Articles on Optics

Nikon Coolpix S570

Review The Nikon Coolpix S570 is a solid camera which looks simple and stylish. The shooter's 28mm wide-angle lens and 5x optical zoom help it stand out from the competition, besides a consistently good photo quality below ISO 400. A new specialty mode for portraits and its pedestrian shooting performance...

Bowers and Wilkins Panorama home theater system

Review Though it's not as recognized for its design aesthetics as Bang & Olufsen, UK firm Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) has been churning out sophisticated speaker designs for years. At the pinnacle of this is the company's insane-looking Nautilus, but with products like the Zeppelin and CM speaker range, they...

Canon Digital Ixus 120 IS

Review A followup of sorts to the Ixus 100 IS, the Canon Digital Ixus 120 IS is another very small, very lightweight 12-megapixel camera. It drops its predecessor's optical viewfinder and in place gets a larger 2.7-inch LCD and 28mm-equivalent lens with a 4x optical zoom. Aside from a couple of minor...

Sharp Aquos LC-46A77M (46-inch LCD)

Review The Sharp Aquos LC-46A77M is second only to the company's flagship LED-backlit LCD TV in its 2009 HDTV lineup. This model offers a substantial dynamic contrast enhancement compared with past-generation Aquos, promising stepped-up picture quality to match its new facade. It also packs a high 100Hz...

Panasonic Viera TH-L37V11S (37-inch LCD)

Review The Panasonic Viera TH-L37V11S may be unusually petite for a flagship LCD TV, but this 37-incher features some of the best visual technologies available under the company's belt. Its key propositions include a premium In-Plane Switching (IPS) Alpha panel, 100Hz frame interpolation engine and...

Olympus Mju Tough-6010

Review In the realm of rugged point-and-shoots, Olympus' name is always one of the first to come to mind. Being an early pioneer in tough cameras, the Japanese firm has one of the world's hardiest consumer-oriented snappers on the market, the Mju Tough-8000. But if you don't dive to great depths and just...

Sharp Aquos LC-40LE700M (40-inch LCD)

Review The Aquos LC-40LE700M is conceived by Sharp to "bridge" the huge price premium between a traditional and an LED-lit LCD TV. To achieve this feat, this 40-incher is stripped bare of all value-added features such as Integrated Digital TV (IDTV), multimedia playback, etc. In fact, what the Japanese...

BlackBerry Bold 9700

Review It's been about a year since the original RIM BlackBerry Bold made its debut, and while it remains a very solid device, it's about time that a flashier, faster model took over the reigns. And that device would be the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700. Not only is it T-Mobile's first 3G BlackBerry, but its...

Brother MFC-990CW

Review The Brother MFC-990CW is an ideal multifunction printer that can truly do it all. For US$230, you get a 4.2-inch touchscreen LCD display, 802.11 b/g wireless networking, a cordless handset with a digital answering machine, automatic duplexing function and Bluetooth connectivity, just to name a few...