Innehållsförteckning för November 2018 från Computer Shopper

For our summer holiday this year, we had two weeks in Wales with 10 of us sharing a house. With four kids to entertain, I scoured the web to find some kid-friendly activities to book and came across a theme park. Job done. We all agreed to go on the first Wednesday, and I noted a 10% discount for booking online the day before. On the Tuesday evening, we sat down to book our tickets, and in the offer list was another for 20% off if you booked at least two days in advance. We only missed out on an extra £20 saving between the eight of us compared to the 10% deal, but it was still slightly irritating as we could have booked the tickets earlier. I’m sure I’m…

letters@computershopper.co.uk ONCE UPON A time, there was a very rich man called John Lennon, who wrote a popular song with the line, ‘Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can’. Well, I have a friend called Verity and she not only imagines no possessions, she’s put theory into practice in the real world. And it’s all thanks to online subscription services. My friend Verity used to own a lot of material things, but now she owns almost nothing at all. Like most of the population, Verity has never owned a mobile phone. She has always preferred to rent one and upgrade to the latest model and ickiest colour, as the fancy takes her. Her little flat is owned by the housing cooperative, her big electric wheelchair is leased from Help…

Samsung reveals new feature-packed Galaxy Note 9 SAY WHAT? SAMSUNG’S GALAXY NOTE series has been around for nearly seven years, with each generation offering a larger take on the flagship phones of the time. The Note series became synonymous with the term ‘phablet’, a portmanteau of phone and tablet, denoting how such devices try to tread the line between both mobile devices. Now Samsung has unveiled the Note 9, arguably the South Korean firm’s most feature-packed phone to date. At first glance, the Note 9 is pretty much identical to its predecessor, which is no bad thing as the Note 8 was a lovely looking device. The Note 9 has a 6.3in Super AMOLED Infinity Display with a resolution of 2,960x1,440 and support for HDR10, which makes images on the…

Facebook’s data hunger Facebook has been looking to make deals with banks to access their customer data, but claims it’s only to help boost the effectiveness of its Messenger chatbots, rather than to fuel advertising Dixons Carphone security Electronics retailer Dixons Carphone has admitted that a massive data breach affected 10 million customers, a significant hike from the 1.2 million it had originally thought were affected Human gamers OpenAI continued to show how AI can make humans look dumb by having its bots beat semi-professional players of multiplayer online battle arena Dota 2 Unhackable claims John McAfee was left looking a bit stupid after cyber security experts claimed to have hacked into his Bitfi bitcoin wallet, despite the security tech guru claiming it was ‘unhackable’…

BACK IN 1999, the dot-com boom was in full swing, with the rapid growth in the adoption and use of the web fuelling the creation of online services and companies. One of the most significant names to emerge from the era was Napster. Getting music through the internet was nowhere near as easy as it is today, with no Spotify or iTunes. The idea of a peer-to-peer file-sharing service was born in a chatroom around 1998 by a user going by the handle of ‘napster’, aka Shawn Fanning. Many of the chatroom users dismissed the idea, but Sean Parker was intrigued and agreed to work with Fanning and his uncle John on the concept. Shawn Fanning pulled day-long coding sessions to get the Napster code up and running, while Parker…

£1,500 •From www.chillblast.com VERDICT Stick to its intended purpose of photo and video editing, and this PC is as good as you’ll get without spending a lot more TO USE ITS full title, the Chillblast Fusion Ryzen 2700X Custom Video/Photo Editing PC might have fallen foul to a particularly Byzantine naming, but that doesn’t have to stop it being a good media editing system, a branch of PC design that’s somewhat under-served in the £1,000 to £2,000 bracket. It certainly has the CPU for the job: AMD’s octa-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 2700X. It’s only running at stock clock speeds – a base speed of 3.7GHz with a boost up to 4.3GHz – but together with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, the Fusion Ryzen 2700X Custom put in some excellent performances in…

£110 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT The software needs work, but this plug-and-play mechanical board largely succeeds THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of good mechanical keyboards if you’re willing to spend over £100, such as the Razer BlackWidow Chroma v2 (Shopper 359) or the HyperX Alloy Elite (Shopper 361). The X1 RGB, from Thermaltake, looks to add another to that list. It’s not the sleekest of keyboards; it has a plain plastic finish, and because there’s a lot of empty space around the edges, it looks and feels large. Still, it’s chunky and solid, and the Cherry MX Speed Silver switches are brilliant. These are similar to the popular Cherry MX Reds: they’re smooth, relatively quiet linear switches with a 45cN actuation force, but their actuation distance (how far you need to press…

£210 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Simple and cheap, this mesh system doesn’t have the performance to keep up with the best IT FEELS AS if you can’t move for wireless mesh systems at the moment, with every manufacturer under the sun joining in. The latest system is D-Link with the Covr-C1023, a slightly cheaper option that nets you three satellites for £210, only a little more than the older BT Whole Home Wi-Fi (Shopper 351). As with BT’s system, the D-Link Covr is designed to upgrade your existing router’s Wi-Fi. The idea is that you hook up the first device to your router via Ethernet, and then disable your old wireless. The remaining two satellites then create a wireless mesh network, extending the network throughout your home and, hopefully, eliminating…

£480 • From www.overclockers.co.uk VERDICT This well-built gaming monitor has smarter RGB lighting integration than most IN KEEPING WITH the PC hardware industry’s current obsession with RGB lighting, the MSI Optix MPG27CQ comes with fully customisable LEDs both on the back panel and along the bottom edge. It’s not just static lighting, either: the MPG27CQ is the first monitor to integrate SteelSeries’ GameSense technology, which can interface with certain games (including Minecraft, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) and use the lights to convey information, such as how much health or ammo you’ve got left. It may all sound a bit gimmicky, but at least it’s been tacked on to a serious gaming monitor, with a curved, Quad HD, 27in VA panel running at 144Hz. Its design and build quality…

£199 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Q Acoustics upgrades its excellent 3010 speakers, and the new 3010i deliver a welcome injection of power and poise Q ACOUSTICS HAS earned quite the pedigree across its family of affordable audio gear over the years and, while its soundbars are a firm favourite in Shopper’s testing lab, the freshly released 3010i bookshelf speakers show that it’s not just TV audio the firm excels at. Basically, the 3010i are the new, improved version of the Q Acoustics 3010. These passive bookshelf speakers sit in the middle of Q Acoustics’ range, and promise full-bodied sound from a very compact design. The driver specifications are similar to the outgoing model, partnering a 100mm mid/bass driver with a 25mm ring dome tweeter, but the speaker cabinet has had…

£529 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT A powerful contender for those who prefer a smaller handset, but beware jerky videos and grainy photos YOU’VE GOT TO applaud Sony for almost single-handedly keeping smaller smartphones relevant in a market that’s currently leaning heavily towards bigger and bigger slabs of glass. Last year’s Xperia X1 Compact (Shopper 361) was a dinky 4.6in handset that didn’t scrimp on specs, and just a few months later we have the Xperia XZ2 Compact: another attempt at cramming high-end hardware into something a lot more portable than its peers. Indeed, the XZ2 Compact sits very snugly in the hand. It looks a lot like the regular Xperia XZ2, only smaller, but its slightly curved rear and smoothed-out corners and sides also call to mind the Nokia 8…

£220 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT It improves on its predecessors in nearly every way, but the Ticwatch Pro falls down in one crucial area: performance THE TICWATCH PRO is the latest creation of Chinese company Mobvoi, a relative newcomer to the UK smartwatch market whose previous wearables were launched via a Kickstarter campaign just last year. The Ticwatch E (for ‘Express’) and S (for ‘Sport’) stood out among their premium rivals for one simple reason: they offered much the same features but at a fraction of the price. Both models run Google’s Wear OS, have a built-in optical heart-rate monitor and GPS and let you store music offline, so you can enjoy a few tunes when you go for a run or bike ride without having to take your phone…

01 A smartphone’s operating system (OS) dictates its basic features and which third-party software you can install. There are three main contenders: Apple’s iOS, which is found on the iPhone, Google’s Android, which is used by various handset manufacturers, and Windows Phone, which has few options, especially since Microsoft has discontinued support for its OS. Apple iOS and Google Android both have thousands of apps available. 02 All smartphones have colour screens, but their resolutions vary. Basic models have 1,280x720 pixels, but text can be indistinct. Look for a display that has at least 1,920x1,080 pixels so it’s easier to read text and watch Full HD videos. Don’t worry too much about built-in media players or Office document editors; you can always install apps to replace these with better versions…

01 A basic 24in LCD monitor costs around £100. It will be fine for typical Windows work but is likely to have poor viewing angles, so you’ll need to sit straight on for the best picture quality. Its colour accuracy may not be very good, either. 02 A VGA input lets you use the monitor with any PC, but the quality may not be as good as it is over DVI or HDMI. Both are digital connections and require a compatible graphics card but they avoid the need for digital-to-analogue or analogue-to-digital conversions, which can reduce image quality. A digital connection achieves the best picture automatically, so you won’t have to adjust clock or phase settings as you do with analogue connections. Many DVI and all HDMI connections support HDCP,…

01 Action cameras are typically much smaller than a regular camcorder, as they are designed to be mounted to a bike, board or car, or worn on your person. As the name suggests, they are designed primarily for shooting action footage, but because of their small size they are ideal for strapping on to your pet’s collar or your children’s toys for a different perspective. 02 Even basic action cameras will shoot Full HD video, and many will even shoot 4K, but frame rate is arguably more important than resolution when it comes to action video. Higher frame rates will mean smoother clips, and super-high frame rate videos can be played in slow motion to emphasise exciting shots. Keep an eye out for 4K/30, 4K/60, 1080p/60 and 720p/120 models for…

01 You should be able to buy a decent inkjet printer for less than £40. High-quality printing is possible on such a printer, but it will be slow. The actual print speed of an inkjet can be half the quoted (maximum) speed for text documents, and even slower when printing graphics. Budget inkjet printers such as these are designed only for light use and can be expensive to run. 02 For £80 to £90 you can buy a more capable printer that’s either faster and better built or better at reproducing photos. If documents are your priority, you’ll want a high minimum speed and low print costs. Look for inkjets that can handle all your office media, such as envelopes and labels. 03 If photos are your priority, speed is…

01 As with Intel motherboards, you’ll need to make sure you match an AMD processor with a compatible motherboard. This is relatively simple for AMD hardware, as most of its recent chips use the same AM4 socket, and the most recent secondgeneration Ryzen processors are backwardscompatible with first-generation chipsets, such as the X370 and B350. 02 Budget APU and a minority of Ryzen processors have integrated graphics, so to make use of this, ensure that your motherboard comes with video outputs such as DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. For Ryzen chips that lack integrated graphics, or if you want more graphics power, install a dedicated graphics card into one of your motherboard’s PCI-E x16 slots. This also has the benefit of providing a greater range of video outputs to choose from.…

Chat and Communication Evernote 6.13.13.7425 Store your notes, ideas and plans in the cloud, and synchronise them between computers. Mailbird 2.5.8 A free desktop email client for Windows. Miranda IM 0.10.80 Chat with friends across multiple messaging platforms, including AIM, Facebook, IRC and MSN, all from one simple interface. UPDATED Skype for Windows 8.27.0.85 Make internet voice and video calls for free, and buy credit to make calls to mobiles and landlines. UPDATED Telegram 1.3.10 This free IM app synchronises your conversations across multiple devices, and can spruce up chats with stickers and GIFs. UPDATED WhatsApp Desktop 0.3.225 A free PC and Mac version of the popular messaging app, letting you chat from your desktop. Customisation iolo System Mechanic Free 17.0.1 Speed up your system with iolo’s PC optimisation suite.…

BUDGET MOTOROLA Moto G6/SAMSUNG Galaxy A3 (2017) This is simply too close to call: the Moto G6 and Galaxy A3 are priced about the same, and there’s almost no difference on performance. That said, they each have their specialities; namely, the Galaxy A3’s higher display quality and stupendous battery life, and the Moto G6’s outstanding dual-lens camera and a slightly nicer look. MID-RANGE MOTOROLA Moto G6 Plus Another win for Motorola, the G6 Plus isn’t just a slightly larger Moto G6. It’s laden with impactful upgrades, such as a faster processor, face unlocking, a longer-lasting battery and an even better camera that can record 4K video. For £36 more you could get the LG G6, but the Moto G6 Plus manages to match this on multicore performance, and we prefer…

£120 • From shop.ee.co.uk VERDICT The EE Hawk offers a rare change from the mainstream manufacturers, but is far from budget perfection ALCATEL AND HONOR aren’t the only ones producing Android handsets for less than £150. While the results don’t always work out, the budget end of the market should be taking all the help it can get, considering that the larger manufacturers are clearly not going to have mercy and stop charging upwards of £700 for their best models. It’s more important than ever that the budget end of the market maintains a good assortment of handsets at accessibly low prices. Following on from the modest success of 2015’s Harrier, EE – the British network provider – is once again offering a possible escape from smartphone-induced bankruptcy. Continuing its…

£169 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Mid-range features and a low-end price make this one of 2018’s most tempting smartphones RELEASED IN 2017, the Honor 9 (Shopper 359) was a very fine mid-ranger; it might have been the best around, were it not for the inconvenient timing of the OnePlus 5 and later the OnePlus 5T showing up. More recently, we’ve had the Honor 9 Lite, ostensibly a stripped-down, cheaper alternative to the Honor 9 proper, although with its lack of a home button, and the display filling even more of the front, the Honor 9 Lite could easily be mistaken for an even higher-end model. Nonetheless, at £169, nearly half of what the Honor 9 cost when it was new, this is a true budget smartphone, yet it takes advantage…

£305 • From www.debenhamsplus.com VERDICT The LG G6’s sprawling display makes it a pleasure to use, but it’s not as good as the Galaxy S8 THIS PHABLET’S REPLACEMENT, the LG G7 ThinQ (Shopper 368), recently went on sale, leaving the question of why you’d want to buy last year’s model. The answer is the price: at £305, the G6 costs less than half of what it did when it first arrived, and since it was built to take on the top-end flagships of the time, it presents the opportunity to get premium specs at a mid-range price. The G6’s 5.7in, 2,880x1,440 screen covers an impressive 78.6% of the entire front panel, and because there’s so little bezel space (or materials dedicated to them), it’s easily small enough to use one…

£269 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT A souped-up camera and longer-lasting battery make this a worthy Moto G6 upgrade THERE’S ONE MORE member of the Moto G6 family to consider: the Moto G6 Plus. It’s the most expensive of the lot, but includes the largest display (5.9in), the fastest processor and, to our eyes, the best camera. Design-wise, it’s similar to the standard Moto G6, with Gorilla Glass on both sides and a circular camera housing that protrudes out of the back. The fingerprint reader is kept on the front, below the screen; this unlocks the phone pretty quickly, but you also have the added alternative of facial recognition. You have to manually wake up the Moto G6 Plus before this will work, either by swiping or clicking the power button,…

£189 • From www.debenhamsplus.com VERDICT The small, stylish Galaxy A3 proves that Samsung doesn’t just excel at expensive flagships SAMSUNG’S A3 AND A5 series have been among the most underrated smartphone product lines for years now. When it sometimes felt as though you had a choice between cheap but basic budget devices or prohibitively expensive high-end flagships, the previous Galaxy A3 models in particular have managed to sneak in luxury features while keeping to alluring affordable prices. That’s taken on even further with this latest 2017 edition. For starters, the Galaxy A3 (and its larger, pricier Galaxy A5 brother) borrows the sleek, curved-edge glass front from the flagship Galaxy S range, and it’s a pleasant thing to hold, with its all-metal body and clean, 7.9mm-thin chamfered edges sitting comfortably in…

£99 • From shop.vodafone.co.uk VERDICT Plodding and poorly constructed, the Smart N9 is an uncharacteristic miss from Vodafone VODAFONE HAS A pretty admirable track record for dirt-cheap smartphones, including last year’s Smart N8 (Shopper 356), which was an awful lot of phone for just £85. Its replacement, the Smart N9, is a little more expensive, but brings with it a host of changes. Not all, sadly, are for the better. Despite adopting an almost flagship-like design, with a glass back and edge-to-edge display, the Smart N9 somehow feels worse in the hand; this is partly to do with the horrible, tacky ribbed power button, and partly with how the slick texture of the glass just makes the whole thing easier to drop (not to mention easier to pick up fingerprints,…

Viewing old teletext pages is one thing. Discovering you can access new content produced daily today, however, is something else entirely. But with a Raspberry Pi and a small amount of tinkering, you can access a service called Teefax, which launched in the UK in 2016 and already has a large number of nostalgic fans. Created by a small band of geeks headed by Peter Kwan, who used to work for Teletext as an engineer, it is very much the real deal. The pages are downloaded from a central server and sent to an old CRT television via the Raspberry Pi’s Composite output. From there, you’re able to tap in the numbers on a remote controller, sit back and enjoy. A major breakthrough came courtesy of Alistair Buxton, who had…

Send your problems to businesshelp@computershopper.co.uk Get to the point I’ve a load of records in Excel that I’m bringing in to Word for a mailmerge. My problem is that the numbers don’t keep their correct formats in terms of being shown as currency and with the right number of decimal places when they’re merged with the Word document. How can I make Word respect my formatting? Sue Howell You need to add formatting codes to your mailmerge fields in your Word document. To do this, edit the merge document before completing the merge operation. Right-click on the fields that are not displaying properly, and choose Edit Field from the context menu that appears. In the dialog that appears next, click on the button labelled Field Codes at the bottom left…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Sold a PUP? I read with interest ‘The 31 ways to super speed your PC’ (Shopper 367), in which you recommend using iObit Uninstaller. I have used this program (the paid-for version) as it was recommended by its stablemate – Advanced SystemCare (ASC), available in your free software selection (see page 77) – in a previous reincarnation of boosting your computer speed. I used them for a few years but started to lose faith as ASC kept saying I should download ‘Driver Booster’, which I did – the free version. I ran the program regularly but found it said drivers it allegedly updated were shown as out of date, and if I bought the upgrade it could update other drivers. ASC also kept stating I should use iObit Uninstaller…

I WAS TESTING out features on a Netgear router, and happened to enable both the guest network and the Circle parental controls at the same time. Something strange started to happen: the Circle app on my phone buzzed at odd points in the day, warning there was a new device on the network, such as Paulasiphone. Not knowing anyone called Paula, I was a little worried. Had my Wi-Fi password been hacked and were people using my bandwidth for free? Apparently not. There was something else going on: an open guest network. The default Netgear guest network has no security on it and is called Netgear-Guest. Given how popular Netgear routers are, there are bound to be a lot of people that have connected to a network called this in…

For the wallet Choosing a case for a DIY PC build can put you in a tricky spot: it’s probably going to be one of the cheaper individual parts, hence a temptation to skimp. But go too basic and you’ll end up with an ugly system, which puts hard limits on certain future upgrades. The Thermaltake Versa H18, however, makes the £39 outlay stretch pretty far. It’s a well-constructed, smart-looking chassis and can be fitted with all manner of cooling and storage hardware. It can only take microATX and Mini-ITX motherboards, but for compact builds it’s a good way to save your budget for the CPU or graphics card. (Page 28) For the shelf You can tell something’s gone wrong when the pricier, supposedly higher-end member of a tech product…

Canada Patent trolling Apple was ordered by a US judge to pay WiLan $145m in damages for infringing two patents held by the Canadian company. WiLan used to make wireless broadband tech but moved to license out its patent portfolio instead. When it got wind that Apple was using two of them without paying the licensing fees, the firm took up the issue with a court in San Diego. The court ruled in WiLan’s favour, though Apple rejects claims of patent infringement and plans to appeal the decision. Ukraine Hackers whacked Three Ukrainian hackers from the cyber crime group FIN7 have been arrested in a joint effort by the US Department of Justice and European law enforcement agencies. Dmytro Fedorov, 44, Fedir Hladyr, 33, and Andrii Kopakov, 30, were charged…

£1,000 • From www.currys.co.uk VERDICT One of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered laptops showcases both its limitations and its potential THIS IS NOT simply another laptop review. It’s a review of what could represent a huge change in the direction of laptop and 2-in-1 design; a moment that, when we look back in years to come, we’ll be able to say, ‘That’s when everything changed’. Not that you’d believe it just by looking at the HP Envy x2. Outwardly, it’s just another Windows 10 2-in-1 with a keyboard cover and stylus, just like all the others. Except this is anything but. Instead of an Intel or AMD processor, the Envy x2 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, the same chip as many of 2017’s flagship smartphones, such as the OnePlus 5, OnePlus…

£1,699 • From www.pcspecialist.co.uk VERDICT A plush PC that values versatility over the very best performance SHINY AND EXPENSIVE, the Vulcan Elite S is a reminder of what PC luxury can look like without tipping into outright ridiculousness. Everything save for the Wi-Fi antenna is housed inside an enormous Cooler Master MasterCase H500M chassis, with tempered glass side panels and twin 200mm intake fans, and the whole system is dripping with RGB LEDs, from the fans and motherboard to the RAM sticks and AIO watercooler pump. The key internals are all high end: there’s a hexa-core Intel Core i7-8700K processor, an 8GB GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Even if it’s not all quite top of the range – the CPU is only running at…

£90 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT With its smart hinged design, the Unimouse’s balance of comfort and customisation is worth paying for GENERALLY, THE BEST way to deal with computing-induced injuries such as RSI is to take a preventative approach: set up your desk comfortably, and perform regular stretches and wrist exercises. However, for the vulnerable (or already afflicted), there are vertical mice. These flip the buttons and scroll wheel up and to the side, so your hand rests vertically instead of horizontally, a position that’s friendlier to the bones and muscles in your wrist and forearm. Contour’s Unimouse takes this concept and combines it with another tenet of ergonomic design: adjustability. It’s split into two halves, with the top half – where you rest your hand – on a hinge.…

£148 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT If you need to print, copy, scan and fax A3 documents, Epson’s WorkForce WF-710DWF has you covered THERE WILL BE a moment, after a long day, when you’ll stop believing that Epson’s WorkForce WF-7710DWF is a big, A3-capable multifunction peripheral (MFP), and start thinking you’ve shrunk. It’s exactly like a scaled up version of a regular inkjet MFP, with an A3-capable scanner, an A3+-capable printer, and a big colour touchscreen with chunky buttons. Happily, this Alice in Wonderland growth hasn’t taken out any useful features: the WF-7710DWF can connect to a wired or wireless network, and print, scan, copy and fax single or double-sided (duplex) A3 documents. With support for the cloud and mobile devices, and a USB port for walk-up scans or prints, it’s…

£2,279 • From www.ultrabooks.com VERDICT A large, high-quality screen in a genuinely portable package makes the LG Gram a hit EVEN THE FINEST big-screened laptops can look and feel like bulky beasts, at least next to their 13in counterparts. Take the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 (Shopper 368), for example: it’s an excellent convertible, but at 2kg it’s far from ideal for lugging on the daily commute. The 1.1kg LG Gram, however, would appear to buck this trend. This conventional clamshell-style laptop, finally available in the UK months after launching abroad, is almost half the weight of Dell’s 2-in-1 but still comes packed with a Full HD, touch-enabled 15.6in display, plus high-end internals including an Intel Core i7-8550U processor. MAKING LIGHT WORK Simply put, no other 15.6in laptop is this portable,…

£349 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT An unusual but brilliant set of headphones with unique sound personalisation capabilities EVEN IN THE crowded, competitive world of headphones, the Nuraphone G2 manage to stand out: they’re quite possibly the weirdest pair of over-ears we’ve ever used, but are also some of the best-sounding. That weirdness comes from how they sit both on and in your ears. Inside the cups are a pair of mushroom-like protuberances, which play the high mids and treble sounds, while the bass and lower mids are played through a larger driver in each ear cup. What’s more, these two drivers use what the manufacturer calls ‘immersion’; in effect, haptic feedback that vibrates the outer body of the earcups to reinforce the bass. These headphones are also different in the…

£599 • From www.landroverexplore.co.uk VERDICT Ultra-ruggedness bumps up against underwhelming performance in Land Rover’s outdoorsy smartphone SMARTPHONES ARE FOREVER getting slimmer, lighter and faster, but while many have also some level of waterproofing or dust resistance, but there aren’t many devices that are truly rugged. Land Rover – yes, that one – aims to solve this problem with the Explore, a phone “created for the outdoors”. As its name suggests, the phone has exploration at its heart. It’s a device you take with you when hiking, mountain biking, kayaking or camping, and it promises not only to help you navigate your surroundings, but to keep going for days at a time without needing to be charged. It’s also built to withstand drops, heat, cold and full immersion in water (including…

01 A basic PC costing around £350 will be able to run everyday office, multimedia and education software and will easily cope with surfing the internet. It might even be able to run some modern games. Many PCs can be sold either with or without a monitor. If you don’t like the display the manufacturer is offering, you can always use your current one, or buy another one separately. 02 If you want to play games, you’ll have to upgrade the graphics card. Budget cards such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 will cope well with many 3D games, but to play the latest 3D games smoothly (and enjoy the best-quality graphics) it’s worth upgrading to a more powerful card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. 03 All modern…

01 All tablets rely on an operating system (OS) to run apps. You have three main choices: Apple’s iOS, which runs on the iPad; Android, which Google licenses to various manufacturers; and Windows 10, which has become common in hybrid tablets and convertibles. If you own an Apple or Google smartphone, you can download your apps, music and so on to a tablet that runs the same OS, so it makes sense to stick with a compatible device. 02 It’s important to pick a tablet that has a good-quality, high-resolution screen. Many budget tablets have 1,280x800-resolution displays, but better tablets have Full HD 1,920x1,080 panels, and we’re starting to see tablets that have even higher screen resolutions. Some are as high as 2,560x1,600 or even 4K. Entry-level tablets typically use…

01 A 32in Full HD TV costs around £200, but premium larger 4K models can be get closer to £2,000. TVs look much smaller in the shop than in your home, so measure the space available before you buy. Curved TVs are becoming increasingly more common, but bear in mind that these typically take up more floor space than a traditional flat set. 02 A 1,920x1,080-resolution TV can display a 1080p image. You can still buy TVs with a 720p (1,366x768) resolution, but they’re no cheaper and the image won’t be as sharp. 3,840x2,560 Ultra HD resolution, or 4K, TVs are finally available at reasonable prices, although you’ll still pay a premium for one over a 1080p model. 03 Consider the number of inputs you’ll need to connect the rest…

01 Wearable tech can include anything from chest-strap heart-rate monitors to augmented reality glasses, but the two most common types are smartwatches and fitness trackers. Both are designed to sit unassumingly on your wrist, and are almost always meant to be used in tandem with a paired smartphone. 02 Smartwatches are typically more complex and expensive, though more closely resemble a traditional wristwatch. You can use them to receive and reply to text messages and emails, quickly check maps and even play games – like a smartphone, most smartwatches allow you to install your own choice of apps. 03 Fitness trackers are much more dedicated to healthy pursuits. Step counters, heart-rate monitors and even sleep tracking are all common, and the data collected is fed back to you so you…

01 Wireless routers each use a number of Wi-Fi standards, so you shouldn’t have any trouble connecting your computer or phone wirelessly if you get an 802.11n or 802.11ac router. Nearly all routers support 802.11n, so even a cheap model should provide decent performance. You can expect a transfer speed of around 40Mbit/s at a distance of 10m from any modern 802.11n router. The very latest routers use the 802.11ac standard, which provides tremendously fast transfer speeds. Some devices still don’t support the 802.11ac standard, so check the specifications before you buy. 02 If you subscribe to an ADSL broadband service, you should buy a wireless router that has a built-in ADSL modem. This will cost more than the equivalent cable router, but it allows you to connect your router…

One question that a lot of people have is this: should you buy your phone outright and opt for a SIM-only deal, or just buy a phone on a contract all in one? The answer depends on how much money you have up front, what you want to achieve and which phone you’re looking at. The key in all circumstances is to look at all the available options and calculate the total cost. To help you, we’ll look at a couple of examples. A BUDGET PHONE Let’s start with the Motorola Moto G6 Play (page 94). If you were to buy this handset on a contract from O2 with 3GB of data, it would cost you £10 up front, then £25 a month for 24 months in total. The breakdown…

£70 • From www.argos.co.uk VERDICT Android Go can’t save this bargain-bin handset from its poor display and dreadful battery life ALCATEL IS FLOODING the budget handset market in 2018, and the Alcatel 1 is one of the very cheapest, costing just £70. That’s about as much as a night out on the town – but would you want to take it with you? The Alcatel 1 is firmly at the smaller, lighter end of the smartphone scale, measuring 138x66x10mm and weighing 134g. That might sound appealing to fans of compact handsets, especially since Alcatel has found room for a headphone jack, microSD slot and a dual SIM tray, but build quality is suspect at best. The back casing is a scratchy plastic number with a dull, silverish coat, and because…

£100 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT A dirt-cheap phone with camera and performance issues that mean it’s still not worth it HONOR, THE CHINESE manufacturer best known for its winning mid-range devices such as the Honor 8 Pro (Shopper 354) and the Honor View 10 (Shopper 363), is also one of the most prolific players in the low-cost smartphone market. The company comes out with a new device seemingly every couple of months, and the new Honor 7S is the cheapest yet, costing just £100. At first glance the Honor 7S looks like a much more expensive phone, thanks to the 5.45in, 18:9 display that takes up most of the front of the case. With a resolution of 1,440x720, it’s not the sharpest screen in town, but it’s perfectly usable, and…

£200 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The HTC Desire 12+ looks fantastic, but still fails to stand out from better handsets JUST BECAUSE A budget phone will be limited to less powerful internals doesn’t mean that it can’t look like a premium device on the outside. That’s exactly the case with the HTC Desire 12+, which shares a similar overall design to HTC’s latest flagship phone, the U12+ (Shopper 368). As a result, the Desire 12+ is a greatlooking smartphone. The purple model we were sent (there’s also a black version) is classy in general, but there’s one problem: it attracts fingerprints like crazy, mainly on the acrylic backplate. Still, if you’re someone who is prone to dropping a phone, you’ll be pleased to know that the Desire 12+ won’t shatter…

£200 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Moto G6 is a robust and affordable handset with a fantastic camera THE MOTO G series has mostly gone from strength to strength over the years, but disaster struck in 2017 when the Moto G5 (Shopper 353) failed to significantly improve on its excellent predecessor. An updated redux, the Moto G5S (Shopper 360) put Motorola back on track, but it’s taken the latest Moto G6 to fully re-establish the series’ position as the champion of the budget smartphone market. For starters, this is one seriously goodlooking smartphone, and with Gorilla Glass 3 on both the front and back, it’s both shatter-resistant and easy to clean. Curved edges, a colour-matched chromefinish frame and a circular camera housing that gleams like an expensive watch finish off…

£229 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT Nokia continues its comeback with this potent, all-metal budget phone WHETHER YOU CALL it the Nokia 6, the Nokia 6.1 (as is printed on the box) or the Nokia 6 (2018) (as most others do), the first thing to know about this handset is that it sits near the bottom of Nokia’s newly refreshed smartphone range. That’s above the nostalgiabaiting Nokia 8110 4G, but well below the flagship Nokia 8 Sirocco. Still, it’s no cut-rate plastic slab. The new Nokia 6 is crafted from a single piece of aluminium and finished in two-tone anodised paint, with either a copper or silver trim around the sides and surrounding the rear camera module – and it looks very swish indeed. DRYING WISH It’s solidly built, too, and…

£142 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT A wonderful all-rounder with a fresh price cut, the Galaxy J5 is a budget success story FIRST, A WORD of warning about this particular Samsung Galaxy J5: it’s recently plummeted in price, and is currently sitting at £142 after launching last year at an RRP of £249. That sounds great (and in all the obvious ways, it is), but combined with the fact that this phone is a year old, it’s a sign that a replacement will be on the way very soon. Still, it’s unlikely that any 2018 Galaxy J5 would go on sale at as low a price as this, and the 2017 model still stands up to scrutiny, so it’s worth keeping an eye on at the very least. FLAT TRICK Fittingly,…

Send your problems to help@computershopper.co.uk Printer wonderland I need to buy a new printer for my small home office, but I’m a bit baffled about what to get. I need colour prints and decent mono performance, and I definitely need double-sided printing. I don’t print in particularly big quantities, but the printing I do tends to be concentrated into a week or so every month, so my printer might be left unused for a few weeks at a time; I’ve heard that inkjets can dry out in those kinds of circumstances. I’m flexible about buying something that’s either low cost or cheap to run, although obviously both would be best. Can you suggest something? Antonia Adams The first question to answer is whether you need an inkjet or a laser…

Death of a legend I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of the industrial designer Rick Dickinson (Shopper 367). This would be a great opportunity to celebrate Rick’s contribution to British computer design (and later, industrial design in general) with a proper article. As he said in an interview, “Sinclair products were born out of staggering innovation and clever shortcuts to get things into ever smaller packages at lower costs”. He was a vital part of that process, with some very clever design solutions. A couple of years ago I emailed Rick and told him that my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, followed by a Spectrum 48k, then a Spectrum 48k+, then a Spectrum +2. He took the time to reply and said that many people in…

Roland Moore-Colyer RAVES AS A TECH fan and journalist, the very latest high-end tech is a tantalising prospect. And I’m lucky enough to get my hands on some of the best flagship smartphones, laptops and gear available. But recently I’ve been changing my mind. Messing around with the latest gadgets is great, but high-end tech is losing its appeal. That’s thanks to just how good a lot of mid-range tech is these days. Take Samsung’s Note 9 (page 14): it offers the very best in smartphone tech the South Korean electronics giant can offer. It’s more of everything that made previous Galaxy and Note phones special, but it pushes dangerously close to the £1,000 mark; that’s a lot of notes for a Note device that will be out of date…

Ripping benchmarks AMD’s new Threadripper 2990WX CPU is putting its 32 cores to work, claiming the highest ever Cinebench R15 score of 7,618, beating the 5,828 of Intel’s Core i9-7980XE Glorious graphics Nvidia finally took the covers off its next-generation graphics architecture, dubbed Turing, and showed how ray-tracing rendering can make graphics and CGI scenes look extremely realistic ARM arming laptops CPU designer ARM’s processor roadmap promises powerful but energy-efficient chipsets for laptops that could seriously challenge Intel and AMD Tax collectors Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is proposing a windfall tax on tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook to pay for public interest journalism…

GOOGLE HAS FALLEN into hot water after it was found that the search engine giant will track you even when you’ve told it not to. If you turn off Location History, your location data is still recorded and stored in a section of your account called My Activity. If you’re left scratching your head as to why turning off Location History doesn’t obscure your location from Google entirely, the answer is simple: Google uses your location for its other apps and services, and these entities automatically store your time-stamped location data without asking. Google is ostensibly trying to be useful, although it’s well known that such data is valuable to the firm’s advertisers. The problematic practice was first unearthed by researcher K Shankari of the University of California, Berkeley, who…

“This is the dark side of technological revolutions and that dark side has always been there” Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, foresees large-scale job losses and a rise in inequality due to AI “Democracy is at risk and now is the time to act” An MPs’ report expresses concern over the spread of fake news affecting politics “Policing isn’t meant to be a free-for-all, where they can make up their own rules as they go along” Millie Graham Wood, solicitor at Privacy International, isn’t a fan of police surveillance tech “If someone, supervillain or not, were to abuse vulnerabilities like the ones we documented in smart city systems, the effects could range from inconvenient to catastrophic” IBM’s Daniel Crowley warns of smart city dangers “Simply, many don’t…

£600 •From www.overclockers.co.uk VERDICT Some aspects are lacking, but it’s hard to get this much gaming performance for so little cash THIS IS THE second £600 gaming system we’ve seen from Overclockers in a few months, following the Kinetic Z3 (Shopper 365). That was a decent budget PC but failed to excel in any particular way, especially when you can get the Mesh Ryzen Gaming PC – CS (Shopper 364) instead. This costs £49 more but has a massively more powerful Ryzen 5 2600 CPU and a 120GB SSD to complement its hard drive; typically, £600 will only yield entry-level chips and mechanical storage. The Kinetic H1M comes with an Intel Core i3-8100, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk; if anything, a downgrade on the Kinetic Z3, which…

£39 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT While it doesn’t entirely escape budget limitations, the Versa H18 is very capable for something so cheap IT’S NICE AND wide, almost entirely built out of metal, includes a PSU shroud for tidiness and can be fitted with a good-sized side window: almost immediately, the Versa H18 positions itself as a PC case for those who want more from their budget components than the usual basic, plasticky fare. Being a mini-tower, it’s still limited to builds using either microATX or Mini-ITX motherboards, but it’s not so tight inside that only the base essentials will fit. CPU cooler clearance comes in at a very respectable 155m, and you can use graphics cards up to 350mm in length. That’s assuming you don’t have any fans or radiators…

£63 • From www.lambda-tek.com VERDICT Nippy and affordable, the SX950U is a sensible SATA SSD even if it isn’t the absolute best ADATA IS PRESENTING this 2.5in SSD as a PC gaming aid, albeit in very general terms – which is unsurprising, considering that the type of storage drive you use has no bearing on things such as frame rates or latency in online games. It won’t give you an advantage, in other words, but then there are game-specific quality of life improvements that come with switching from a hard disk to an SSD. Load times are shorter, for instance, so you can spend more time playing and less time staring at progress bars, and a faster drive can also reduce the ‘hitching’ effect sometimes seen in open world games:…

£215 • From www.uk-insight.com VERDICT The 16:10 X24P1 is a great office monitor, thanks to its stand and accurate IPS panel THERE ARE PLENTY of monitors that are aimed at the everyday consumer, but not many are designed for businesses. AOC has a strong presence in the business industry and is renowned for tailoring its products for that market. The company’s latest iteration is the X24P1, a monitor that runs at an aspect ratio of 16:10, a step up from more common 16:9 monitors. If you’re an office worker, particularly if you work with spreadsheets, you’ll find that the squarer display of a 16:10 monitor can result in better productivity, simply because you can fit more windows or spreadsheet cells on a page without having to click or scroll between…

£6,209 • From www.apple.com/uk VERDICT It’s eye-wateringly expensive, but this is the most potent professional laptop around WE’VE REVIEWED A lot of expensive laptops in these pages, but none has reached the lofty heights of this, the top-spec version of Apple’s latest 15in MacBook Pro: it’s yours for the princely sum of £6,209. For that, you get a six-core 2.9GHz Intel Core i9-8950HK CPU, 32GB of DDR4 RAM and a discrete Radeon Pro 560X graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM. This spec also includes an immense 4TB SSD, which alone adds around £3,000 to the base price – and even the most basic spec is £2,349, so it’s not like there’s much of an entry-level version. Our review model is quite simply the most powerful laptop Apple has ever…

£400 • From uk.jbl.com VERDICT JBL has crafted a big, booming speaker that’s ideal for outdoor gatherings, but some sound quality has been lost in the process FOR MANY MUSIC fans, boomboxes were among the coolest things you could own back in the 1990s. Nowadays, fashion has drastically changed, but JBL is seeking to bring back that old-school vibe (at least to a degree) with its Bluetooth-enabled Boombox speaker; it even has a built-in handle to help you hoist it on to your shoulders. Alas, unlike the ghetto blasters of yesteryear, the JBL Boombox is not covered with knobs and ostentatious grilles; its name might be designed with a small nod to the past, but its roughly cylindrical shape, circular side-mounted passive drivers and tough nylon fabric coverings contribute to…

£229 • From www.johnlewis.com VERDICT Brilliant but expensive, the Nest Hello is the most intelligent video doorbell around VIDEO DOORBELLS SEEM to be the next big thing in smart home tech. With the concept popularised by Ring’s aptly named Video Doorbell range, their use among security-focused homeowners has skyrocketed in recent times. The idea behind the Nest Hello is similar to that of Ring’s products: it’s a doorbell with a camera, microphone and speaker embedded in it, and connects to your home Wi-Fi network. This allows you to see who’s at the door through a smartphone app, record clips of comings and goings automatically, and even talk to people who come to the door when you’re not in, via an integrated speaker and microphone. ABSOLUTE POWER Unlike its closest competitor,…

01 A basic laptop costing around £300 will run everyday office, multimedia and education software, but it won’t be suitable for 3D gaming or processor-intensive tasks such as video editing. Many laptops at this price have a 15.6in screen and weigh over 2kg, so they’re best used around the house and for occasional journeys. 02 If you want to play modern games, you’ll need a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060M. Good gaming laptops tend to have large 15.6 or 17in screens and weigh around 3kg, so they’re best suited to use at home. 03 If you want a laptop that you can take everywhere, look for a model that weighs less than 2kg. For the best portability, buy one that has a…

01 If you’re ready to step beyond the basic controls of a compact camera, or you want greater flexibility than an ultra-zoom can offer, a compact system camera (CSC) is the next logical upgrade. With interchangeable lenses, manual controls and stellar image quality, these cameras give proper digital SLRs a run for their money. 02 There are three competing types of CSC mount, and the one you buy determines the number of compatible lenses and accessories you have available. Samsung’s NX-mount is arguably the most limited in terms of lens selection, and the company has confirmed that it’s shutting down its European camera business, so it’s best to avoid these altogether if possible. Sony’s E-Mount has a slightly wider range, but Micro Four Thirds offers the widest variety. Both Panasonic…

01 Bluetooth speakers come in all shapes and sizes, so you’ll need to decide what you want to do with the speaker before you buy. If you don’t plan to take your music outdoors or around the house, look for a wired speaker. These are typically cheaper than speakers with built-in batteries. If you do want a portable speaker, however, pay particular attention to how much it weighs. Ruggedised models should be able to survive accidental drops, water spills and unexpected rain showers. 02 Many of the cheapest Bluetooth speakers use the lossy A2DP Bluetooth protocol, which is prone to compressing your music and discarding detail compared with the original recording. It’s hard to tell the difference when listening to pocket-sized speakers, but if you’re looking for a speaker to…

01 A smart thermostat can save you a lot of money by intelligently controlling your heating. Most smart heating devices are designed to be used with hot water central heating systems, with the boiler directly controlled by the system. These typically require a relay to be wired into your boiler, with a wireless thermostat giving you direct control. Smartphone apps then tie into the system to give you remote control. While it’s possible to fit controls yourself, you may want to pay an experienced plumber to do the job: expect to pay around £150 for a typical installation. If you have electric heating, there are very few choices, and the big names (Nest, Honeywell and so on) do not directly support these systems. 02 Want smart hot water control? If…

01 A basic 1TB internal hard disk should cost around £40. This will be fast enough for general use and will provide enough storage for most users. Make sure the hard disk you choose has the appropriate interface type for your PC. Most hard disks and solid-state drives (SSDs) use the SATA3 interface, which enables faster speeds than the older SATA2. Pretty much every motherboard released in recent years will have multiple SATA3 ports, allowing you to connect several storage drives at once. 02 SSDs can make the most of SATA3’s high bandwidth for fast file transfers. They use flash memory similar to that found in USB flash drives, and although they tend to provide less capacity than mechanical hard disks, they’re significantly faster. More expensive SSDs use the NVMe…

£99 • From www.argos.co.uk VERDICT It’s a mixed bag overall, but the 3V has a few strong points that make it worth a look ON PAPER, THE Alcatel 3V doesn’t sound like much more of an exciting smartphone than the Alcatel 1: it’s not as ultra-cheap as some budget phones, but it doesn’t have the specs to compete with top dogs such as the Motorola Moto G6. It’s stuck somewhere in the middle, and it’s a middling phone. It does, to be fair, look rather sleek: its 6in, 18:9 display fills out the body a lot better than the Alcatel 1 does, and while it weighs an unremarkable 155g, it is only a svelte 8mm thin. GRIME WAVE That said, the sides are made from cheapfeeling plastic, while the glassy,…

£200 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Honor 7X is the cheapest big-screened smartphone, and the rest of it isn’t half bad either THE HONOR 6X (Shopper 351) was one of 2017’s big surprises, offering a dual 12-megapixel camera, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, a snappy Kirin 655 processor and a Full HD, 5.5in display, all for the ludicrously cheap price of £225. With such a tough act to follow, the Honor 7X was always going to have its work cut out, but it looks to be even better. Honor has squeezed in a flagship-style, edge-to-edge display, and since it’s been out for a few months already, the price has fallen from £260 to a bargain £200. That puts it among the cheapest edge-to-edge smartphones around, putting even the famously good-value OnePlus…

£180 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The P Smart is a well-made smartphone, though its rivals offer more and may even cost less THE HUAWEI P Smart took its time coming to the UK, finally being released in spring 2018 after being announced all the way back in 2017. Not that we weren’t happy to wait; it was an inexpensive 18:9 aspect ratio smartphone, a rare beast at the time. What’s more, it’s become even cheaper in the months since launch: originally, the dual-SIM model we reviewed would set you back £230. Now it’s just £180, and the single-SIM version is even less at £170. It’s also a nice reminder of how far sub-£200 phones have come in terms of design. Long gone are the days of ugly bricks; the P…

£150 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT An impressive display, good battery life and decent camera: the Moto G6 Play is another great budget phone from Motorola IT’S FAIRLY EASY to infer that the ‘Plus’ edition of a smartphone might be bigger or have better features than the standard version, but the ‘Play’ moniker is less clear. In this case, the Moto G6 Play has a weaker processor, a lower-resolution display and less luxurious materials (the backplate is made out of plastic) than the Moto G6 – but in exchange, it’s £50 cheaper, and includes a larger 4,000mAh battery, so you can ‘play’ with it for longer. See? Despite the fact that it’s made from plastic (or ‘glass polymer’ in Motorola’s words), the Moto G6 Play is actually pretty attractive. In fact,…

£469 • From www.oneplus.com/uk VERDICT Once again, OnePlus has delivered the best smartphone if you want top-tier features at a sensible price ONEPLUS PHONES HAVE always been about delivering flagship specs and performance at well below average prices, and the OnePlus 6 is no exception: it has Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 845 processor, can be equipped with 6GB or 8GB of RAM, and includes a relatively spacious 128GB of storage, or 256GB if you go for the most expensive £569 model. Admittedly, even the base £469 handset looks out of place among all the budget devices in this group test, but remember that we’re looking for value, not just low prices. And when you consider that the nextcheapest Snapdragon 845 smartphone in the shops is the £599 Sony Xperia XZ2, £469…

£412 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT With its speed and power, the Galaxy S8 is a flagship in all but price ONCE UPON A time the Galaxy S8 would cost you nearly £700. It’s taken the fullness of time and, perhaps more importantly, the arrival of the Galaxy S9 (Shopper 364) to bring things down to a more reasonable level. You probably won’t see the Galaxy S9 get a comparably hefty price cut any time soon, but then one of our criticisms of it was that there wasn’t much to differentiate it from the S8. With this in mind, doesn’t it make a lot more sense to buy the latter? MAGIC MIRROR If you need further convincing, let’s remind ourselves of the Galaxy S8’s many accomplishments, starting with its most standout…

Plenty of startups make a try in healthcare and fail, either because the technology never quite gets there, regulators slap it down, or there’s simply not enough money in an idea. Look at smart contact lenses: they’ve been mooted for years, yet even Google and Novartis pairing up on the idea hasn’t helped it come to fruition, with the project apparently held back because of trouble in the core premise of analysing tears for health conditions. Apps seem an easy win, reminding us to take pills and checking pollution levels for people with asthma, but the NHS was forced to clean up its app library after discovering lots of them leaked data and simply weren’t living up to standards. Then there’s Theranos. This US startup, led by Elizabeth Holmes, pledged…

clive@computershopper.co.uk SMART BULBS CAN be incredibly useful, helping you wake up in the morning or making your home more welcoming when you get back from work. They can even be set to light up intermittently to deter burglars when you’re away, or help your circadian rhythms by changing their hue and brightness throughout the day to match the sun’s movements and your activities. However, as with most smart tech, setting up smart lighting effectively requires a bit of thought and planning. Luckily Computer Shopper is here to help. SMART LIGHTING IS possibly one of the more tangible smart home upgrades you can make, particularly if you’re quite sensitive to light colour and brightness. A smart bulb can be tuned to a specific colour temperature and brightness, but even better it…

ben@computershopper.co.uk VIRTUALLY EVERY DIGITAL camera and smartphone can record 1080p video, and picture quality is often excellent. However, if there’s one thing that instantly separates amateur and professional footage, it’s wobbly camerawork. Professional film crews use a wide array of camera supports to move the camera smoothly through the scene, only occasionally resorting to handheld camerawork as a deliberate stylistic effect, as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield. Video camera stabilisers have been available for amateur filmmakers for a while, but they’ve tended to be either expensive, cumbersome or largely ineffective. However, the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, has pushed the technology forwards and prices down. A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAMERA STABILISATION To understand why stabilisers are needed and how they work, it’s best to start…