Stories by: Spencer Dalziel

this age of Big Brother and home-cooked voyeurism, MSI's new StarCam 370i is ready to facilitate all your snooping tendencies. This webcam can do just about anything except make the tea, but MSI has stuck to a cut-throat price that will shock the competition. A great buy.

When we reviewed Sanyo's Xacti VPC-C1, we were quite enamoured with the hybrid digital camera and mini-camcorder approach. We were less impressed by the lack of features.

Few manufacturers can match Kyocera for overall cost of ownership. The company's ECOSYS technology means this printer is quiet and low-maintenance. Add a price tag of $519 (including $145 toner cartridge) to the reasonable print speeds and quality output, and you have a personal mono laser worth attention.

The brilliant PC game Battlefield 1942 was an ambitious amalgam of the best in first-person shooters. Simplified strategy and vehicle sims, writ large on huge playing vistas for up to 64 online players. This unique setup created a new genre of online action, and just a year after its release devoted gamers created a level called Galactic Conquest, in homage to the battle on Hoth in the Star Wars universe.

This digital camera has a surprisingly full feature set for the cash, while catering for point-and-shoot photography.

When you see a colour laser printer claiming a 20ppm (pages per minute) print speed, cynicism tends to kick in - because colour printing is notoriously slow. But the Magicolor 5430DL can really knock out the sheets.

Kodak's range of entry-level digital cameras has come on in leaps and bounds since we saw the first products several years ago. No other manufacturer has managed quite as well to combine ease of use with quality results.

If we mentioned an MP3 player offering gigabytes of storage, all wrapped up in a small white case with matching white headphones and white cabling, you’d think we were talking about Apple’s iPod. You’d be wrong. Creative’s styling is reminiscent of Apple’s design and you could think the Zen Xtra is just a cheap imitation — and you’d be wrong again.

Although notebooks lack quality audio, this new release from Creative is about the best external sound solution currently available. It’s a worthwhile buy for anyone who wants the best possible output for home entertainment audio applications.

A couple of years ago the original Aquanox set the benchmark for graphically endowed games. We were waiting with bated breath to see if the follow-up could surpass such high expectation.

When Core Design went for a developmental reinvention, the world’s favourite cyberbabe returned to PlayStation 2, to mixed reviews. New camera angles and different controls made for frustrating play, and the inclusion of stealth felt like an afterthought. Despite the game’s release date being continually bumped back, there were murmurs that Angel of Darkness was rushed to hit the shelves before it was ready.