Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

Wouldn’t it be amazing if your stereo could play all the music on your computer? Or play the same music in all the rooms in your house? Or if you could watch the videos you’ve got on your computer on your TV?

If any of this sounds appealing, you should consider buying a wireless media streamer.  These devices use a wireless internet connection to share music and videos between devices including hifis, computers and TVs, and between different rooms.

Although this arrangement might sound tricky to set up, you don’t need a degree in electrical engineering to set up most streaming systems.  Some manufacturers, like Sonos, go out of their ways to make it easy, by selling ‘bundles’ of everything you need to get started, while others design ’single unit’ systems, like the Sony NASSC55PKE

There are two main varieties of media streamer.  The first variety concentrates on music, detecting the music files on your computer and either plugging into your stereo system or speakers to play them.  Audio streamers from the upper end of the market will usually work with a subscription to a music-streaming service like Napster, Spotify or Last.fm (more about these services later).

The other kind streams both audio and video content, and is usually used to display videos saved to your computer hard drive on your TV, or show TV on your computer.  More high-end versions also display your photos on your TV or offer direct access to sites like YouTube.

You may already be familiar with some of the big names in the media streamer area: Sonos multi-room music streaming systems are well-known, as are the Squeezebox range of video streamers and Apple’s Apple TV.

Unfortunately, the variety of different types of streamers on the market means that it’s much harder to decide which streamer to buy than, for example, which TV to buy.

We’ve just added a dedicated media streamers section to Reevoo.com which is a great place to start.  We’ll add in more detail on the different types over the next few weeks and we’ll also be writing some blog posts to guide you through this complicated market.

Family Photos

Be Natural!

Children only sit down to eat food and even then you could do with some superglue on the chair, so don’t make them sit down or do anything they wouldn’t want to. The best way to capture children is in their element – playing! For that reason have some props like bubbles or a favourite football at the ready

The kids Are in Charge!

If you want to capture your child’s attention you’re going to have to let them take you down a peg or two. There are some great perspective tricks you can use to do this such as getting the adult to stand in the distance and lining up your perspective with the horizon so that the child looks bigger than the parent. After one attempt at this, be sure to show the kids the result and they’ll be churning out hundreds of similar ideas begging you to photo them holding a tiny version of Mum in their hands.

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   The above photo is courtesy of Bazoomba_lol on Flickr.

The Whole Family!

Photographs of the whole family this summer will look best when you’re out and about. That’s great because it means you don’t have to worry about lighting. With this in mind use your portrait mode setting on your camera and turn your flash off. Without flash you can really capture the lighting of your surroundings. Take a slightly wider photo so that the location your family are in is obvious. That will make for a much more memorable photo when you look back in years to come.

Once you’ve managed to herd your whole family together, the adults have stopped gossiping and the kids have paused, but briefly, from their mud-slinging competition, you’ve got to make the most of it. Have a joke lined up to make everyone relax. If it is a light hearted comment about someone in the group it will be great as you can press the trigger when everyone looks round and laughs together. Much better than a static ‘all eyes forward’ photo that doesn’t tell much of a story!

About Turn!

Usually when you think of photographing the family you think of what they look like, their faces. Try turning this idea around, literally. Instead of photographing them straight on get them looking at something. If your troopers have spent the day fortifying your beach position with sand castles and moats, make their creation your subject and photograph over your children’s shoulders as they look at what they’ve made. Photographing like this will capture their emotion more than just a normal forward facing head shot and helps to give context which, once again, means the pics will be far more fun to look back at in the future.

The Right Stuff!

Tripod: Almost all digital cameras have a built in timer setting. With a handy Gorilla Pod you can rest your camera, put it on a timer and get yourself in the family portrait too.

Camera: All modern digital compact and SLR cameras will handle portrait photography well in brightly lit situations. Some cameras, such as the Fujifilm Finepix Z10FD come with face detection which help to focus quickly on a tricky subject such as an active child.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7 is a great compact choice. It has HD video recording for when one frame is not enough to capture all the action. It also has a 25mm wide angle lens, great for capturing the whole family, and a powerful 12x optical zoom making it just as versatile for distant photos.

The Sony Alpha 350 is a brilliant entry level DSLR, and with the 18-70mm lens provided it’s great for documenting a whole family holiday. It helps that it’s extremely well priced too!

A full range of cameras with Face Recognition can be viewed here

At Reevoo we’re about more than just reviews. We’re about the whole process of buying and enjoying something cool and new. With that in mind the three resident Category Managers, Jo, Sam and Jon have taken some time to lay out some helpful tips across three different product categories.

Reevoo Washing Machine Buyers Guide

Jo’s Washing Machine guide should help get you out of a spin and into the right shopping cycle with her top 5 tips designed to help you decide which washing machine is the right purchase for you.

For a full guide of the 5 tips, just click play below or check the video out as you shop on the Reevoo washing machine category page itself.

The Tips:

- Plumbing
- Dimensions, Loading and Appearance
- Capacity
- Usage
- Additional Features

The Video:

In the busy and sometimes confusing market of MP3 players Sam’s Top 5 purchasing Tips should be music to your ears:

The Tips:

- How Will I Use It?
- How Much Storage Do I Need?
- Do I Want To Watch Video?
- Watch Out For Battery Life
- Is An iPod the Best Option?

The Video:

For a full, step by step walkthrough of the above tips check out the video below or on the MP3 Player category page on Reevoo.com

Jon’s camera guide walks you through the features and settings that come into play when taking a photograph. The guide should help you decide what type of camera you want to snap up!

The Tips:

- The Sensor
- ISO Settings
- Megapixels
- Aperture
- Shutter Speed
- Exposure

The Video:

As with the other guides Jon’s can be seen on the Digital Camera Category page whilst looking through the compact and SLR camera reviews on Reevoo. If you don’t want to go anywhere just hit play below!

Laptops can be tricky things to purchase. If you want a larger hard drive or more RAM, how much more should you pay? Do you go for well established brands or cheaper newcomers?

Read on to find out what happened when we analysed 900 laptops to answer:
1. How much does a large screen cost vs. a small screen?
2. How much does an extra 100GB of hard drive space or an extra 1000MB (1GB) of RAM cost?
3. Who really makes the best laptops?
4. Should I buy a new model or buy an older model for a cheaper price?

1. How much does a large screen cost vs. a small screen?
Strangely, the size of screen has very little to do with the price of a laptop. Check out the graph below which shows that 17” screens can vary from £235 to £2000! And quite often, 13” and 15” models are the same price as the larger 17” models.

So, when you come to choose a laptop, chose a size that’s right for you. If you want to be able to take it with you wherever you go, go for something that’s small and light but if you will be using your laptop for design work or to watch DVDs, then go for a larger screen size.

Click image to enlarge

2. How much does an extra 100GB of hard drive space cost, or an extra 100MB (1GB) of RAM cost?
It’s quite difficult to split out different features to determine how much they each add on to the price but – and here comes the science – by doing a regression across all the different laptops we know, using the price as the dependent variable and all key factors influencing price as the independent variables, we picked out the coefficient of the size of the hard drive and number of MB RAM to come up with the following:

• An extra 100GB of hard drive space typically costs around £100
• An extra 1000MB (1GB) of RAM costs £70
This isn’t always the case but we’ve noticed that it’s a general trend, using the methodology above.

Take a look at the table below which shows how brands like Sony and Toshiba pack in larger hard drives or more RAM and alter their prices accordingly.

Click image to enlarge

3. When I buy a Sony am I just paying for the brand or are they really better? Who really makes the best laptops?
Different brands excel at different things and focus on different parts of the market so it’s quite difficult to tell which brand is best overall. But we’ve looked at a few factors to help you out:

Customer score vs. price
We’ve looked at the correlation between the average selling price for each brand and their customer score to see if those which impress on performance charge more for their products.
This throws up some interesting results:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see there is some degree of positive correlation between average selling price and average score by brand. So as a broad brush statement, we could say:
Brands that are more expensive tend to get more highly rated by consumers

More importantly however, there are some brands that have significantly higher average scores than others. Namely,
• Asus may not be as well known as some of their illustrious competitors, but their low end products (average selling price of c.£300) are consistently highly rated
• Dell are the next best key manufacturer with a strong mid-range offer
• Sony laptops are also highly rated but at a price! People are prepared to pay more to own a Sony but they seem to perform well and impress consumers.

Brands and features
Different types of laptops suit different types of people, so we’ve looked at how brands perform in a number of key features and picked out the top performers in each feature. We’ve also included the average score across the feature so that you can see how well the top-scoring brand did:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see there is some degree of positive correlation between average selling price and average score by brand. So as a broad brush statement, we could say:
Brands that are more expensive tend to get more highly rated by consumers

More importantly however, there are some brands that have significantly higher average scores than others. Namely,
• Asus may not be as well known as some of their illustrious competitors, but their low end products (average selling price of c.£300) are consistently highly rated
• Dell are the next best key manufacturer with a strong mid-range offer
• Sony laptops are also highly rated, but at a price! People are prepared to pay more to own a Sony but they seem to perform well and impress consumers.

Brands and features
Different types of laptops suit different types of people, so we’ve looked at how brands perform in a number of key features and picked out the top performers in each feature. We’ve also included the average score across the feature so that you can see how well the top-scoring brand did:

• Asus do well to outperform the others in battery life, size and weight and overall rating
• Dell win the award for the best designed laptops
• Sony do best in the performance category and;
• Acer get the prize for the best value for money

4. Should I buy a new model or buy an older model for a cheaper price?
Some shoppers can’t resist getting the latest gadget or gizmo but how much could they save if they waited a few weeks?

Prices for most products will vary according to different retailers and different special offers at launch whereas others will keep their price for years on end – games consoles tend to follow this trend as manufacturers make the real money on games and accessories.

We’ve analysed price trend in thousands of electricals to give you an idea of what a typical price decay curve looks like:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see it doesn’t take long for retailers to start knocking the price of new products! Laptops follow a pretty similar path to other electricals, we’ve included TVs and digital cameras here and as you can see:
• if you buy a laptop around 3 months after it has launched, it will be around 20% cheaper than the launch price
• For most laptop purchases, that’s a saving of nearly £100!

However, after 4 months, prices flatten out so that anything older than 4 months will not save you any more money. You will just end up buying a machine that may have been built using older technology, and is more likely to be replaced with a newer version soon (which impacts resell value, but more importantly will probably leave you pretty annoyed)

So there are all the facts. Hopefully you’ll know what to look out for when you go to buy a laptop but if you’re still having problems, drop us an email at feedback@reevoo.com.

(All data based on H2 2008 figures)