Dell has seen considerable success in the consumer PC market, and has drawn on the expertise gained in that market to drive into the business market over the past several years.

Back in February 2002 (PC Authority issue 51 page 42) we ran a comprehensive round up of the latest PDAs in the market, but its amazing what difference a few months make. Toshibas entry to the market, the e570, won the Quality Award, but was pipped at the post by the Palm m125, which won the value award with its extremely competitive price.

Polaroid's move into the digital market was just commonsense. After all, the digital camera market in Australia is growing faster than any other non-food consumer item except DVD software, and the days of traditional cameras seem well and truly over.

Canopus first made its name providing top-notch 3Dfx cards. Realising the deadly competitiveness and pace of that market, however, Canopus has moved on and repositioned itself as a company specialising in video editing.

The JoyBook 8000 marks the first attempt by BenQ to enter what some might argue is a crowded notebook market. BenQ's stance on the JoyBook is different from other notebook manufacturers though, as it won't be selling the JoyBook as 'just another notebook', but will instead market it totally as a digital lifestyle product.

HP crashes the 30" party with the most versatile display on the market.

Accounting software is a tough market to get into and is littered with the carcasses of many who had tried and failed to take on the established giants in Quicken and MYOB. Business Breeze is a locally designed product specifically aimed at the small business market.

Successor to the ubiquitous 350D, Canon's affordable yet powerful 400D D-SLR is a serious weapon whether an amateur or pro.

It was a little hard to compare some monitors as they were more for the high-end market where others were aimed at the consumer/budget market. Such was the case with the Viewsonic VP171B, a high-end professional graphics model. The VP171B featured 280cd/m² brightness coupled with an incredible 600:1 contrast ratio.

Stylish and bursting with features, Polyview deserves to take the 17in LCD market by the horns and turn it upside down as it did with the CMV1515 (June 2003). Another display to boast the 16ms pixel response time, the fast rise and fall rate of the pixels in this display make it ideal for gaming, even when playing first person shooters or watching video.

Like the Panasonic LF-D521U, this DVD-RW drive is a generation behind the newest ones on the market. As such it lacks a lot in burning speed – in fact most of the newer models on the market are twice as fast.

In what is an interesting first time foray into the crowded PDA market, Acer is hedging its bets by releasing both Palm- and Pocket PC-based PDAs. It's a curious gambit to be sure, and we're content to see which PDA branch blossoms while the other withers.

The PixelView range of graphics cards share a sizeable proportion of the OEM market, with many of the small-to-medium PC vendors using them to outfit their PCs with inexpensive graphics solutions.

TI's current workstation-class 3D graphics accelerators - dubbed X1 - are the company's latest effort to keep a hand in the high-end 3D graphics market. Consumer-level 3D hardware is now massively powerful, of course, but for all-out 3D performance and rock-solid driver integration you need a card dedicated to the purpose, and ATI claims the X1-128 is it.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software has been around for a long time and OmniPage from ScanSoft is often touted as the market leader in this space.

In the sub-$2,000 category, we thought it would be negligent to leave Apple, and its popular eMac, out of the running. While we can't benchmark it head to head with the PCs, at least we can compare the features and see what alternatives there are to mainstream PCs in the world. Interestingly, the eMac (as its prefix implies) was originally intended for the education market, but it proved to be such a success it was cut loose into the broader retail market.

In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.

If you're space conscious or limited when it comes to your PC set up then no doubt you've already looked at the TFT display option at some point. We've got three new TFT offerings from three companies in the Labs this month, which should give you a good idea of the state of play of the TFT market at the moment.

It has been a long time coming, but finally there is some serious competition to the mantle assumed by the behemoth that is NVIDIA. The Radeon 8500 is the latest graphics chipset from ATI, which itself is a graphics giant, though does not possess nearly the same public profile in the consumer 3D market. Unlike previous ATI cards that featured exclusively on ATIs own branding and PCB, the Radeon 8500 and 7500 are open to other board manufacturers, presumably to take a bigger bite out of NVIDIAs lucrative market share.

It may be early days for the technology, but it's still interesting to look at Sony's Blu-Ray drive under the microscope.