Nice little TV

A nice little TV for secondary use (e.g. bedroom, study), it has a whole load of connections (2xRGB SCART, Component, Composite, 1xHDMI, PC VGA) that should suit most applications. It also has a coaxial link for receiving terrestrial TV, Freeview, and a card slot for Top-Up TV. I currently have mine set up with an AV sender hooked up to one of the SCART sockets, and a Wii hooked up via component. (It's worth noting that one of the SCART sockets is Smartlink compatible, for connecting up to other Sony video products.)

As with other Sony products, the manual is clear, and well presented - although if you're fairly gadget-savvy, it should be pretty easy to set the TV up without it. The on-screen menu is pretty straightforward, you can adjust the picture and audio to your heart's content. The sound effects are worth experimenting with, although don't expect the full cinematic experience from the onboard speakers, which are quite decent for a TV set this size (they're actually better than those on my 32" LCD TV, not a Sony I hasten to add...)

The quality of the casing is solid, if a little bit plasticky, and you have manual controls on the top of the set. I was surprised at how thick this TV is, but it has VESA spaced holes on the back if you wish to hang it off a VESA-compatible wall bracket (you can remove the stand that is attached). You can tilt the vertical angle of the screen if using the stand, but it's a little bit stiff - I wasn't sure it would move at first.

As another reviewer mentioned, depending upon the angle at which you view the screen, the image can appear darker in some positions, so it's worth getting it set up correctly. The image quality is good for a screen this size - DVDs play clearly, and TV images are good if not exceptional.

All in all, there are few LCD TVs in this size that have this many features for this kind of price (the Amazon price is decent, although I got mine for a bit less elsewhere).

Fine solution for a necessary evil

I hate the fact that Sony continue to go it's own way with the memory stick; Just about everybody else on the market uses some form of the SD range but Sony has to be different with a proprietary format. I bought a Sony HDR-HC3 HDV camcorder which can also take pretty decent 4MP stills so to use this facility, I was forced to buy a Memory Stick for it.

The stick works well and I got it for a good price from Amazon at the end of 2006. Should be even cheaper now. Be wary of buying fake sticks from some independent sellers (you'll find people with bitter experiences here) but the genuine article works just fine.

My first DSLR

After a while considering various cameras, including the Canon 400D and Nikon D60 I finally decided that the Sony's cost was the deciding factor.

I have only had it a few weeks but found it really easy to use and have already got some good photos that I wouldn't have dreamed of with a compact (particularly with the aperture settings). I am not sure how good the lens is as I have nothing to compare it too but the images seem really crisp.

As a beginner I can't understand why I would want to spend more than £300 on a DSLR, as it has all the functions I would expect.

So far so good!

Durability

5 stars for durability! I recommend these phones to all of you who are accident prone and a little rough with stuff. I dropped them (accidentally) whilst crossing the road at a traffic light and only realised what had happend when I got to the other side of the road. I stood on the pavement and watched trucks, buses and cars drive over my earphones - I was gutted! I was sure that they were destroyed. But after rescuing them, I hooked them back to my ipod and the were still working! Although they look scuffled, the phones are in good working condition.

Very Good TV And On Time Delivery.

This TV is amazing. It has many connections on the back for the Xbox 360 and PC etc and the picture is great, analogue and digital. The sound is very good under any mode and the TV gives an overall flawless display no matter what you want to do with it. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well it fits in my bedroom and it looks great at any angle. Also the delivery was before they said it would be but this is better because I can wait for it at home because school has ended for the summer.

Brilliant, Incredible

Where do I start? Having just recently bought this system on Saturday, I can't find enough words to describe how much it has impressed me.
The setup was extremely easy, and took a matter of minutes, and after connecting it to my PS3 and LG 32inch TV, I watched"300" on Blu-Ray and the hairs on the back of my neck were on end. I actually thought I was a Spartan!
Another great feature of this system is the DVD up scaler, I'm watching Lord of the Rings; The Two Towers, right now and can definitley notice the difference.
Gaming also, I played Fifa 2008 earlier this afternoon and thought I was in the crowd! Incredible.
USB port at the front is also a nice feature, meaning I can plug my iPod directly into the surround sound and enjoy my music!
I am honeslty delighted with this purchase, especially for the price i paid of £135, I couldn't recommend it more. Even if you are not serious about technology and just want a decent sound system, buy this now!!

Very good picture, limited sound options

I got this when HD DVD ceased to be supported (I already have a top HD DVD player). I picked this because it can be chipped to be an all region player. This was essential if I was to remove the standard DVD player from the ever growing tower of devices below my TV. The picture compares favourably with the Toshiba but the technical details here (and on many other sites) say:

Dolby digital plus, DTS-HD & dolby truHD digital out & decoding capability

DD+ is supported but the others are output as plain DD and DTS. If I had realized this I may have went for the 500. Very annoying when you have a receiver with HDMI in.

Great

I brought this camera a little over 1 month ago, and after extensive testing on a holiday to Berlin was very impressed with the features on this camera, only down side is the smile feature! i tied it out, and you need to be grinning ear to ear to make it work! but apart from that it is a good camera. Battery life is very good, and there is an internal memory just in case you run out of space on your memory card, i have a 4gb memory card and have found this sufficent for at least 4 days worth of photos, picture quality is very good as is the video recording. i would recomed this camera as it is light , looks good and packed with features.

A Sexy Piece of Kit

Having had a couple of MP3 players before (including an iPod), I can thoroughly recommend this product, recently bought from Amazon: it's amazing, really, particularly in view of the price. And it's made by Sony.

First off, it's so small and sexy looking! It's also extremely rugged. The sleek black finish has minute speckles of silver embedded into it, which sparkle alluringly. The 3-colour display screen is recessed, so it doesn't get scratched, and like all Sony products, has been designed to feel tactile and smooth to the touch, and fingerprints just wipe off, unlike on an iPod.

The sound quality is startling, very rich bass & midrange, especially if you ditch the supplied Sony earpods & substitute an £8 set of Creative Labs EP630 ear-canal 'phones (rebranded Sennheiser CX 300's), and adjust the equaliser accordingly.

The drag & drop software built into the thing makes transferring albums a piece of cake: no fancy complex software to install on your pc: plug it in to a USB socket & it's immediately spotted as a hard drive, so you just drop music albums onto its window & it takes them without complaint.

Battery life between chargings is about 3 times as long as a typical iPod: I've had 12 hours of continuous listening on mine.

It also recharges without complaint from one of those cheap mains/usb plugs, so you can take it abroad & recharge it on holiday without a pc, as I have.

A very sexy & rich-sounding little piece of kit for the average user of an MP3 player. I don't create playlists, just browse through albums, tracks or play whole albums, so I can't comment on the more techie niggles about track selection that people have posted in their reviews.

Thoroughly recommended. Buy it.

Difficulty in setting up with Sky HD

I bought this to do 1 thing, which is to empty my full Sky HD hard drive, I know it doesn't record in HD, as yet nothing commercially available will. No all I wanted to was to put the 6 recorded Rugby league games onto their own discs. I have an AV amp at the heart of my system, I have the SKY HD box and this recorder feeding into that via HDMI and an HDMI from AV Amp to the Plasma TV, working a treat. Now I wanted to connect the recorder side of things via scart, firstly no signal at all coming into the recorder, that was the SKY box output setting, sorted, then when I did eventually get a picture its about one third the size of my plasma with no sound at all. This I assumed was the very expensive RGB Scart I used which I suspect is picture only, add an audio lead I thought, the problem is there is no audio input on this Sony other than the decoder/line in scart. So I have had to buy a second fully wired scart, but still when I look at the picture through this scart it is still reduced in size to the middle of the plasma. Frustrating!! so in terms of playing DVD's it is good, trying to get recordings from the Sky HD box to it though is a different matter.

Excellent camera

Absolutely love this camera. It's a huge upgrade from my previous brick. Fantastic pictures, very easy to use, and in black it's extremely sexy! You can take about 600 pictures with a 2GB Memory Stick Pro Duo. Definitely recommended and a good price too! Fits perfectly in the"Sony LCS-CST Soft Carrying Case For Slim Cybershot".

Excellent Earphones

These are the best earphones I have ever purchased. I've only just tried them, but they stay in the ear even when working out in the gym. Not a sound expert, but they do the job & the sound is good for me!

SORRY BUT I HAVE A QUESTION ON BRAVIA

Hi

Firstly, I know this is a place to put your reviews, and hopefully I will be doing that shortly!

But I thought that as all of you are obviously very satisfied with your Sonys and also the research I have done on the Sony HD Ready LCD tv it looks perfect for my needs.

I was on the verge of buying this tv when it was pointed out to me that if you do not have cable or satellite then you cannot use this tv or that the quality of the picture is far below what it should be.

From the reviews I have read, everyone seems satisfied - does this mean that you all have cable/satellite?

Many thanks for your help

G

Everybody's smiling with the W170

I've already got an alpha 100 D-SLR, but there are occasions when its just not the time to lug a great big camera round with all the different bits that go with it. So I thought that this would be a good everyday sort of camera. I was wrong.

It's a fantasic camera! I could end up using it more than my D-SLR as the pictures are of the same quality, but in such a small case!

The last compact digital camera I had was another Cyber-Shot, the P-10, but its 5 years old now, and how its all changed. Everything is so fast, from turning it on, to focusing, to zooming, to taking as many pictures you want in a row, its all instant!

However, I really think the best points of this camera are the functions that do it all themselves. Face detection and the Smile Shutter. No longer is face detection a gimmick, everything is adjusted to make those faces look the best they can, focus, exposure, white balance, and flash are all adjusted. And it plays a role in the Smile Shutter, the most fantastic thing you will use for a long while.

Just focus the camera, press the shutter, and smile! It really works, and is so fun to use, you can also set the camera to child priority, so that the camera will only fire when the children in the photo are smiling, I hear sighs of relief from parents everywhere!

But using the Smile Shutter you will always get great people pictures, as i've found, after the first smiling picture, the subject laughs so much at the camera that it just keeps going!

All of this, and a lot more, in something you can fit in any trouser pocket, what an age we live in.

Ok, a couple of tiny gripes. The camera is slower to focus when zoomed in to the max 5x's, but only by about a second. The other is that in my 5 year old camera, the infoLITHIUM battery used would tell you down to minute how long you had till it ran out, all of my Handycam's do this too. This camera CAN do this, but you have to purchase an infoLITHIUM battery seperatly, would have been nice to include it in the box.

Overall though, its a supurb piece of kit, and i'm sure it will capture many moments, probably 95% with smiling happy people due to the Smile Shutter, to come.

Sony Vaio NR21 Notebook

This notebook is built to a high quality and works great with Vista, I am very pleased with the performance and can highly recommend it

Plug and play but average picture quality

I got sick of messing around with software and cables to convert video footage from my 10 year old Canon camcorder to DVD and started looking at the Sony HDD range. After dismissing the older SR32 and SR52, I started looking at the new SR35 and SR55. I chose the more expensive 55 because of it's larger CCD sensor.
The great thing about this camera is it records to industry standard mpeg2 format and transferring videos to my PC is now a case of plugging into a USB port and copying the files. The camera appears as a removable disk drive to Windows.
Unfortunately, I was a little dissapointed with the quality of images even when using the HQ recording mode. When recording in daylight things aren't too bad but in artificial and low light conditions, the quality of the images aren't too good. I wasn't expecting top end quality from this camera anyway, but was ultimately expecting better. I would say the quality is marginally better that that of videos from my old camcorder which have been converted through my digital TV adaptor.
Overall, I do like this camera for it's small size, low weight and plug and play capabilities. But if you are looking for high quality images, it's probably not a good choice.

Excellent quality

Everything is great; easy to use, great photo quality (especially outdoors), powerful zoom, small, compact and great build quality.

Only negative points were that the lead attachment to the camera feels very brittle and the battery must be removed to be charged. Not worth removing a star for.