| Top 10 Home Cinema – November 2012 |
| The new BDV-N590 isn’t good – we’d bet there won’t be a more complete, better-value home cinema system released this year. It’s more stylish than its forebears, its PS3-emulating curves incorporating a side-mounted disc-loading slot plus touch-sensitive controls. |
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| Top 10 TVs – November 2012 |
| Defending your title is never easy, so it’s to Samsung’s credit that its ES8000-series TV goes straight into the No.1 slot as a replacement for its previous model, the D8000. Available (so far) in 40in, 46in and 55in versions, it’s fully loaded with HD tuner and 3D support, and its smart TV features are bolstered by a dual-core processor plus built-in Wi-Fi. |
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| Holiday Gift Guide (Part 2) |
| Lest you thought I wasn't serious about the leather thing, here's a gorgeous iPhone case that, as an added bonus, makes the carrier look literate. Sort of. It's kind of hard to be staggeringly wowed by such a tiny faux-book, but it fits in well with a bookshelf of thicker tomes. |
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| Holiday Gift Guide (Part 1) |
| You'll have to toil through a Japanese website to get your hands on this cool piece of technology, but it's so much fun that it just might be worth it. Just tune in to a YouTube video, plop your phone into the slot on this goofy-looking set of goggles, and enjoy as the screen comes to 3D life. |
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| Top 10 Camcorders – November 2012 |
| The Sony NEX-VG10 has been knocked off top spot to make way for its successor, the VG10. But this is no mere title bump: it’s a vast improvement. Not only is this the best-looking camcorder on the market, it also adds a higher bitrate for glitch-free footage, incrrdible 5.1 sound, and 1080p@60fpsvideo shot on a 16.1MP APS HD Exmor sensor – the same found in Sony’s NEX-5N and NEX-C3 mirrorless cameras. |
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| Top 10 Cameras – November 2012 |
| Rocking GPS and manual controls, the TZ20 has an ‘Intelligent Zoom’ that extends the 16x optical zoom to 21x and an easy to use touchscreen. It’s also built like a tank but most importantly, it delivers classy pics. It’s keeping the TZ30’s seat warm ’til we review it |
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| The Big News In Digital Publishing (Part 2) |
| A POTENTIAL DRWABACK to using HTML5 rather than rendered page images is font handling. Because content is ‘live’, type will be rendered on the fly, on the device the reader is using, not as a preparatory stage before exporting static pages. Unfortunately, using non-standard fonts on iOS and Android isn’t straightforward. |
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| The Big News In Digital Publishing (Part 1) |
| Quark already offers a digital publishing solution that can turn page layouts into magazine apps. In fact, it was one of the first to do so. So why has it gone back to the drawing board and emerged with a radically different approach? |
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| Top 10 Blu-Ray Players – November 2012 |
| The Panasonic DMP-BDT320 is a truly special deck, with a spec that’s an intriguing combination of the old and the new. The new? Try Wi-Fi, a touchpad-equipped remote, DLNA support, two USB inputs and the Viera Connect online streaming portal, complete with iPlayer, Netflix and Skype. |
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| Top 10 Geek Accessories – November 2012 |
| Packing all the basic as well as wireless printing and AirPrint for easy use with iDevices, this whisper-quiet printer performs as smoothly as its meta and glass chassis might suggest. Did we mention it has its own email address for printing photos? Oh, we just did |
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| Top 10 Headphones – November 2012 |
| Bose’s latest long-haul headphones are its finest yet. Wearing a pair is as comfortable as binding pillows to your head with silken thread, and both sound and noise cancelling are superb. The price has trickled up a bit over the last month, but they’re still worth it. |
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| Delays Hit New Apple Hardware |
| Seen alongside iOS 6’s Maps controversy and increasing delays in approving submissions to the App Store, the manufacturing problems could give the impression of a company whose growth is outstripping its management capability an obvious risk for what was described by late CEO Steve Jobs as ‘the world’s biggest stratup.’ |
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| Ouya Wants To Shake Up Gaming |
| After years in the gaming industry, Julie Uhrman noticed a shift from console and PC gaminh to mobile. As a result, Uhrman, whose resume includes exec roles with GameFly, IGN, and Vivendi Universal, set out to bring gaming back to the living room via a $159, Android-powered video game console that offers free-to-play titles and is accessible to developers. |
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| Freemake Video Converter |
| The developers at Freemake.com are pretty funky bunch. Not only does Freemake have a great looking site, with a heady mix of cool, colorful icons but it also provides an almost obscene amount of free software, which is actually the most useful of its kind to be found anywhere. |
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| Audio-Technica ANC9 : Noise-cancelling headphones |
| ANC9 QuietPoint headphones look like serious business even before you unbox them: Audio Technica has provided some extra touches with a semi-hard travelling zip-up case to carry them, two cables, adapters for stereo systems and aeroplane headphone plugs. |
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| Focal XS Book Music System |
| For all the tricks and capabilities the Mac has mastered, audio quality from its speakers is not one of them. In fact, up until recently external computer speakers did not have the best reputation when it came to sound performance either. |
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| How-To Imaging: Landscapes |
| Landscape photography is about the spirit of spaces. The best landscapes don’t just show you what a place looks like; they reveal what a place feels like. |
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| EOS C: Half-blood Princes - Knock The DSLR Off Its Throne |
| Both the C300 and C500 appear to offer all the advantages of shooting with a DSLR, but without any of the major workarounds that are necessary. It’s easy to put up with using a DSLR for video because it produces amazing results, but there are compromises that have to be made. |
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| InCase Pivot On-Ear Headphones |
| The Pivot on-ear headphones from InCase are all about minimalist design – a thin, light headband holding two smallish earpiece discs, each containing a 4cm driver. |
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| Plantronics Voyager Legend |
| Positioned at the high end of its Bluetooth headset range, Plantronics has released the Voyager Legend. This is a lightweight one-piece headset constructed mainly from soft touch material, especially for those areas that come into contact with the skin. The Voyager Legend allows you to adjust the ear-loop and boom microphone elements so that the headset can be worn on either ear. |
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| The Best In-Car Accessories |
| The Smart Talk links with your phone via Bluetooth so you can answer calls with a press of the call button or, if you hook up your device’s voice control setting, you can take calls without your hands leaving the wheel, or your eyes the road. |
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| Elgato Game Capture HD |
| Elgato’s new Game Capture HD is capable of capturing video directly from all HDMI devices – including the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, but primarily from games consoles. |
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| Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.0 |
| Adobe’s Lightroom has never been an easy application to explain to the uninitiated, but we’ll give it a shot. Lightroom 4 is, at its core, two things: a DAM (digital asset manager] and a raw-file developer. |
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| CraftArtist2 Professional - Traditional Crafting On Your Computer |
| Serif has just released the latest version of CraftArtist 2 Professional, a product designed to replace all those pencils, paints, scissors, bits of colored paper and glue normally associated with hobby crafts. Instead, you have a set of digital utilities that can take the hard work out of creating things like photo books, greeting cards, posters, decoupage and invitations. |
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| À La Mode Accessories |
| In the battle of style versus practicality the BookBook case for iPhone takes about as many hits as it delivers. On the plus side you’re unlikely to find a cuter looking covering for your phone than this. |
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| All About Compact System Cameras (Part 1) - Nikon 1 V1 |
| Nikon has opted for a fairly small CX-size sensor in the V1, which immediately places a question mark over image quality. The good news is that it’s largely unfounded. The quality of Nikon glass and image processing stand up and the quality of the photos is impressive. |
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| BenQ GW2750HM - Great Performance For Its Price |
| BenQ’s monitor weighs a reasonable 5.6kg and measures 48.9cm tall, 65.5cm wide and 19.1 cm at the base. Offering 1920 x 1080 HD resolutions at 16:9, the GW2750HM stamps its authority on an office environment. |
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| LG LM9600 47” Smart TV - A New Direction |
| Smart TVs are here to stay, even though they do seem a bit strange in the South African market, where very few homes have the level of internet connectivity and networking to take full advantage of the idea. And the technology is moving very quickly, zooming through generations faster than a greased pig. |
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| The 3DS XL : Super-Sized! |
| Nintendo are well known for releasing new versions of existing hardware fairly regularly. It is a system that seems to work rather well for the mega-corporation and, with the release of the newest version of 3DS, it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop the trend any time soon. |
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| iOS In The Studio |
| Simkin, with his iPhone 4 and iPad 2, and Jacoby, with her iPhone 4S, do more than just post Instagram photos depicting the behind-the-scenes world of dancers' lives; they both rely heavily on their iDevices for a wide spectrum of daily tasks, from recording rehearsals to organizing their schedules. |
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| The Truth About Free Trials (Part 3) |
| Despite the hair pulling that free trials put me through, eight services – AdaptedMind, Ancestry.com, Britannica Online, Dr. Laura, Hulu Plus, Merriam-Webster, SugarSync, and The Weather Channel – proved that it is possible to make parting ways a breeze. |
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| The Truth About Free Trials (Part 2) |
| When it’s quit-or-get-billed time, technical snafus are doubly frustrating. I was surprised to see how many services – such as ESPN Insider, FreeCreditScore-com, GameHouse, IMDb Pro, RealPlayer Super Pass, and Spotify Premium – suffered from technical errors on their sites that made canceling hard. |
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| The Truth About Free Trials (Part 1) |
| Three of the sites charged me even though I canceled before the free trial ended. With two other sites, I sound up with a bill simply because I couldn’t figure out how to cancel before the trial expired; I blame this problem on poor website design . |
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| 20 Ice Cream Sandwich Secret Revealed! (Part 2) |
| Hidden within the ‘Develop options’ section of the Ice Cream Sandwich software are quite a few nerdy ways to adapt your phone. Most won’t be of any use to those who are just using their phone as a phone, but if you want it to feel faster, or at least look a little different, the scrolling, zooming effects on windows and menus can be edited in many ways. |
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