Jumping killer whales and pico blues

Sanyo’s HD2000 pistol-grip camcorder has a special trick – it can record 1080p video at 60fps, and can even reach 600fps for those Planet Earth-style animal action shots if you don’t mind sub-YouTube resolutions. Its video quality may not quite reach excellence but its all-in-one ability to take good video and stills makes it a strong choice at a good price.

Another strong choice, but at a more premium price, was the superb LaCie 324 monitor. The 24in panel displays 92% of the NTSC gamut, and during our tests it had cooing crowds gathered around it as the ultimate endorsement. Bringing images alive in a way standard monitors just can’t match, it earned a deserved recommendation for professionals.

Unfortunately, Dell’s first pico-projector, the M109S, was a bit of a dud in comparison, with focus issues, poor performance in all but the darkest rooms and fiddly controls driving our reviews editor to despair during testing. The format is in its infancy but it’ll have to get better before we dive in.

The bargain PC and the psychic mouse

Novatech sent us the ION, a PC with a difference: a full system with a 17in widescreen TFT, keyboard and mouse for an incredible £234 plus VAT - almost cheap enough to squeeze into our £250 challenge. True, it’s Atom-based so it won’t do everything, but it’s hard to find fault in a system that offers so much for so little.

By contrast, Fujitsu sent us a mouse with an RRP of £299. The culprit is the PalmSecure technology inside it, which uses infra-red to read the unique pattern of the veins in your palm. It’s undoubtedly fascinating to use, and it’s claimed to be more secure than fingerprint technology, but Fujitsu will need to improve the accompanying software before we’d consider breaking the bank fro a palm reader.

On the laptop side of things we saw Lenovo’s ThinkPad W500, a professional machine that occupies a unique niche with its high-resolution screen and ISV workstation certification. It’s impressive, but we’re not convinced it’s quite worth the price.

Best of the rest

We also saw Belkin’s Powerline AV Starter Kit, which finally managed to add some style to a market that’s traditionally been function-over-form. The Xerox Phaser 6280 failed to impress our business reviewer, D-Link’s DGS-1248T ’eco-switch’ fared a little better, but the Vivotek IP7142 IP camera topped them both by being more capable of withstanding the British weather than the rest of us managed this week.

A lovely blue Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA8EX just landed on my desk to be reviewed, which is great, because it has one particularly exciting feature – it’s completely waterproof. Eager to test this out I ran down to reception where we have a huge fish tank, and I dropped it in.

It worked perfectly – as you can see in this underwater test video – even recording decent audio of the filter bubbling away in the tank.

The camera can record video at 640 x 480 pixels at 60 frames per second, storing files to SD cards. Because this matches the Sanyo VPC-CG9 I tested in the recent camcorder labs it’s likely that much of the hardware is shared and that they will both give similar results. Keep checking back for a full review to find out more.

I’m currently trying to convince my editor that a trip to the Bahamas on expenses is the best way to extensively test this out – please lend your support in the comments.

Thanks to tarotastic for the image.