Fast cars, fast games, now we have fast printers. Hewlett Packard claims that its new Photosmart 8250 inkjet photo printer produces 4 x 6in photos in under a quarter of a minute. We tried it out with borderless prints, which always take a bit longer. A 4 x 6in print using normal print mode took around 20 seconds and a borderless A4 photo took about two and a half minutes, making it a very quick printer indeed.

As well as printing fast photos, the 8250 does all the things you would expect of an inkjet printer in this price bracket (recommended price is £149). It prints A4 text documents in black at around 30 pages per minute and borderless prints in all the most popular sizes. A front PictBridge camera port, rear USB port and card reader compartment enable direct printing from digital cameras and all popular storage cards. For wireless printing, there is optional Bluetooth. 4 x 6in photo paper and A4 have their own dedicated paper trays. A 2.5in colour LCD screen to display photos before printing comes with plenty of controls to select, rotate and zoom pictures.

Quality is just as important for photos as speed. The printer's maximum resolution is 1200 x 4800 dpi, not the highest for this type of inkjet, but very, very good. Our test prints were so realistic they could easily have been mistaken for the real thing. Borderless is the printer's default setting and as well as standard sizes, we had excellent results with borderless large panorama mode, which prints 215 x 610mm photos. There are six, separate colour inks plus black which gives you the chance to economise. If you use some colours more than others, only the empty cartridges need replacing. HP claims there are also ink economies from its new printhead technology. The 8250 does not repeat the maintenance cleaning cycles that most inkjets use, and which waste ink. Instead, the 8250 uses a new recycling method that HP says allows more of the ink in cartridges to be used in printing. HP has also built in a system that checks ink levels and stops you starting print jobs if you have insufficient ink.

There is a catch to printing fast photos. The printer requires a new range of quick drying papers called HP Advanced. Use HP's Premium photo papers and print speed drops dramatically. As well as quick drying, Advanced papers are bar coded. The 8250 reads what paper is in the tray and tells you when you have mismatched a print job to the paper loaded in the tray. The new Advanced papers gave fairly good water resistance in our tests, but not as good as Canon's near indestructible photo paper. Whether HP's Advanced papers will give the same longevity as its Premium photo papers, which come with a 50 year guarantee, only time will tell. Our test photos are stored in a draw and we will report back next year on any signs of fading.

Tags: Cameras Printers Photo printers HP Wi-Fi

HP Photosmart 8250 Photo printer originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 05 Sep 2005 08:54:34 +0100

Eight out of ten people wear trainers for the sake of appearance rather than sport, says the latest research from the sportswear industry. So why has Reebok spent four years and many millions of dollars developing the Pump 2, a technologically superior performance trainer that looks just plain and boring?

From the start we had our doubts about Pump 2s. The press release refers to former NASA engineers working on the technology inside the shoes. Bearing in mind all the hoo-hah with the shuttles over the past two missions and NASA seems like the wrong place to go.

The idea behind the Pump is simple, according to Reebok. Instead of laces to hold a shoe on your foot, an air bladder in the shoe creates a custom fit. As you walk, your step acts as a pump, inflating the shoe's air bladder and moulding it to the contours of your feet.

Without a mechanism to release air, the bladders would inflate until they burst. So engineers worked on a valve to release air from the shoe, keeping the pressure constant. It needed to be small enough to fit into the
shoe without altering its fit, but rugged enough to withstand wear and tear. They also needed to pinpoint an ideal pressure level, which was neither too loose, nor too tight.

In our tests, it was the valve that proved to be the Pump's Achilles heel. It did not work effectively to release air. The shoes became tighter and tighter until they were so tight we had to bend down and release air manually.

This was awkward and had to be done repeatedly in order to keep them comfy. Reebok claims that it tested the trainers before their release and that 95% of people found Pump 2s comfortable including Dame Kelly Holmes who says" Pump 2s feel really good because after only a few seconds of using them they fit my feet perfectly, and are very comfortable."

Of course what she doesn't say is whether or not after those first few seconds she suffers the same problems we do, and whether she ever has any intention of ever wearing them again once her professional career comes to an end.

Tags: Sports Fitness Running Clothing Reebok GPS

Reebok Pump 2 running trainers originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:03:56 +0100

Dog walkers know the drill - when you take your dog for a walk you want to do everything in you power to make your dog knackered without you having to walk to the moon and back. In steps Chuckit!, a gadget that aims to help exercise a dog by increasing the length you throw a ball.

Of course any ball with a piece of string attached to it will make it possible to throw a ball further, and so Chuckit! has evolved to allow you to pick up ball as well, which is especially handy when one lands at your feet, covered in saliva and dirt.

Chuckit! comes in two sizes to suit your height - standard and a slightly shorter, junior version - and includes a standard sized tennis ball. The standard version is 66cms long and is made of a flexible, lightweight plastic. At one end is a cup for scooping up and holding the ball. At the other end is a handle.

Using an action similar to serving with a tennis racket, a flick of the Chuckit! over your shoulder launches the ball into the air. In our tests with our stunt test dog Claude, we could easily throw it distances about half the length of a football pitch with very little effort.

However, we did find picking up was less reliable and depended on how the ball was lying on the grass - a bit like those lazy litter pickers in the high street. Sometimes the ball slipped easily into the cup, other times we had to push the cup onto the ball with our feet or hands. A tad annoying for as we said at the beginning we wanted to avoid that saliva, drool and dirt.

Tags: Gadgets Petplanet

Chuckit! dog exerciser originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 19 Aug 2005 00:26:20 +0100

Here at Gizmogirl, SanDisk is the logical company to buy an mp3 player from. It is the Tupperware of the digital world, with a huge range of tiny containers for storing your digital junk. The company's latest storage device is an mp3 player with some nice features and a few drawbacks.

On the plus side, the e140 version of the player comes with 1GB of storage and a
card slot for SD cards. If you already own a bunch of SD cards, then you have an MP3 player with a storage level only limited by the number of cards you own and their capacity, for less than £100.00. This is handy if you want to listen to ebooks on your Sansa, use it to carry files other than audio, as well as just being your MP3 player.

Small and light enough to fit into any pocket, the player has a backlit five line display. Five lines of text onscreen saves having to scroll right to read
information. There are plenty of options for sorting songs including by artist,
album, song title, genre, year, date loaded and recently added. An AB feature lets you select a start point and end point and play that segment over and over if you like. We used it to learn foreign langauge clips; handy if you are holidaying abroad.

As with SanDisk's previous MP3 players, no drivers are required and files can be
easily copied via USB 2.0 just like a hard drive. The earphones that come with the player are far superior to what we expect from bundled phones and a reason to choose the Sansa if you do not already own a decent set. This is a major plus as many suppliers choose to cut corners in this area and unlike Apple, don't even stop to make them look fashionable as compensation for below-par sound.

There is also a handy radio as an alternative to your music. The digital FM tuner has 20 presets and picked up stations like BBC Radio 4 clearly in our tests.

Tags: Audio MP3 players SanDisk

SanDisk Sansa e140 MP3 player originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 16 Aug 2005 10:12:31 +0100

Tech firms are keen for you to add gadgets to your summer holiday shopping list, none more so than Lexmark with its latest portable photo printer.

"It doesn't make sense that consumers can take their digital cameras anywhere, but they have to wait until they get back to their home to enjoy their prints," says Giovanni Giusti, general manager of Lexmark UK.

The P315 is designed to change all this. Lexmark advertises it as a truly portable printer. With on board editing features that work standalone dumping the need to connect the printer to a computer. It is PictBridge compatible and prints standard 6x4 borderless images directly from the following memory cards: CompactFlash Type I & II, Microdrive, MultiMedia Card, Secure Digital Memory Stick (MS, Pro, Duo), Smart Media and xD format. Cost per print is around 24p using Lexmark's consumables.

Printing time for a 6x4 image is about 2 minutes, with quite a noise as the thermal process transforms photo paper into the finished picture

We are not sure about the portable claim. It may have a handle, which makes it easy to carry around, but the P315 is mains operated without the option to attach a battery, which rules out printing on the beach. It can be operated anywhere, as long as anywhere has an electrical socket.

It is also quite large compared to other portable photo printers. The P315 has none of the compactness of Canon's Selphy range of portable photo printers, and Canon boasts the option of battery power. Of course, Lexmark's P315 is very competitively priced compared to Canon's premium Selphy range.

How does the low price point of Lexmark's machine affect the quality of prints? We were satisfied with our prints although colours lacked brightness. Our disappointment was more with the odd, slim borders left blank on 6x4 prints. The P315 uses thermal inkjet to print, which takes a while longer than dye- sublimation and produces prints that we have found are susceptible to marks. A drop of water washes off the image whereas prints from our Canon photo printer, which lays down colours in layers, have been water resistant in our tests.

Lexmark's consumables are not as price competitive as its machines. If you are planning on printing a lot of photos then it may be worth paying more for the machine and less for consumables. Canon's photo printers give much better quality photos and prints using the company's paper and ink kits cost around 22p per print.

The LCD screen on our review model was loosely fitted which meant we could not adjust it to view photos. This may have been a fault on our machine but is worth checking before you buy.

Tags: Cameras Printers Photo printers Lexmark Wi-Fi

Lexmark Portable Photo Printer P315 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:10:08 +0100

You can do it! Whether it is fixing, replacing or improving, Barbara K's Toolkit for women empowers even a complete novice to tackle and complete basic home repair projects. That's the promise from Barbara Kavovit, media savvy CEO of Barbara K Enterprises Inc.

Kavovit, who is all over American home improvement magazines and TV makeover shows, was inspired by another media creation, Sex and the City character Samantha, to design tools designed for the size and strength of women's hands. We put her toolkit to the test.

The set includes a claw hammer, slip joint pliers, 2-in-1 level, interchangeable Philips and flathead screwdriver, adjustable wrench, 3m measuring tape, putty knife, 16 hex key wrenches and a fastener assortment. Everything comes in a case, which according to Kavovit, is styled to look like a laptop from Apple. A booklet guides you through DIY projects including hanging pictures, replacing doorknobs and repairing a running toilet.

Let's start with the thing we liked most about the kit. All the tools have good rubber grips, so there is no slipping and hurting yourself by accident as you apply pressure. Where you apply extra force, Barbara K! tools have extra, ribbed rubber patches that give just the friction you need, just where you need it. We also liked the turquoise, not pink logo, which spells out Barbara and means your partner is only going to pinch your tools in an emergency.

What we did not like so much was the weight and balance of the hammer. At 200g, we thought it belonged in a Fisher Price toolkit and was not weighty enough to be useful, it lacks the meat of a standard 16oz claw hammer. The tape measure is imperial not metric and if it did have a stopper, we could not find it. The spring-assisted pliers are easy to use but there is no way of closing the spring mechanism, which means they are always open so you cannot drop them into your pocket in between jobs.

Tags: Gadgets DIY Barbara K

Barbara K! girl power toolkit originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:02:02 +0100

Samsung knows how to pack small handsets with lots of features and the E720 clamshell phone is no exception. It is one of the few new handsets to offer extra features without a penalty when it comes to size.

The stylish, two-tone phone weighs a tiny 90g and measures 90x45x23mm. It fits well in the hand and is perfect for slipping into your pocket. The E720 doesn't have quite everything, but first let's look at what it does have.

As a mobile for entertainment, the E720 includes a superior MP3 player, a megapixel camera and an excellent video camera. Samsung has pitched the E720 as a mobile jukebox-cum-phone, like Motorola's E398. The two companies have approached the addition of MP3 differently. Whereas Motorola has a removable storage card and stereo speakers, Samsung has gone for MP3 controls on the front of the phone and 88.5mb of built in memory.

Motorola's approach seems to make more sense to us and Samsung is rumoured to have a handset similar to the E720 but with a removable card slot in the offing. There is no shortage of options for putting tracks on your phone with both USB and Bluetooth for connecting to your computer. The phone plays MP3 files, not WMA.

Songs can be set as ringtones, which is difficult to resist although the Crazy Frog may invite murder by a stranger and Samsung's excellent one stop button for quiet mode helps if you need to silence the phone quickly. Buttons on the front of the phone enable you to play, pause, forward and rewind without opening the handset but only once you have selected MP3 mode. Once started, you can operate the MP3 with your phone in your pocket using the external controls. We liked this a lot. Music plays either through the phone's loudspeaker or supplied stereo headphones. We preferred the headphones as music on the loudspeaker didn't sound too good to us.

Samsung rounds off its entertainment package with four games, including Freekick, which take advantage of the excellent screen. It's not as big as the screen on Samsung's D500, but matches it for quality.

What is missing from the E720 is speakerphone and voice recognition. If you are in the habit of talking to your phone and using it set down on a desktop, Samsung phones are not for you. It does have a voice recorder, which records voice memos up to an hour.

As far as the basics go, we had no problems using the keypad. Menus and controls were logical although with so many functions in such a small space, there are a lot of sub-menus to find. Samsung does manage to keep the most useful functions to a single press of a button and it's no surprise that the company has brought us the easiest phone to operate as an MP3 player to date.

The camera operates by pressing a button on the side of the handset and volume control stays on the side of the phone too. Samsung's antenna technology gave us good call quality for incoming and outgoing voice calls.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Samsung

Samsung E720 mobile phone originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 23 Jun 2005 11:18:00 +0100

When it comes to gifts, most dads prefer ice-cream to a pair of socks. Better than a tub of their favourite flavour is this low-tech gadget which combines football and food preparation. Sounds brilliant in theory, so we decided to put UCO's Play & Freeze Ice Cream Maker to the test.

The Play & Freeze is shaped like a football with a metal cylinder inside. The cylinder is where you add your ingredients. We were making vanilla ice-cream so our ingredients, which we prepared earlier as they say, were sugar, cream, eggs and vanilla pods. Ingredients to make 0.5 litre of vanilla ice-cream cost us around £2.00. With the cylinder in place inside the football, the rest of the space is packed with as much ice as you can fit in, plus salt. Rock salt is recommended but we used table salt and it worked fine. Rock salt should enhance the freezing ability.

Next step is to play with the football. It takes about 20 minutes of rolling the gadget to make ice cream. Not all our younger testers lasted the course, maybe because the ball weighs about 3kg when full, which is like rolling around a couple of bags of flour. But on a sunny day in the garden, at a picnic or on the beach it should be no problem to find enough helpers to keep the ball rolling. We had no problems with leakage. Our ice-cream tasted better than supermarket shop and we especially liked having control over the quality of our ingredients.

The instructions warn against throwing or kicking the ball. UCO suggests better uses for it once you've finished making ice-cream, like mixing your favourite margaritas.

Tags: Gadgets Kitchen gadgets UCO

UCO Play and Freeze Ice Cream Maker originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:29:09 +0100

Compact and full of gimmicks, but is it enough to impress? We take a look at the Canon Ixus 50, the latest weapon from Canon in the digital compact arena.

Playing about with colours is something most of us do after we have transferred digital pictures from camera to computer. Now you can do it on your camera before you take a picture. Canon's IXUS 50 introduces a new mode called My Colours, though annoyingly, Canon has left the American spelling unchanged for the UK model. It allows you to change the colours in the picture you are about to take. The balance between red, green and blue can be altered, skin can be given pale or tanned effects and one colour can be highlighted with everything else rendered in black and white. Colours can also be swapped.

We put My Colours to the test on a bottle of tomato ketchup. With the camera in shooting mode, clicking the Function/Set button displays 9 different modes - Auto, Manual, Digital Macro, Portrait, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, Underwater and, lastly the new mode, My Colours. Selecting My Colours opens a sub-menu displayed along the bottom of the LCD screen with nine options. The first option, Positive Film, produces intense natural appearing colours like those obtained with positive film. There are two options for skin colour - Lighter Skin Tone and Darker Skin Tone. These worked well, colouring our lily-white skin with a light Mediterranean tan whilst leaving all the other colours in the shot true. Our favourite options were Colour Accent and Colour Swap. The first lets you transform an image into black and white but keep one colour true. Colour Swap lets you select a colour on the LCD screen and swap it for another one. Controls are very easy to use. It takes seconds to swap red ketchup for white and then yellow and then green and see the results of your creative photography. If you are unsure about the effect you want then original images can be recorded at the same time as the My Colour versions. My Colours also works in Movie Mode.

The IXUS 50 features another first: Canon's QuickBright function on the LCD screen. The 2inch LCD is important because the viewfinder on this camera is grotty and difficult to use for anyone with a nose. Pressing the display button for over a second increases the light behind the LCD screen. Pressing it again restores the original setting. Canon claims that QuickBright improves visiblity in glare or outdoor conditions. This was the case in our tests, but the improvement was so minimal as to make little difference. Sony has a better solution to washed-out LCD screens in our view with its Clear Photo technology. Sony, in our experince, also gives more useful information than Canon on battery power and storage capacity. Canon's low battery indicator appears just before you run out of juice whereas Sony's indicator shows a full battery and then exactly how much power you are using. We set our IXUS 50 to its lowest quality image setting because we were testing it with the tiny 16MB storage card that comes with the camera. The information it gave on how many shots we had left was quite inaccurate. When the indicator said 119, for 119 shots left, we were able to take a further 31 shots before the memory card was full. If you don't want to be caught out, buy a much bigger memory card and a second battery.

Tags: Cameras Compact cameras 5 megapixels Canon Digital cameras

Canon IXUS 50 digital camera originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:03:23 +0100

The swivel action screen enables the SF65 to work like an actual digital camera. Turning the screen activates camera mode. Holding the phone in landscape, exactly as if it were a digital camera makes it easy to take pictures at any angle. The colour display for framing pictures could be bigger, although Siemens deserves praise for keeping this combination handset beautifully small. Zoom keys are at the top and bottom of the screen with the shutter button on the top side, where you'd expect to find them if this were a straight digital camera. It comes with a 1.3 megapixel camera, 4x continuous digital zoom, picture editing for framing and colouring photos and 18MB memory; not massive but enough to store the digital equivalent of a couple of rolls of film. In our tests, we preferred the SF65 form factor for using the phone as a camera to other clamshell camera phone designs. In fact, you forget the SF65 is a phone once the swivel screen is turned into camera mode, and so will the subjects in your snaps.

As a phone, the SF65 is small and easy to use with one hand. When open, the clamshell fits well for chatting and the quality of voice calls was very good. The minimalist looks and polar white exterior make you think of iPods and the Apple influence carries on inside with simple, monochrome icons. The SF65 does not go as far as working like a music player: the phone does not handle MP3 files. The kepypad is well laid out with firm buttons and plenty of space left for the D-pad. If you are considering trading down from a 3G gas guzzler, the battery life on the SF65 is a dream. With heavy use, expect to recharge it at most every other day. Excellent battery life means no second display on the cover. Siemens has gone for style over functionality with a tiny red and green traffic light on the cover to alert you to incoming calls. There is no Bluetooth which could be a major drawback unless you are happy with old fashioned IrDA for wireless data transfer. Nor is there video recording (not much of a drawback in our view) and forget using the SF65 in N.America; dual band GSM 900/1800 rules this phone out if you spend half your life leaving Heathrow for some distant location.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Siemens

Siemens SF65 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 12 May 2005 13:28:29 +0100

A quick search on the internet for embroidery patterns finds the same old selection of flowers, fruit and butterflies. Even the word, embroidery, summons up a craft obsessed with order and tidiness, with Brie Van De Camp as head of the sewing circle. In steps Brother's software to turn the world of embroidery upside down.

At the heart of PE Design is a Stitch Wizard, which automatically converts any image into a sewing pattern. The pattern is saved using a USB card reader/writer. Brother's computer storage cards fit all its embroidery machines to produce the finished design.

We put the Stitch Wizard to the test. Our first image was a ceramic head, made by one of our editorial team. Loading images for conversion is straightforward, either via the clipboard or browsing to find the image file and then importing it. One click opens the Image to Stitch Wizard function. This takes you through several steps, the most important of which is selecting colours to create your image. The program assumes 10 colours and selects them automatically. This may be too many, say if your image is black and white so you will need to edit the colours to include just black and white. When the image has a lot of colours, you can increase the number of colours, or edit the selection so you have the right mix. The software then takes about five seconds to convert the image into a stitch pattern, most likely of tens of thousands of stitches.

As beginners, we found it was trial and error finding images that worked well. Brother suggests converting photos of people into embroidery designs but this did not work too well for us. The software can convert any image, but put rubbish in and you get rubbish out. Our favourites were graphic patterns and images with strong blocks of colour. Our editorial team also managed some good results from photographs of our pets and houses where we live.

The program gives you a preview of what the finished embroidery will look like so you are saved the hassle of producing designs that don't work well once sewn. The Stitch Wizard gives an embroidery style that is more abstract and closer to a tactile, knitted finish than the neat look of traditional embroidery stitching.

PE-Design includes functions similar to a graphics package to create your own designs from scratch, rather than working from an image. There are 35 embroidery typefaces for lettering and the software loads all the typefaces on your computer as well. When it comes to stitching, the file saved via the USB card reader/writer includes instructions for sewing order, loading colours and stitch counts.

Tags: Software PC software Photo editing software Brother

PE-Design Version 6 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:01:04 +0100

Philips's new Azur Precise GC4130 steam iron is a revolution in ironing, according to the consumer electronics giant. The company has redesigned the shape of the iron's soleplate and its steam vents. The Careeza soleplate is now more pointed and the Steam Tip introduces steam slots in the soleplate that are elongated to take the powerful, concentrated steam right to the very tip of the iron. This makes it possible for the ironer to reach not only the most difficult parts of a garment, but also the intricate fastenings of such household items as the perennial duvet cover.

Gizmogirl put the new iron to the test - not on duvet covers but on shirts, some with front pockets with small buttons and others with epaulets with even smaller buttons. On all those hard to reach places, the Azur Precise did a good job. It ironed our shirt with epaulets especially well and better than we would expect from an ordinary iron. Where it made little difference was with ironing poorly cut shirts. If your main problem with ironing garments like shirts is laying the sleeves flat, then the Azur Precise won't ease your task.

Philips Azur Precise comes in just the one colour; blue unlike other models in the range which come in aqua blue, light blue, lilac and black. As well as the new soleplate and steam tip, it has a double steam chamber - one for continuous steam of 40g/min and one for a shot of steam at 100g/min. Steam can be used vertically to iron hanging garments and curtains. It is comparatively small and light in weight at just over 1.5kg, which makes it easy to store away. A storage plate is included.

Tags: Gadgets Kitchen gadgets Philips

Philips Azure Precise GC4130 steam iron originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 30 Mar 2005 08:11:26 +0100

When it was launched late last year, Sony's VGC V2S was the ultimate multi-tasking device. It could do so many things that we wondered who would have enough hours in the day to make use of all its functions. As well as a desktop PC with wireless keyboard and mouse, the V2S is a 20inch LCD TV, a dual format DVD burner, a music centre and a 250GB library to store and display your photos and videos.

What does combining a PC and an LCD TV in one device mean for users? On a practical level, it saves space and means less clutter, less cables: the wireless V2S runs amazingly on one cable, assuming you have wireless internet and are happy using the V2S's speakers, rather than adding home cinema sound. In the case of the V2S, it also means a gorgeously designed piece of technology that is very easy to set up. Once you switch on, a combined PC/TV means combined tasks. For instance, editing photos and then sharing them on a big screen happens on one device. Checking email during the commercial break while watching TV means flicking the remote control between TV and PC instead of walking from one device to another, from one room to another. This is where things start to get complicated. Traditionally, watching TV is a group activity, although bowling alone has caught on fast with lots of TVs in bedrooms for personal use. Checking email or fixing the red eye on your digital pics is a solitary activity. A combined PC/TV as a family device can quickly turn into a battleground whereas in a bachelor pad it can be the perfect answer to a digital lifestyle.

We asked Sony about its customers. V2S owners are a middle aged, middle class bunch (owners average income is £4,000 upwards per month). Surprisingly, many are first time PC buyers. Walk into their homes and the V2S is most likely to be sitting in a home office or living room. Design, graphics and the integrated TV were all important factors in deciding to buy so it comes as no surprise that the top five uses of this multi-tasking device are: watching TV, recording TV, burning to DVD, listening to MP3 music catalogues and viewing photo albums.

Does it make sense to buy a Windows PC and use it for TV centred entertainment? The two big drawbacks for us are that Microsoft Windows struggles to be a consumer friendly operating system - switching on the V2S is like switching on your PC - and a combined PC/TV means that when you are are watching TV you are stuck with the background fan noise of a computer. The advantage is all the added functionality of a desktop computer with a huge storage capacity in one well designed device.

Tags: Hardware Desktop PCs Sony

Sony Vaio VGC V2S Desktop originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:42:38 +0000

Digital photo frames are the latest gadget to offer photographers a way of bringing pictures stuck inside digital cameras to life. Unlike traditional frames, which display a printed photograph, Pacific Digital's MemoryFrame displays digital images on a TFT LCD screen. The frame connects via USB and downloads images directly from your digital camera, your computer or memory card reader. Frames come in two sizes with different finishes: the 7ins x 5ins frame displays a slideshow of around 30 pictures and the 10ins x 8ins frame shows up to 80 images.

We set up a slideshow on the 10x8 frame. Pressing the menu button on the back of the frame takes it into Management Mode. Menus are self-explanatory and once we connected a digital camera via the USB port, it was simple to scroll through menus and thumbprints. Pictures have to be saved to the frame and this can be done by saving all photos from the camera, or by selecting individually. It's likely that lengthy slideshows will be compiled from pictures taken over the years, which are stored on a computer. In this case, the easiest would be to compile slideshows using the accompanying drag and drop Digital PixMaster PC software and transfer them all in one go. Using a PC gives you the option to add captions. These appear with pictures only at first and then disappear leaving just the image. The software also allows you to transfer slideshows from the MemoryFrame back to your PC, which would be handy if for some reason this was your only copy of an image.

Screen resolution on the MemoryFrame is 800x600 pixels. This is less than most photographic printers and it means that high resolution images do not benefit from increased detail or resolution once transferred to the frame. When we compared our slideshow to some dog-eared, film photographs that we had in photo frames, we were not too impressed with the sharpness of the digital display. The bigger problem was with combining portrait and landscape pictures. We had the MemoryFrame set to landscape but not all the pictures in our slideshow were the right dimension. Portrait shots have to be rotated but the automatic resizing leaves a 6x4 image with two blank panels either side in the 10x8 frame. To use the full impact of the screen, you really need to set the MemoryFrame to either Landscape or Portrait depending on how you are going to stand it up (or mount it on the wall) and then compile either all landscape or all portrait slideshows.

Tags: Cameras Camera accessories Digital photo frames Pacific Digital Canon

Pacific Digital MemoryFrame originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:29:03 +0000

Pocket gizmos don't come much more fun than Fujifilm's MP100. This tiny, wireless device uses IRDA (infra red) to receive images from your mobile phone and print instant colour mini-photos. The printer measures 123mm x 30mm x 97mm so slips easily into a handbag or a baggy back pocket.

The MP100 takes a cartridge of ten credit card-sized high-alkaline photo sheets so there are no inks needed for printing. A twin pack of 20 sheets retails at around £10.00. 50p a photo makes this a fairly expensive device to run especially as the prints are more likely to be momentoes or something you wanted a quick reference shot of. It takes 2 CR2 lithium batteries which Fuji claims will print about 130 photos. An auto power-off function turns the device off.

We tried the printer with our Sony Ericsson K700i. This model is listed on Fuji's website as compatible with the printer. A complete list of compatible phones is given at www.fujimobile.co.uk/phones.html. With so many of the latest mobile phones dropping infra red in favour or bluetooth, make sure you check your phone's compatibility before you buy.

We had to save photos on the phone before we could send them. The printer has no screen to display the image. With IRDA or beam on your phone switched on, it is simply a matter of selecting the option to send by infra red and then lining up the two devices. It takes less than 30 seconds for the whole printing process. A counter tells you how many sheets are left in the printer and there is a reprint button to print the last image sent. As with Polaroid cameras, it takes a while for the photos to fully develop but the finished, glossy images were better quality than we expected. At 86mm x 54mm images are small in our opinion, worth it for those moments when you want an instant printed copy of what's on your camera phone.

Tags: Cameras Printers Photo printers Fujifilm Canon

Fujifilm MP 1000 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 21 Feb 2005 11:52:13 +0000

Would you say no to having a dozen new movies you're waiting to see, always at your fingertips? As a promise it ranks along with a mobile phone with an everlasting battery. Yet a dozen new movies at your fingertips is what Sigma, a manufacturer of processors, claims for Digital Cube's i-Station personal media player. Sigma makes the EM8561 media processor on which the device is based.

The i-Station certainly looks good. It comes in a well-designed case with cut-outs and embossed lettering. The TFT LCD is about twice the size of the average screen on the latest clamshell mobile phones. For watching videos, the screen has the ergonomic advantage of being landscape, not portrait. Controls are fairly simple with the option of a joystick and two buttons or a pen on the touch screen interface. We found the touch screen unreliable and reverted to using the joystick. The pen doubles as a stand to prop the device at an angle but this did not work too well either.

Our review sample came with a fairly out of date version of the firmware - Version 1.04 as opposed to the current Version 1.10. We registered the device on Digital Cube's website to upgrade the firmware. This would have given us more options on file formats than DivX or XviD encoded AVIs and regular MPGs. We could only find firmware upgrades from Version 1.08 so we emailed support but have not received a reply from the Korean-based Digital Cube so far (17.02.05). We tried our luck playing .WMV files but given the limited format support, the i-Station did not understand them.

Getting back to the promise of a dozen new movies, and assuming you have overcome any compatibility issues, where is the content for this device going to come from? Personal DVD collections recorded by yourself, is one source but the i-Station does not record directly from the TV. Recording EastEnders in real time onto your PMP to watch on the way to work the next day is out. For anyone used to managing music as compressed audio files, the idea of recording in real time may be too excruciatingly slow to consider anyway.

A library of pre-recorded film DVDs is no use either. Pre-recorded video footage on DVDs that you buy comes with a copyright license that gives you the right to own the DVD but not to copy it. Other factors holding back content for personal media players is the sheer size of video files which are far less manageable than audio files. Thanks to Hollywood and the likes of the Motion Picture Association, there is little chance that PMPs will enjoy the content boost given to MP3 players from huge collections of audio files sitting on millions of computers any time soon.

As well as video, the i-Station supports audio files and JPEG photo files. According to Sigma, this means you can have 1,000 selected songs and 2,000 significant (as opposed to insignificant) photos as well as your dozen new movies on the 20GB device. It also has an FM radio, English/Korean dictionary and digital voice recording in MP3 format. Content on the i-Station can be played back on a TV. This might be useful if you are abroad and do not like the local selection of TV channels. Plug your I-Station in, and watch your dozen new movies instead.

Tags: Audio MP3 players Digital Cube

iStation PMP1000 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:06:41 +0000

Whether you're making potato pancakes, bubble and squeak or just plain mash, the first ingredient you need is perfectly smooth mashed potato. Simply Cook's new potato masher uses a roll-and-rotate method to mash potatoes instead of pounding. According to its manufacturer, DNC, the Simply Mash requires half the effort to conventional mashers to make super smooth mash.

We put it to the test with a variety of floury potatoes including Golden Wonder, King Edwards and Romano. A completely different action is required to the traditional pressing and pushing motion and this takes a bit of getting used to. But once you have the knack of rolling and rotating the gadget, potatoes reach a smooth consistency in no time at all. We found that it worked much, much better than a conventional masher.

The gadget is made of polypropylene with a rubber handle so it goes in the dishwasher. Keeping it clean still takes a bit of effort, but is easier than a potato ricer. Since the blades create such a lot of surface area, there is a lot to keep clean. We recommend rinsing it straight after use.

Don't expect the masher to fit neatly into a slim, cutlery draw. If DNC's innovative design appeals, then this is a quirky gadget to sit out on your worktop.

Tags: Gadgets Kitchen gadgets Lakeland

Simply Cook Potato Masher originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 09 Feb 2005 06:38:37 +0000

Sony finally cracks to the power of MP3, but it is enough to win those iPod lovers over? We take a look and a listen to find out.

MP3 is not the only new feature on the latest version of Sony's pocket sized music player. Battery life on Sony's players has always been excellent and now Sony has redesigned the recharger. The bulky USB/charging cradle has gone. In its place is a neat, light and portable USB/Power clip. Adding a more portable AC adapter is a bonus on top of the NW-HD3's quick recharge time. That is unless you particularly like sitting your device in a cradle when you want to recharge it or transfer files.

Colours on the NW-HD3 are new too. Gizmo Girl was sent the pink version to review. We don't often review pink gadgets. Our lady readers tell us that they prefer gadgets that men would use. Shocking pink is not for them. In fact, women buying gadgets can sometimes be like men buying cosmetics: if it's ok for your partner, then it's ok for you. So, when the first people in the office to walk off with our Nivea Visage moisturiser and our NW-HD3 were men, we relaxed our rules about pink.

As soon as we switched on the player, we noticed what we think is a clever design detail. The screen is colour washed but not with the ubiquitous acrylic neon blue. You can set it to co-ordinate depending on the colour of the player. The pale, shell pink effect on the player that we tested worked really well. For style, there really is nothing to match the NW-HD3.

When it comes to substance, Sony has made what it regards as a very big strategic step by adding MP3 functionality to the NW-HD3. This does not open up the player as much as you might think because you still have to use Sony's SonicStage Version 2.3 to put music onto the player. MP3 files are wrapped during the copying process which means once on your player they will not transfer on elsewhere. Sony advertises this player as a pocket sized, 20Gb MP3 jukebox. We think its real appeal is to music lovers who buy physical CD albums and want to take their music collection with them. The player has the capacity to hold several hundred CD albums transferred at bit rates up to Sony's highest quality Atrac3plus 256 kbps. Capacity will be nothing like the 900 albums that Sony refers to, which is based on a sub-standard 48 kbps. Still, it is an amazing feat for a device that is similar in size to competitors' 5Gb players, and 128k ripping will still give you a figure in the low hundreds.

SonicStage may not be the most intuitive software for managing music, but we found some advantages to the D-pad control over touch pad and click wheel controls. There were times when we wanted to skip forward a few tracks or back to listen to something again, but we preferred not to take the player out of our pocket to do so. A remote would be the answer but since there isn't one we found ourselves navigating blind using the D-pad. Given that we know our albums pretty well from memory, this worked surprisingly well.

Tags: Audio MP3 players Sony

Sony NW-HD3 MP3 Player originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:53:27 +0000

What separates Nicole Kidman and Kylie Minogue from Jennifer Aniston and Catherine Zeta Jones? Hairstyles, of course. The first two are fashionably curly, whereas Jennifer and Catherine have dead straight hair. For the Jennifer look, the breakthrough hair gadget is undoubtedly Remington's Wet 2 Straight ceramic irons. They are the first hair straighteners to also dry wet hair. Grooves in the straightening plate channel water in wet hair so it is released safely through special vents on the side of the straightener.

We say safely, but this depends on not catching your hands anywhere near the vents where the steam escapes. The irons heat up in less than a minute. If you catch them across your forehead, you will end up with the same familiar burn as from ordinary irons. Wet 2 Straights come in two sizes - slim and wide plates. We tried wide plates on long, thick hair, which we sectioned, as they do when drying your hair in salons. The irons dried the hair almost on contact, which meant the whole process of drying and straightening hair was incredibly quick. The heat is so intense that roots dry without having to place the irons very close to your scalp. It would at least halve the time of your routine if you currently blow dry and then straighten hair. The irons were also very quiet. They made a bit of noise, like a steam iron, but nothing like the whine of a blow dryer. Missing out on blow-drying also avoids putting a lot of volume in hair when you want it to be straight. Our results were very good with hair as smooth as a mill pond and still noticeable the following day.

Remington claims that the process is quicker with Wet 2 Straights partly because of how the bonds in hair work to govern its shape. When hair is wet, the bonds change, which is why hair is usually longer and straighter when wet. Drying hair reforms bonds and hair becomes less straight. Obviously the best time to straighten hair is when it is wet. Remington also says that Wet 2 Straights cause less damage to hair because moisture is locked in. Not too sure about this one. It seems to us that any sort of irons on your hair just has to be bad for it, but worth it when you want hair that is mirror smooth.

Tags: Gadgets Styling products Remington

Remington Wet 2 Straight ceramic irons originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:15:45 +0000

Celebrity Big Brother has made it onto mobile phones this year. Customers with the 3 network can watch 2 minute video clips of the latest celebrity tears and tantrums for 50p a clip. With several other TV programmes set for your handset, Gizmo Girl decided to try out mobile Big B.

Big Brother on E4, 24/7, can be like watching paint dry so the idea of catching the best bits as video clips on your mobile is a great idea. 3 has been posting five clips a day at 7.00, 10.00, 13.00, 15.00 and 17.00 hours. Clips take less than a minute to download or can be streamed instantly, although streamed clips are not saved to your handset, so can't be watched again. DRM prevents transfer of the clips but there are no limits on how many times you watch a video once saved.

3's technology works and could go further by allowing you to dial in live to a specific camera, as already happens for fans of Big Brother in Sweden. More difficult than the technology, has been choosing video content. In comparison to video news clips, or football for example, it is more difficult to agree highlights in advance. There is no equivalent to scoring goals. 3's deal with Big Brother's production company Endemol, leaves the producers to select content. This is a bit like the editor of the Guardian deciding Endemol has editorial control over media content in his newspaper. There is no revenue sharing deal between the companies: 3 has paid Endemol a fixed fee so is taking the risk on whether subscribers will pay to view. Customers on 3's Video Value add on package have free access to all the clips.

Having tuned in so far, it seems that 3 has ended up with some clips that have rated as must see, such as Germaine Greer's decision to leave the Big Brother house. But some clips have been pretty boring and some have been impossible to follow as stand alone clips. One clip featured housemates wearing a brain-like hat, which we did not understand. Maybe Endemol was hoping clips would tease 3's customers to tune into to Channel 4? It did not really work for us.

Tags: Phones Apps Video downloads

Celebrity Big Brother on 3 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 20 Jan 2005 13:02:02 +0000

Can Orange's smartphone and winner of Girl's Best Friend wireless category award at CES 2005 take on the more established models from Palm and HP and more to the point will the small form factored device be able to replace both your phone and your PDA? We take a look and find out.

The Orange SPV 500 is a smart phone, which means it has an operating system - in this case Microsoft's Windows Mobile - as well as firmware like all mobile phones. Having an operating system on your phone brings some benefits, and some pitfalls.

Firstly the benefits. The SPV C500 is more than a phone. As well as calls, you can manage you email and PIM data on the go, courtesy of the operating system. Since it runs Windows Mobile, you can use your phone like a PDA and download all sorts of third party applications. It works brilliantly as an MP3 or multimedia device too.

The phone is loaded with Windows Media Player 10.0 and 128MB of onboard storage. This can be upgraded to 256MB. The phone's designer - HTC - deserves tons of credit because it has managed to keep the handset small enough to qualify as a phone but has found enough screen size to make it work as an email reader and PDA style device. HTC (High Tech Computer corporation) claims this is the world's smallest smart phone and on the back of its success, the Taiwanese company is already the biggest manufacturer of Microsoft-powered mobile phones.

In design terms, the only compromise seems to be the overly slim, 5-way navigation key that sits above the keypad and is difficult to use. Luckily, Orange uses a lot of numbered menus so whenever possible we found ourselves selecting by the key pad, not the navigation key. Keeping it small also means a keypad that really does not work for typing anything but the shortest of email.

The downside is that all this software slows the phone down. We like switching a phone off when not in use but because is took over 30 seconds for the SPV C500 to switch on, this was impractical.

When you only have 30 seconds to make a quick call, waiting 30 seconds for the phone to switch on is a no go. Because the phone was slow, it was doubly annoying to have Window's logo animated on screen and it made the screen a mess, especially when Orange and Microsoft were fighting over whose logo appeared in the top right hand corner of the screen.

It would be unimaginable for design conscious Orange to run press ads with its logo half blotted out, but this sort of mess was common on the SPV C500. A much bigger problem was that much of the added functionality of a smart phone did not actually work for us because of the email server we use.

For all Microsoft's talk of compatibility, its mobile operating system simply does not talk to AOL's email server. We thought of setting up a Hotmail or Yahoo email account and forwarding on our AOL email as a way round but this failed because AOL does not support forwarding of email.

The benefits of PIM data were reduced too because remote access from your phone depends on your company running Microsoft Exchange Server with Exchange ActiveSynch or Microsoft Mobile Information Server. Without this back up, synchronising your phone remotely with the latest updates to your calendar that have been made back at the office, does not work. You will have to do it manually once you are back in the office by synching your phone with your PC via the USB cable.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Mobile phones Orange

Orange SPV C500 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:26:08 +0000

We never knew it, but BenQ is the world's largest manufacturer of DLP projectors. Until recently, it has made projectors for better-known companies like Hewlett Packard. The PE5120 is BenQ's first home cinema projector bearing the company's name.

Aimed at the entry-level market, the projector is designed to work straight out of the box. The projector itself is a fairly small, anonymous off-white box with a third of the back panel taken up with connection options. Pictures can be input via component video, S-video or VGA-DVI cable. This gives you the option to switch between set top box, DVD player, camcorder, games console and PC as your picture source and explains why BenQ calls this a home entertainment, rather than home cinema, projector. It also means that if your output source is high quality, such as a DVD player with component output, you are not losing quality when it comes to feeding in your picture. The remaining rear panel houses the fan, which, while quiet, blows air out of the back of the projector. Some projectors blow air to the side and this sort of detail affects where you position it. A rear fan makes it more difficult to sit a projector on a bookshelf mounted against a wall, for instance.

The all-important picture controls on the remote control work very much like the scenic modes used in digital cameras but in place of beach, snow or underwater settings, the PE 5120 has pre-sets for gaming, video, cinema and economic as well as 16:9 (widescreen) or 4:3 (standard) format. If you find calibrating pictures hit and miss then having settings to optimise the picture at the touch of a button is ideal. The gaming pre-set for example, reduces the video contrast and increases the lumens which you will need for playing games during the day. The remote also lets you adjust the picture with the keystone control so it sits squarely. The remote is useful, but it is ridiculously bulky (way too big to measure with our six inch ruler) and obviously a design that has been left over from office projectors.

So with all our gadgets connected, and picture set to optimum, how did we rate the pictures? The projector uses a digital light processor (DLP) which is generally regarded as superior to LCD for home cinema and it also boasts a fairly good contrast ratio at 2000:1. Despite all this, we found ourselves not falling in love with the picture, but this was subjective. Colours were accurate and there was no rainbow effect but the picture seemed to lack depth. The other disappointment was the throw on the projector. It threw a picture about half the size we expected. This would be an advantage if there were plenty of distance between where you want to sit a projector and where the image hits the wall or screen. If you want a short distance, which can be more practical in the home, you will be disappointed with the size of the image and the 1.2 zoom control gives you hardly any option to change the size of the picture using the lens.

Tags: Home Cinema Projectors BenQ

BenQ PE 5120 Digital Projector originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:03:17 +0000

Sewing machines with fancy touch pad controls costing several thousand pounds have been around for several years. In today's sewing circle, the equivalent of the latest media centre PC is a machine that produces multi-coloured, computer generated embroidery designs faster than Edward Scissorhands. For beginners, there is Brothers' Innovis CS 8060. If you take advantage of 50% plus reductions and buy online, this computer sew machine is available for a fraction of the price.

The CS 8060 is an entry-level machine with 50 built in practical and decorative stitches and 5 styles of buttonhole. It is not set up for embroidery. Before you can sew a single stitch, there is the problem of loading thread and this is where the Innovis scored most highly in our tests. The machine features Brother's Quick Load Thread System, which does for sewing machines what APS film did for cameras, only better. Upper threading is completely automatic. You just load your spool of thread into a cassette being careful to follow a few basic steps with the thread, place the cassette into the top of the machine and press down. Something happens but it all passed too quickly for us to see exactly what. The end result is that the thread appears miraculously looped through the eye of the needle so all you have to do is pull it through and you're ready to go. Loading the bobbin follows similar principles to manual sewing machines and we found ourselves guiding the thread as it loaded onto the bobbin to keep it neat and even, which was a bit hit and miss.

With our threads loaded, it was time to try out some basic stitches. The CS 8060 has plenty of straight and zig zag stitches but if you want to be more creative, there are some super quilt, herringbone and blanket designs too. Programming stitches is easy with the LED panel and if you have forgotten to fit the correct sewing foot for your choice of stitch, the panel gives you an error message telling you what you have done wrong. The big test came with the buttonhole stitching. This requires its own foot - a fairly long, plastic foot whereas all the others are metal. The foot adjusts to the size of your button and then it's simply a case of selecting which design you want and the machine does the rest.

Whatever your stitch, sewing is automatic with push button controls to start, stop and reverse stitching, and lower and raise the needle. In practice, we used the machine's manual foot pedal because it gave us better control and we were sewing small lengths. Once you get into several metres, the automatic controls would probably come into their own.

Tags: Gadgets Kitchen gadgets Brother

Brother Computer Sew Machine Innovis CS 8060 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 06 Jan 2005 12:52:08 +0000

The surprise with this portable music player was not the size, which at 66mm x 56mm x 15.5mm makes it small but not the smallest. Nor was it the fact that we could drop it without the casing showing any sign of damage. The surprise was that the F660 would not play WMA files, even though it has been advertised as playing mp3 and WMA.

After exchanging emails with the makers - Huaqi Information Digital Technology - in Beijing, we discovered that the F660 is not intended to play WMA files. Huaqi is the country's leading manufacturer of portable digital music players, with ten times the sales of Apple's iPod in China. The company told us that it has no plans to invite Microsoft and its WMA Media Player to take a stranglehold of the F660. This is bad news for Microsoft and not much better for Apple, both of which want us to adopt their proprietary file formats over mp3. Of course, the fact that a gadget can go on sale in the UK advertised as an mp3/WMA player, without anyone actually checking that the device does what it says, is very bad news for consumers. It goes to show how difficult it is to buy the latest technology wisely. The lesson has to be to buy gadgets from retailers who have excellent after sales service and will not quibble if you decide you want to return something.

Now to review the mp3 player, which actually works very well. As well as mp3, there is an FM radio and voice recorder, and line in recording if you want it. It runs on an ordinary AAA battery: expect about 10 hours play. Plug the F660 into a USB port and it appears on the desktop as a removable storage device. Drag and dropping a couple of albums from wherever you keep them on your computer takes no time at all and with manageable file sizes, the USB 1.1 transfer rate is not a problem. With this sort of capacity, you are sorting through the equivalent of what's on your coffee table which means the simple organic LED display, which illuminates two lines of information, works perfectly. The volume control is especially good with 30 fine settings. There is nothing worse than an audio device that is either too quiet or too loud because there is too little choice to set the volume level. There are four equalizer settings and tracks can be programmed to play once, twice or repeat. The headphones have a neck strap and seemed well built, like the device itself. Switching on starts the mp3 player mode. A button on the underside of the player opens the Function Menu and you can scroll through to select the voice recorder or FM radio. The EZ - Navigator is handy if you want to browse all files on the memory, as you would on a computer. Setting up the radio is also easy. Select FM Setting and then your region (the UK is for some reason coupled with China which made us smile), then FM Auto Scan and the Smart FM tuner saves stations as what the manual calls.FLS files but which on our device showed as .FSL files. Problems with language translation maybe?

Finally, a note about the so called magnesium alloy casing. Huagi claims the F660 is made of the same alloy as used in missiles and aeroplane parts, hence the company's tag line 'rocket in your pocket'. To test the claim, we dropped the player several times and it survived without a scratch. Later, reading the manual, we noticed the casing is in fact ordinary zinc alloy, not rocket scientist magnesium alloy.

Tags: Audio MP3 players Agio

Aigo MP3 F660 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 04 Jan 2005 16:29:03 +0000

One way to find a quiet place to relax, away from the modern world, is to don a pair of the most modern, sound isolating earphones. Shure, best known for personal monitor systems used by professional musicians on stage, has designed the EC3 earphones for everyday use. Its smallest, most compact design to date, the EC3s use high energy, micro-speakers for high quality, balanced sound across the frequency range.

Shure's sound isolating method is different to noise cancelling headphones. Headphones like Bose's Quiet Comforts use electronic circuitry to remove noise after it has entered the headphone earcup. A mirror image of the noise signal is created, cancelling the sound. Because the headphones fit over the ear, they tend to be fairly big, and noise cancelling also uses batteries to power the microphones and circuitry, which again adds to the size. Cancelling out one noise by producing its inverse sound becomes less effective as sound frequencies become more complex. Shure claims that the performance of noise cancelling headphones will at best screen out around 80% of unwanted noise. By comparison, EC3s are the sound of silence, isolating you from all but 7% of the noise around you, according to Shure.

How did they perform when we put them to the test? The first hurdle was fitting the EC3s. The earphones have seven different pairs of sleeves made of foam, clear pliable plastic and silicone rubber. These are different sizes and the sleeves fit tightly over the earphones to create a seal once the EC3s are placed in your ear canal. We started with the biggest sleeves and worked our way down until the EC3s sat neatly, flush with our ears and we could not hear the TV we were sitting next to for the purposes of this test. It was only by pulling our ear upwards and outwards, and by checking an anatomical drawing to see exactly where our ear canals were, that we managed to fit the earphones. Not everyone will like the sensation of pushing something into their ear and we did not even try the foam covers. These work by pinching the foam so it compacts, inserting the earphones and the foam then expands to seal out sound. We were too worried about what would happen to the foam sleeves when it came to taking the earphones out to try them out.

With the earphones fitted, we tried them with a portable music player and a portable DVD player. As you would expect, the experience you get from portable media devices is improved a lot by a good set of earphones. What set the EC3s apart for us was the degree of isolation from surrounding noise. You really can get lost in your music, or watching a video, with these earphones. And when it is the only thing you are hearing, there is less need to turn up the volume, which has the advantage of saving power on your device, as well as being better for your hearing.

Tags: Audio Headphones Shure

Shure E3C Sound Isolating Musician's Earphones originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 20 Dec 2004 13:21:17 +0000