Stories by: James Dickinson

The DC22 is Canon's mid-range DVD camcorder. While many DVD camcorders at this price point aren't known for their image quality, Canon has bucked this trend, and come up with a comfortable, easy to use video camera that produces excellent quality video.

Yamaha's YHT-475B is a mid-priced home theatre system offering a good range of customisation for the budding enthusiast. What it lacks are next generation features such as HDMI connectivity and automatic calibration microphones. However, for the user who doesn't mind manual tinkering, and whose primary concern is sound quality, the YHT-475B makes a good buy.

Netgear's EVA700 is one of the burgeoning range of media streamers available on the market. These take multimedia files from your computer and output them to a television. The EVA700 may not be sleek and it's certainly not pretty, but it does support a wide range of supported formats, and is also one of the first devices that is compatible with Intel's Viiv platform, promising easy setup and compatibility. However, it just isn't very well designed, which in addition to some quirky bugs makes it a frustrating piece of hardware to use.

The world of media streamers is ever-evolving, and Mediagate's MG-350 HD is one of the latest models to take advantage of high definition formats. This diminutive little device is primarily designed to get media from your PC to the television, but if you feel like getting your hands dirty installing a hard drive, it can even act as a standalone media server.

Although the DV8900 is primarily billed as a digital video camera, it's really a whole lot more, with support for music, voice recording and still images too. Unfortunately, the phrase 'jack of all trades, master of none' springs to mind, as none of its features are implemented all that well.

The latest fad to hit the world of digital photography is displaying photos in LCD digital frames. Paper is just so last millennium. We saw it fairly recently with Philips' [[prodid:1746]] - a nice product, but perhaps a little small for some. Sony has upped the ante with their HDPSL1 hard drive photo storage; instead of bundling a screen with the device it connects to your television, even supporting High Definition. Be prepared to have those embarrassing snapshots splashed across your living room in full 65-inch glory.

It's always nice to have choice. JVC certainly provide in this regard with their five-strong range of Everio camcorders. Sitting right in the middle of the range is the GZ-MG57, a solid offering. With a 30GB hard drive, a 15x zoom and the superlative design we have come to admire across the whole Everio range, it definitely meets the features requirements. However, the image quality just doesn't quite stack up, which is a fatal flaw for any camcorder.

There are a lot of things going for the Samsung VP-DC165Wi, including Dual Layer recording and a great feature set. The trouble is they just don't make up for the mediocre video quality and dreadful still images from this lower priced model.

What do you do if you want to transfer your video footage from a camcorder to a DVD, but you don't own a PC? One possible solution is to use Sony's new DVDirect multi-function DVD recorder. This handy little device can take videos from Mini DV, HDD and DVD camcorders, memory cards, as well as any device that outputs video via composite or S-Video. To take advantage of all its features however, you need to have a Sony camcorder, as not all of them are compatible with other models.

Not typically a company associated with noise canceling headphones, in the c820s Jabra has nonetheless produced an impressive device. Offering a great balance between performance and price, they provides some serious competition to other manufacturers such as Bose and Etymotic. We took to the skies to compare the new pretender against another popular model, the Bose Quiet Comfort 3s.

The lengthily named Live! Cam Video IM Pro is one of Creative Labs' mid-range webcams. It's got a heap of functionality and decent video quality to boot. Anyone looking for a simple to use webcam that includes some fun extras can't go far wrong with this product.