Hitachi VM-D965LE Video

Digital radio in Australia is a slow burner. While many people are investing in digital set-top boxes and digital displays for the purpose of watching digital TV, not too many people are jumping on the digital radio bandwagon.

A completely new digital SLR system has arrived in the shape of the Olympus E-1 and is perhaps the most eagerly awaited professional camera this year.

Digital photography has made enormous strides in recent years, and as a result, the technology is being incorporated into affordable consumer products.

The Complete Digital Photography is an excellent and comprehensive book about all aspects of digital photography. The author makes a strong distinction early on however: this is a book about digital photographs taken with a digital camera, not film photos scanned to be manipulated. This is an important point, as the book goes into great depth about how to take photos under varying conditions and then manipulate them afterwards.

Olympus first introduced SLR (single lens reflex) to digital cameras in early 1998 in the form of the Camedia C-1400L.

Johnson takes an obligatory tour through the technology, explaining the differences between CCD and CMOS sensors, the common features of digital cameras and some of the jargon peculiar to digital photography.

The Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 is the latest sound card from Creative Labs, the company that has dominated the consumer-level computer audio card market for most of the last decade.

Not flawless, but Sony’s debut DSLR impresses with a 10.2-megapixel resolution and built-in anti-shake.

BVG's Learning Digital Imaging Training is a collection of four tutorial CD-ROMs including Using Digital Cameras, Using Scanners, Learning Adobe Acrobat and Learning Photoshop 6.0.

The digital still camera is a treat to use.

Digital video is a rising star, with DV camera sales increasing from year to year and digital software sales to consumers and enthusiasts alike also on the rise. It's a welcome trend, to be sure, but with all such trends there is a widening gap between the digital haves and the have-nots, with no easy way to share video between.

Digital convergence is one of those irritating buzz phrases used to describe things like an Internet fridge. But every so often a product that epitomises the concept actually appears.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the size and performance of this digital format. The cameras are a fraction of the size of the old camcorders we used to lug around the countryside, the batteries last longer, the tapes get smaller and, the quality gets better.

There is little doubt that digital photography will take over from film, and it will happen sooner rather than later. As more people buy and start to use digital cameras there is an ever increasing demand for simple-to-use photo editing software that will allow them to get the best out of their photographs.

While the storage community eagerly awaits Serial ATA disks (see page 39), the latest generations of Ultra ATA disks have emerged, boasting huge capacities and searing performance.

The Caviar 'BB' series disks from Western Digital are designed to be good, solid mid-level drives with decent all-round performance.

Not all multimedia notebooks have to weigh in around the $5000 mark. Digital Star’s 15.4in widescreen PowerNote Z71V offers very good value for money for a laptop sporting a 2GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM and a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 graphics chip.

Rarely has a new camera received as much attention as the EOS 300D, released amid a flurry of excitement among photographers and a massive marketing campaign. Why the fuss? Because it's a true 6.3-megapixel digital SLR for under $2,000 including lens. It sounds expensive in the context of the cameras in this month's digital cameras Labs, but the previous generation of several models in that test were nudging a grand when they were released.