placement (”it’s a movie theatre, a library, and a music store all rolled into one awesome… pad!”), but there is one other tech-related episode to catch. In it, the family worry about their gadget obsession, so a challenge is set to see who can stay unplugged the longest. (20:00, Sky 1)

Each half-hour episode of How Does That Work? covers several topics so it might not have much depth, but of some interest are the consecutive looks at the workings of the hard disk drive and the MP3 player. (01:00/01:30 [morning of the 28th], Discovery Science)

December 28th

Part Kinect, part Microsoft Surface, it still looks like too much hard work. The film that hints at the possible future of user interfaces, Minority Report. (14:00, Sky Movies Sci-Fi & Horror)

December 30th

I, Videogame is “a provocative ‘rockumentary’ on the birth of a new form of entertainment,” apparently, with four episodes to catch on consecutive nights. Here’s the quite brilliant synopsis for episode one: “In the 1950s, the Cold War quickly evolved between the world superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutually assured destruction enforced an uneasy stalemate, yet also drove computer technology to create missile simulations in order to predict the results of a nuclear war. This same computer technology was used to develop the first computer game in 1958 – Tennis for Two.” Obviously. (2am [morning of the 31st], Discovery Science)

December 31st

Episode two of I, Videogame looks at the 1980s shift from controlling things, like spaceships and tennis rackets, to controlling recognisable characters with real faces and back stories. And Donkey Kong. (2am [morning of the 1st], Discovery Science)

New Year’s Day

Episode three of I, Videogame looks at the birth of Castle Wolfenstein and Doom, and the move from 2D to 3D. It also looks at the thinly veiled recruitment tool, America’s Army, and has games developers asking “how long before a game was nearly indistinguishable from reality?” Quite long, as it turns out. (2am [morning of the 2nd], Discovery Science)

January 2nd

Episode four of I, Videogame looks at the God game genre, talks to the legend that is Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims), and covers the shift from gamers consuming content to creating it themselves. It also, intriguingly, covers how people used games to find their definition of good and evil after the breakdown of the Cold War. (2am [morning of the 3rd], Discovery Science). For some reason, the fifth and final episode on online gaming is not being shown.

January 3rd

What better way to finish your techie Christmas than by enjoying a festive edition of Mastermind featuring the one and only Sir Clive Sinclair? He’s up against the intellectual might of two actors and a Blue Peter presenter, so he’ll need all the support he can get. (20:20, BBC 1)

Merry Christmas!

But we techie types have some more modern rituals too. Online Christmas shopping, for example. Loading up your Sky+ Box or Windows Media Center with films you’ll never watch. And, of course, hiding away in the study while you get to grips with this year’s must-have PC game.

For many of us, these customs are as much a part of the Yuletide season as wassailing and mulled wine; yet the technology that makes them possible has only come into being within the past few decades. And as 2010 comes knocking, I find myself looking back over Christmases of the past and marvelling at the huge advances we’ve made within my lifetime to get here.

1980: The infancy of home computing

As Christmas 1980 came around my family had just acquired our first home computer — a Sinclair ZX80, arguably the first mass market home PC. It was sold on the promise of unparalleled flexibility, with adverts boasting that “you could use it to do quite literally anything from playing chess to running a power station.”

By today’s standards, though, it was impossibly limited. With its 1KB of RAM and 3.25MHz processor it could run only simple text-based BASIC programs. Graphics were limited to a black and white 64 x 48 grid, and the video subsystem was so slow that the screen went visibly blank before every redraw. In principle I could have hooked it up to the TV in the front room for Christmas day, but I don’t think the family would have been enthralled.

Needless to say, in 1980 there was no online shopping. The Internet was still purely an academic communications network, and though dial-up BBS services did exist, they were very much a niche service. At this point I don’t believe I had ever even laid eyes on a modem.

1985: The age of rubber keys

Step forward five years and I had graduated from the ZX80 to the ZX Spectrum 48K.

Like the ZX80, the Spectrum was marketed as a serious machine – “you’ll quickly be moving into the colourful world of professional-level computing”, promised the adverts — but like millions my age I used it almost exclusively for playing games. Loading software from tape was slow and flaky, but by the standard of the day it was a versatile and affordable system (costing £175 at launch) and the colourful graphics palette from which the system took its name was pretty enough to justify taking over the front-room TV on Christmas morning.

(In truth, though, since only two colours could be used within each 8×8 character square, many Spectrum games made very sparing use of colour, to avoid ugly “attribute clash”.)

It was possible to use a joystick to play Spectrum games, but you needed a special interface, and for kids my age those were expensive add-ons. So on Christmas Day 1985 I was using the rubber keys to control Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Knight Lore and Jet Set Willy. What a year.

The online scene was starting to take off, too: the Prism VTX 5000 modem, running at a sprightly 1200/75 baud rate, let Spectrum users connect to Prestel. You couldn’t buy presents as such, but you could check information such as weather reports and train times, and it was even possible to access your bank account — so long as you were a customer of the forward-looking Nottingham Building Society.

1990: Guru meditations and Megablasts

Skip on another half-decade and we were in another world. The computer of choice was now the Amiga 500, a machine light years ahead of the Spectrum.

The standard model used a 7.14MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, packed 512KB of internal RAM and ran a multi-tasking, mouse-driven OS. The graphics really had attained arcade quality, overshadowing the contemporary Sega Megadrive and NES consoles. Indeed, the Amiga’s graphical resolutions challenged the capabilities of the front-room TV, leading to flickery interlacing in the highest resolutions – and you needed an ugly external RF modulator to connect to a television at all.

Though the Amiga was most popular as a gaming platform, it also had a hand in kickstarting the media revolution. Media Center-type abilities were still a long way off, but partnered with NewTek’s Video Toaster suite the Amiga could serve as a powerful video-editing and production station. Famously, Amiga hardware was used to generate the special effects for the TV show Babylon 5.

Its sound capabilities were notable too: though limited to 8-bit audio, quality was exceptional by the standards of the time. One fondly-remembered game is the Bitmap Brothers’ game “Xenon 2: Megablast”, which featured a house track by Bomb the Bass as its theme music – and this, of course, was during the days of the 3½in floppy, before audio could simply be streamed from a CD.

1995: Windows breaks through

By 1995 another transformation had taken place. The Amiga was succumbing to a lingering death – the result of poor management rather than any technical weakness – and its place was being taken by the PC, made accessible to the mainstream for the first time by the arrival of Windows 95.

For many households, this was the first home computer that required its own monitor. And though this opened up graphical possibilities far beyond what a TV could handle, it also removed the home computer from the living room (I personally spent most of my first Christmas day as a PC owner hidden away in my bedroom). Thus was created an entertainment divide that to this day hasn’t been satisfactorily bridged.

Still, on premium PC systems with CD-ROM drives it was for the first time possible to play music and watch videos on your desktop. You were stuck with VCD media, though, as DVDs had yet to arrive on the scene.

A typical 1995 PC system might have been based on a Pentium processor running at 90MHz, with 8MB of RAM. For those who had come from the Amiga, these were big numbers; yet in everyday use these machines typically felt sluggish and underpowered, due in part to Windows 95’s heavy reliance on virtual memory (which wasn’t used at all by most Amiga models).

This – coupled with the increasing average age of home computer owners – perhaps explains a shift away from fast-moving action games towards less resource-intensive strategy and adventure games. Christmas 1995 might have found you playing games such as Colonization and Command & Conquer.

The online world was getting more grown-up too: the world wide web was now a few years old, and with a state of the art 28.8Kbits/sec modem you could send faxes and connect to services such as AOL and CompuServe. I wouldn’t have been allowed to do this on Christmas Day, though: leaving aside the £20 a month subscription fee, it would have tied up the phone line, preventing our various relatives from calling up to relay their seasonal wishes.

2000: Evolution, not revolution

Once Windows had established itself as a standard home OS, the pace of change appeared to slow to a crawl.

To be sure, hardware kept growing more powerful: the original Pentium processor matured into the Pentium III and 4, while AMD’s competing “Thunderbird” Athlon processor was gaining respect as a credible alternative. Graphics hardware from the likes of 3DFX and Matrox – as well as our friends ATI and Nvidia – was driving the PC to unprecedented heights of high-resolution 3D gaming.

All the same, the standard home desktop, running Windows 98 or Windows Me, still looked almost exactly the same as it had five years ago under Windows 95.

In incremental ways, though, these new releases of Windows did reflect the changing role of the in PC. The most obvious upgrade was Internet Explorer: the original release of Windows 95 hadn’t included a browser, but within a few years the internet had become a huge mainstream business. Microsoft infamously bundled Internet Explorer into Windows 98 and Me, and even tried to make the Windows Explorer mimic the browser with its disastrous “single-click” mode.

Whether you chose Internet Explorer or the cutting-edge Mozilla browser – still very much in beta at this stage – it was now possible to place orders online with “e-tailers” such as Amazon, Dabs and even Sainsbury’s. By 2000 those in the know were doing their Christmas (and everyday) shopping via 56k modem connections. ADSL had yet to be rolled out in the UK, though trials were underway.

And with Windows Me the PC continued its metamorphosis into a general purpose media station. This was the first edition of Windows to bundle Windows Movie Maker, turning video editing from a specialist usage into a standard application. Media Player was upgraded to make use of online media information, and the DVD Player application no longer required special decoder hardware.

It’s also notable that Christmas photographs were now starting to be taken on digital, rather than film-based cameras: typically these would have been two- or three-megapixel images, shot on a chunky compact camera with a fixed-focus lens, but this was enough to give the PC another media-type role, editing and organising photographs.

PCs were still largely banished from the front room: some graphics cards promised “TV output”, but in reality this normally meant an S-video connector that only the most expensive televisions could accept.

Still, laptops were by now starting to percolate into the mainstream, so this Christmas I was at least able to play Hearts from the comfort of the sofa. I couldn’t browse the web from there, though: while 802.11b had been standardised during 1999, almost no domestic hardware yet supported wireless connections.

2005: Today’s tech starts to emerge

By 2005, home computing had all but reached the form in which we know it today. Laptops and desktops were by now running Windows XP, still today the most popular OS among PC Pro readers. The familiar Core 2 Duo processor was just around the corner, although if you’d bought a top-of-the-range PC for Christmas 2005 it would have come with a Prescott Pentium 4, the first mainstream processor to use the LGA 775 socket. 64-bit support was becoming standard too, though the new Windows XP 64-bit Edition hadn’t found wide acceptance (and never would).

Internet access had matured too: ADSL and cable broadband had become almost ubiquitous in London and the home counties, though less populated areas were still waiting to be hooked up. Wireless routers were becoming common too, thanks to the rise of laptops (by some measures they would overtake desktop sales within two years). I believe 2005 was the first Christmas I enjoyed with the assistance of an always-on wireless broadband connection.

The actual business of browsing the web in 2005 was very similar to today, though those who hadn’t jumped to Firefox 1.5 were still stuck with the pokey Internet Explorer 6. At this point YouTube was still a small independent startup, Facebook was open only to students and Twitter didn’t exist at all.

2005 also saw the arrival of Windows XP Media Center Edition, aimed at putting the PC back into the front room. The platform never did satisfactorily learn to connect to a standard television, but the rise of HDTV sets with digital inputs made that a moot point. Dedicated Media Center PCs didn’t exactly transform the market, but with their ability to record live TV for later viewing and play user music and media on demand they set the scene for modern services such as Spotify and BBC iPlayer.

For early adopters, at least, the technological pieces of today’s Christmas pie were finally falling into place.

And what of the future?

Technology is an industry that never stands still, and since 2005 we’ve seen Windows 7, netbooks, iPhones and DSLRs all arrive in the mainstream. And, of course, it won’t stop there. No one can really predict the technologies that will become a part of Christmases to come, but 3D Blu-ray, motion-sensing game controllers and domestic projectors have all been touted as marvels to come.

Personally, one trend which I think will continue is the re-establishment of the PC as a home entertainment hub. Intel’s 32nm Westmere processors promise to pack massive computational power and HD graphics into a tiny platform with tiny power consumption, opening the door to the most efficient and unobtrusive media PCs yet. With broadband becoming almost a given in UK households, I reckon the potential of  on-demand video, games and services is ready to explode. And personally I can’t wait: just think, if you don’t fancy next Christmas’ Bond film, you could just flick over to a different one.

What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Are my recollections wildly at variance with your own? Let me know your thoughts about what’s to come. And they do say that Christmas is a time for sharing, so why not share with us your own fond memories of the technology of Christmases past?

Image credits: ZX80 by Daniel Ryde; ZX Spectrum 48K by Daniel Ryde; Amiga via http://www.flickr.com/photos/quagmirez31/; CD-ROM via http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vincent1969; Pentium 4 processor via http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sting; iPhone by Ed Schipul

Take the hundreds of movies that are churned out by dozens of channels over the festive period: while some just aren’t worth bothering with – with guff like Santa Clause: The Movie or White Christmas the worst offenders – others are worth a watch simply for their off-the-wall technology.

We’ve scoured the listings and hunted down our favourite examples so, if you’ve got a spare moment between the Queen’s Speech and Top of the Pops, you can take a peek at some of the oddest tech ever commited to celluloid.

Matrix magic

Take The Matrix trilogy (9pm, ITV2, 28/29/30 December), for instance. It may be one of the most technologically advanced franchises ever made – but also one of the most ridiculous. Take a step back from Keanu’s sunglasses, Morpheus and bullet-time, and consider the movie’s main idea: a virtual world powered by human bio-electricity that, at the same time, keeps regular folk sedate enough for the Matrix itself to try and take over the world.

It’s all a little bit silly.

That, however, is exactly why it’s one of our favourites – it’s full of insane tech that can only be fully understood by the geekiest of geeks and, if you need some peace and quiet come the holidays, we’re confident that it’ll reduce elderly relatives to a confused stupor. Much like The Matrix itself, in fact.

Process terminated

Another movie that takes tech to the extreme is Blade Runner, which is being shown on the BBC iPlayer until Boxing Day – a suitably high-tech format for a movie that paints a bleak, dystopian and tech-filled Los Angeles.

Some of the movie’s futuristic tech was, to say the least, a bit wide of the mark. We’ve all seen blurry images zoomed into pixelated messes on Crimewatch, but protagonist Deckard took it to a new extreme: mere seconds after looking up an image, he’s able to zoom in, make out detail that can’t possibly have been in the original picture, and then follow the image around a corner.

That’s not the only example of over-zealous futurism, either. Flying cars regularly appeared in movies after Blade Runner, but few managed to look so outlandish while also boasting the kind of chunky GUI normally found on the BBC Micro.

Of course, some of Blade Runner’s predictions weren’t quite as outlandish. Airship advertising may have seemed silly at the time, but it’s now possible to buy your own flying billboard, and the movie’s neon umbrellas are also available to buy.

The Terminator franchise is another that revels in harebrained technology, and another that’s getting a good airing over the festive season – the first movie is on BBC3 on New Year’s Day, and the second appeared on ITV2 on the 23^rd. As well as featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin, both movies include Skynet, the self-aware AI system that tried to blow up the planet with nuclear weapons before telling more robots to rid it of any humans who happened to survive the blast.

The silly tech continues in the second film. Skynet’s back, but the most influential piece of kit is, arguably, a humble CPU – albeit a processor that was rescued from the arm of a previous Terminator model and was then being used to reverse engineer a new and improved version of Skynet. You know, the AI system that was planning to carpet-bomb the planet and then rid it of the human race.

It’s a good thing it all got blown up in the end.

Bridget Jones on the edge of sanity

The Christmas schedules aren’t all action, with dodgy technology cropping up in family films and even the odd romantic comedy. Take Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, which was shown on December 23^rd but is surely ripe for Sky+ and DVD outings over the festive season.

It’s set in the modern day, so it’s not entirely unlikely the characters will come into contact with computers – although, in the grandest Hollywood tradition, they’re not the sort of PCs that you or I probably know. After all, it’s not every day that emails appear in our inboxes, in real-time, letter-by-letter, as they’re typed.

Then again, perhaps Miss Jones was being alarmingly prescient: once somebody finally figures out a proper use for Google Wave, real-time email might become a reality.

Inspector Gadget is another family-friendly movie that makes a mockery of the rules of physics, technology and, well, everything else. It’s fair to say that your sense of disbelief might have to be suspended in order to watch a film where Matthew Broderick is turned into a helpful cyborg after being attacked by a bowling ball, but what follows is even worse.

One particularly grating moment sees the good Inspector attempt to discharge oil from his bionic finger, only to see a torrent of toothpaste emerge from a previously-unknown orifice that, naturally, has to store said liquid. Where does he keep it? How does he fill it up again? It’s also worth mentioning that this crime-fighting machine has a left foot that shoots fireworks, but no-one thought to fit him with a gun. Clever.

At least Inspector Gadget proves that there’s only one real choice when it comes to law-enforcing cyborgs – Robocop. Also being shown over the festive season, it doesn’t mess around with toothpaste dispensing: instead, he boasts a machine gun, flamethrower and grenade launcher. On the same arm. Weedy Matthew Broderick, quite frankly, wouldn’t stand a chance.

Holy FSB, Batman!

Thankfully, there are plenty of other movies to keep the tech-minded brain occupied over the holidays. The team behind Adam West’s 1966 classic Batman movie obviously knew something that we still don’t when they made this camp classic, which is being shown on Film 4 on New Year’s Day.

Take, for instance, his PC: while we make do with poxy power supplies, Batman’s system was powered by the Bat-diamond and overclocked by the Accelerated Concentration Switch, which sounds far easier than having to fiddle around in the BIOS. There’s also such witchcraft as the BatComputer Ingestor Switch, BatComputer BatResistance Signal and the BatCorrection Signal, which put Batman, Robin or Alfred in their place when they’d made a mistake – a feature that’s literally decades ahead of the fabled Clippy when it comes to usefulness.

And that’s not all: Batman’s turbo-charged PC also included a Special Escaped Archcriminal BatLocator and Anti-Crime Voice Analyser, and produced illustrated BatSlides, which were far more useful than the usual text-only cue cards. We’re also incredibly impressed by his ability to discover exactly where Gotham City’s worst offenders are located when his PC seems to be made entirely of blinking lights.

Batman’s roster of gadgets could, in some ways, prove as prescient as Bridget Jones’ real-time emails. His BatPrinter produced forged documents, the BatSpectrograph Criminal Analyser recorded biological information of anyone in close vicinity, and the BatCrime Computer studied a felon’s movements and then predicted his next crime.

It’s a shame that few Christmas movies include such madcap technological wonders but, amid the snow and the presents, it’s possible to find the odd gem. Take Tim Allen’s 1994 movie The Santa Clause. While most of the movie is typical seasonal fare, keen-eared gamers will be able to hear the sliding door noise from seminal FPS Doom, which was released the previous year. It’s famously popped up elsewhere, too – including in episodes of Doctor Who, Babylon Five and Mystery Science Theater 3000 – due to its status as a favourite stock sound effect.

You may have to avoid the seasonal favourites – and, after all, who wants to suffer through Billy Elliot, A Christmas Carol or ABBA: The Movie – but, if you prefer technology over turkey, these movies prove that there’s no need for the Christmas season to be bereft of techy joy.

In the current issue of PC Pro you’ll find a full Christmas gadget guide, with 41 products tested and reviewed, from photo frames to cameras to USB guitars. But to help you beat the rush this year, we’ve plucked out ten of the best from the feature and from our A List.

Samsung NC10 – £300

Hands-down the best netbook on the market right now. It feels as sturdy as a proper laptop, offers a hefty seven-and-a-half hour battery life and features an almost full-width keyboard. Stylish, strong and hugely portable – and all this for less than £300.

Sony Reader PRS-505 – £190

If any device is going to sway the eBook doubters, the Sony PRS-505 is it. The silver case is a joy to behold, and the E Ink screen perfectly replicates the experience of words on paper. There’s space for 160 eBooks, and 100 classics bundled free.

Creative Zen X-Fi 16GB – £140

As well as 16GB of space and superb sound quality, the latest Zen connects to Wi-Fi networks to download music and podcasts and stream audio. The controls are a bit fiddly, but the excellent user interface, SD-card slot and FM radio make this one of the best mp3 players around.

Sony Cybershot DSC-T70 – £150

A gorgeous camera with a body that feels almost like it’s hewn out of a single chunk of aluminium, the Cyber-shot DSC-T70 is also a capable eight megapixel snapper. Highlights include fast autofocus, Super Steadyshot image stabilisation and quick shutter response times – and a competitive price.

Pure Evoke Flow - £150

This is best internet radio, bar none, that we’ve reviewed, and adds DAB, FM and media streaming to the mix too. It’s not cheap, but if you want a quality radio, with great looks, sound and usability, there’s nothing that comes close.

TomTom Go 730 – £208

Satnavs may be ten a penny these days, with GPS receivers in mobile phones, but it’s still worth paying a premium for a quality navigation product. TomTom has a track record here and has laid siege to our A List satnav entry for what seems like forever. This model is a brilliant device: stacked with features yet extremely easy to use and effective.

Sony DPF-V700 – £112

With typically stylish Sony design, excellent picture quality and an impressive range of on-board features – including auto touch-up, 512MB of memory and a card reader – the Sony makes a convincing argument as the best digital photo frame around. It may cost £129 but, if you’re looking for the best way to show off your snaps, it’s worth every penny.

Panasonic SDR-S7 – £134

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to operate the new generation of low cost flash memory camcorders. This one from Panasonic is the best of the new breed – it’s small, light and easy to use yet boasts some impressive features – including image stabilisation – and decent image quality. 

HYmini Personal Wind Turbine – £40

Attach the HYmini to a handlebar or wing mirror and even a light breeze will charge its internal lithium-ion battery – which can then be used to charge your mobile phone, mp3 player or PDA. It’ll prove incredibly useful as a portable battery pack and is an ideal gift for the eco-minded gadget fan.

Sony Alpha A200 – £260

Apart from a live-view mode, the A200 has every feature you could want – in-body image stabilisation, nine autofocus points, a 10-megapixel sensor and an 18-70mm lens. And with a steadily falling price, it’s an absolute bargain of a DSLR.

*****

Read the full feature of 41 Christmas gifts – cameras, MP3 players, internet radios, camcorders, photo frames, green gadgets, hi-tech watches and USB musical instruments – as well as an in-depth look at eBooks, in the current issue of PC Pro, on sale now.