Interesting design and plenty of features, but it takes an age to produce mediocre results

A dreadful scanner and an overall lack of features make the low price a moot point

Youll have to excuse the pun, but the MFC-9200c is far and away the big brother to the MFC-4600. There is no comparison in terms of size, and it efficiently uses that space to provide more features than its competition.

As most of the devices we tested consisted of inkjet units, we were interested to see how the laser printer in the MFC-4600 stacked up. Relatively lacking in features, the MFC-4600 is geared toward productivity, performing well in our speed tests.

Senator Helen Coonan plans to ask the ABA to clarify public concerns about footage from the reality television program Big Brother.

Whereas a couple of years ago Canon might have described this as a mini camcorder, it now describes it as a compact multimedia DV camera. Certainly by comparison with the others in this month's labs it's not mini, however it does manage to pack a lot of features into a relatively small package. It is an upright camera rather than the longer, squatter shape of the MVX250i and weighs 43 grams less than its bigger but cheaper brother.

Superb print quality at consistently high speeds, and it’s packed with useful features too.

Kodak's LS433 is similar than its little brother the LS633, and they fight it out on slightly different battlefields. The 4-megapixel LS443 is the slightly bulkier of the two, has a smaller display and weighs a little more.

It lacks the style of its higher-end big brother, the Coolpix 500, but at half the price, it wont stretch the budget too far.

The Radeon 7500 is the little brother to the Radeon 8500 and is essentially an enhanced version of the original Radeon card, an example of which was tested in this round-up as a yardstick and included in the performance graphs (pages 50-51). It features the Charisma Engine; ATIs equivalent of the T&L engine found in GeForce-based cards.

Despite having a 1.02-megapixel CCD, the 820 still suffered similar poor optical zoom performance of its little brother, with image pixelation at high zoom. The image stabilisation was only average and that put you off seeking any sort of magnification while filming moving objects. The improved CCD does provide better stills, and the 820 can use MPEG-4 to compress video clips.

The WinFast Titanium 200 T shares is similar to its big brother, the Ti 500 TD, in terms of good performance at an affordable price. This time around however, its the performance-on-a-budget GeForce3 Ti 200 chipset offered at the very affordable price of $555, making it a strong contender for PC Authoritys Value Award.

Although boasting the lowest average access time in the roundup at 12.2ms, looking at this drive's graphs, we notice a few more hiccups along the way than its big brother the 400GB Deskstar 7K400.

The Panasonic NV-GS15 is the cheaper version of the NV-GS120, but you wouldn't pick it to look at them. It is not until you start to use it that you discover why it is $600 cheaper than its big brother with the three CCD's. The single, 800,000 (400,000 effective) pixel CCD produces average picture quality and certainly nothing that would compare with the 1.62 million (1.02 million effective) of the NV-GS120.

PC Authority has secured a $350 discount for readers on Dell’s new 27” monitor.

Robots are supposed to be helpful or entertaining. Roboreptile, with his limited movements and irate demeanour, is just unpleasant

For the price, the performance and feature set, the MultiPASS C75 represents good value for money for those who want a cheap, all-round performer.

The HP Officejet Pro 8500 is one of the best office inkjet alternatives for under $350. Being feature packed, small businesses may be tempted to try this over the latest expensive laser printer.

Perfect image fidelity - no expense spared.

A nondescript looking scanner that admits to a 36-bit colour depth, enhanced to 48-bit through its drivers.