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.

Of course, some conveniently shorten into a series of letters that can actually be said as a single, new word. Think acronyms like NASA, SCUBA, laser. Think VAIO.

Today I read of Sony’s redefinition of the famous VAIO brand, and it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what it had stood for since its creation.

Very Attractive If Overpriced, perhaps?

The truth, it turns out, is not as exciting as I’d hoped. The original Video Audio Integrated Operation will now become the vastly more descriptive and creative Visual Audio Intelligent Organiser. The laptop world can exhale again.

But Sony isn’t the only brand with a famous abbreviation; a fairly obvious one is the use of HTML in the name of HoTMaiL. There are plenty of other IT brands with abbreviated product or company names – and they range from the interesting to the truly cringe-worthy. How many of these did you know?

Starting off gently with places…

Lexmark, a spin-off from IBM’s printer-manufacturing division, was so named after its base in Lexington, Kentucky. Kyocera is abbreviated from the original Kyoto Ceramics Co, while CISCO isn’t actually an acronym, despite appearances – it’s short for San Francisco.

Onto merging company names…

The two companies Shibaura Seisakusho and Tokyo Denki merged in 1939 to form Tokyo Shibaura Denki, nicknamed Toshiba. It took nearly 40 years for the now-famous name to be made offical.

LG, thankfully, comes from the merger of two Korean companies, Lucky and Goldstar. Far less saccharine than the oft-used “Life’s Good”.

Word meanings…

Samsung comes from the Korean word meaning “three stars”, while Sony itself is derived from Sonus, the Greek goddess of sound. Asus is another abbreviation, and fairly obvious once you know it; it comes from Pegasus, the mythical winged horse.

Finally, the Greek root xer means “dry”, so inventor Chester Carlson used it to distinguish his dry copying device from the wet copying devices of the time; thus Xerox was born.

Place names, merging companies, ancient words and mythical characters. But, much like VAIO once you know what it actually stands for, some acronyms sound exotic but are just plain bad.

Can BenQ really stand for Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to Life?