Stories by: Richard Baguley

In our tests, the Sony DCRDVD803 produced excellent results, capturing strong, bright colours and smooth movement in both indoor and outdoor lighting.

The FinePix S2 Pro is a heavyweight in every sense of the word. At 900 grams for the body alone (with batteries), it is one of the heaviest cameras we've reviewed. It's also one of the biggest.

Compared to some other digital SLRs--such as the bulky Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro or the heavy Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D--the Nikon D70s feels small and lightweight. The D70s fits comfortably in the hand and weighs only 800 grams without a lens.

Although many of the digital SLRs that we have tested have a plentiful supply of buttons, the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D probably has the most: 24 dials and buttons spread around the camera. But this approach has a big upside: it makes the controls much easier to get to. For instance, on many cameras the LCD menu is required to access the exposure or flash compensation settings, but the Minolta 7D puts these controls on two dials on the left side of the camera body. Likewise, additional controls--a button for switching between autofocus and manual focus, a dial for changing metering modes, and a dial for selecting the white balance mode--enable the user to make further adjustments with their thumb without taking their finger off the shutter button, or their eye from the viewfinder.

Although the Sony DCRHC42 is a lightweight in both price and heft, it's far from lightweight in quality. The DCRHC42 produced great-looking video in our tests, with smooth movement. It also captured strong, accurate colours, even under difficult lighting conditions such as indoors under fluorescent lights.

Once, DVD-based video cameras were the poor cousin of tape-based cameras. That's not so anymore. In our tests, the Sony DCRDVD403 as had excellent overall quality, capturing strong, bright colours and smooth movement in both indoor and outdoor lighting.

In our tests, the Sony DCRDVD803 produced excellent results, capturing strong, bright colours and smooth movement in both indoor and outdoor lighting.

The MyPal A730's 3.7" screen is one of the best-looking PDA displays we've seen, with bright, vivid colours and sharp text. It's also one of the few PDA screens with VGA (640 x 480) resolution. The A730 runs Windows Mobile 2003 OS Second Edition, which allows you to rotate the screen into landscape orientation--a definite plus for working on things like spreadsheets.