Will home media centres do to the entertainment industry what video did to the radio star? With new technology reshaping our lounges, homes could soon become fully functional media hubs.

Panasonic has gone above and beyond, releasing its NV-GS35 with its massive 30x optical zoom, dwarfing the usual 20 or so times zooms found on other cameras.

Digital camera prices are continuing to fall, which is largely due to market saturation. Fortunately for consumers, it's now at a point where a good quality high resolution camera can be picked up for a little under $1000.

Taking photos is only half the fun. Touching them up on your PC and printing them is the other half. PC Authority takes a look at some of the best photo-printers on the market.

There are always moments in life when you wish you had your camera to hand. The Labs team rounds up the latest pocket cameras.

The Civic Diamond 2015.xT is more than a little similar to Digital Star's PowerNote CL56 (reviewed November 2004, page 43), featuring the same OEM housing. Designed to take care of any application you can throw at it, it's a capable book that will handle DirectX 8 and 9 games, as well as churn through productivity apps.

Combing a 250GB 7,200RPM hard disk drive, 8-in-1 card reader and USB hub, there's not much this unit can't do. It can be operated in either an upright or lying down position, while the USB hub function allows you to plug in a removable USB device such as a memory key or digital camera directly without fiddling with USB extension cables or reaching behind your desktop or notebook.

ACDSee is designed to help your photographic overflow woes.

Small form factor (SFF) PCs now have their foot well and truly in the home entertainment and IT/CE crossover market due largely to their aesthetics, functionality and quietness of operating volume. Westan's Biostar product looks to continue along these lines, offering a multimedia PC with all the performance of AMD's 64-bit desktop processor architecture.

Another notebook to embrace the entertainment market and sell units with widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio displays, this PowerNote packs some serious hardware under the hood, pushing not only AMD's Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ processor, but also ATI's Mobility RADEON 9700 a 60GB, 7200rpm hard disk drive and a multiformat 4-speed DVD burner for disc creation on the go.

Designed from the ground up to cater for all computer users, this notebook is a great all round performer.

Dan Chiappini delves into multimedia jargon in our monthly tech term glossary.

We reviewed the MegaPC180's predecessor, the Mega651, in September last year (Issue 70, page 46) and were fairly impressed with the way this unit handled for a first generation crossover Hi-Fi/PC. The key to digital convergence is seamless integration and MSI has gone a few extra steps in the right direction to help with this changeover.

Currently only available to OEMs, although it should be released later to the consumer market, Seagate’s Momentus hard drive upgrade kit is designed to boost the common bottleneck issue of hard drive performance in notebooks, tablet PCs, digital audio players and blade servers.

Although the mobile marketplace has been changing in the face of Centrino and the slow but gradual tablet PC adoption rate, large form factored (greater than single spindle) notebooks are still the order of the day.

Ricoh's Caplio R1 is unfortunately the underperformer of the lot in this Labs, with final scores below the 100 average. While the scores below may make it seem like it's a very poor camera, the reality is that the scores highlight the deviations and differences in the products compared.

Kyocera's Finecam SL400R has the most innovative styling of any of the compact cameras here: it has a swivelled body which cuts the camera in two so you can swing the lens down giving it a cross-like form factor as seen from the side. It's a funky design, and it means that when flush the camera has a slim, pocketable aspect.

Along with the Sony Cyber-shot P-93, the Canon Powershot A95 is the big lad of this roundup with a pretty decent 5-megapixel CCD. The rest vary from 3-4-megapixel. While this does give the Canon a bit of an edge over the competition in terms of resolution and functionality, it's the camera's other attributes that cemented this unit in the top three.

Shuttle's push on the small form factor market has seen the PC finally migrate from the bedroom to become an integral part of the lounge room and entertainment set up. Capable of a number of varied roles, these include file servers, HDTV receiving boxes and media streaming machines.

It's not often that a company releases a product that is as functional as it is stylish, and can wow the masses in droves. Samsung's D500 does just this, combining the looks of its last generation E800 slide phone and a feature set to rival anything currently on the market.