Top 5 gadgets you shouldn't buy

I agree:

http://money.aol.com/top5/general/gadgets

1. High Definition DVD Players
2. PlayStation 3
3. 'Draft N' Wireless Routers
4. Windows Vista Operating System
5. 10 Megapixel Digital Camera

i own none of these. am i cool? ;)

Agreed with all of those. Though on 2 and 4 it's a wait and see thing.

they mean "Right now" right?

I don't see why you shouldn't -ever- buy a 10 megapixel camera. One day they will be very cheap and then there is no reason -not- to.


Alrighty. I wasn't going to read it cause I don't have time.. But I went ahead and took a peek to see. Yeah... Was gonna say.. that would be stupid.

Vista should be no 1

Good list. You also need to add on HD Plasmas (or at least the "fake ones".

Is it true that Plasma Screens need about 10 minutes to warm up when turned on before you can view anything?

The sad thing is that within the next year I'll probably own every item on the list. I already own Vista so that's one down.

:)

I'd be happy if I could even afford to buy any of them. :/

I agree with them strongly about PS3, HD-DVD, and Vista. Those cover the range, IMHO, from probably doomed to perhaps salvageable (in that order).

..you all very wrong about PS3...

I'll be surprised if the PS3 ever makes money, or has any good games coming out in the next year.

I expect that some games already being done for it will come out... perhaps late... and some will just run away.

Then the rest will all suck and not use the PS3 to advantage.. and while sony has the moolah to keep it afloat... They might tank their game department when they start REALLY being hit through their music and blu-ray fiascos.

I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled a sega... or just left entirely.

Agree with the list, 2, 4 & 5 especially. PS3 - will be around 3 or 4 years before I 'maybe' consider buying one (slightly less for the Wii). I do own a PS2, that suits my needs.

Which is surprisingly what they said in the article.

What? Didn't you read the article either?

You're right. It's going to be a much bigger flop than anyone anticipates.

I can't believe Jack Tretton made such a ludicrous claim. They really don't know how to handle publicity...at all.

They used too.. It is almost like they are ruining their own business on dolphin.

I managed to buy a Toshiba Laptop for £50 yesterday after swapping an older laptop (about 1.5 years old). Full price aroud £700. My price £250, then cut to £50 with the sale of the ol' HP notebook.

Anyway,It has an Intel Core Duo t2400 processor, 1gb ram, 160gb hard drive (I thought it was 80, then 120, but tis actually 160 after formatting properly) and a Geforce go 7600 256mb PCI Express x16, with a 17" 1480x900 screen.

...And to my shock it actually has a HD-DVD drive. someone, please tell me..

Where the hell am I going to use a HD-DVD drive? :P

To watch HD DVD movies of course!


Yah just like how everyone anticipated the PS2 to flop.

Nobody really thought the PS2 would flop. The press was always biggin' up the PS2 before it's launch and many people were holding out for it, and this was a major factor why the Dreamcast failed. It's believed that if Sega launched the Dreamcast at the same as the PS2, it would have been much more of a success.

On the PS3 front, this time around the press are always slating the PS3 and nobody seems to be waiting it out this time for PS3.

oh, of course! On my laptops 17" screen!

[edit]

Man, I just noticed my £ sign still isn't working. Anyone got any idea as to what that's about?

1. blu-ray dvd burner
2. windows vista
3. a >> skype certificated << headset from microsoft :D
4. 10 MP digital camera
5. a pink plush laptop

AMon: you're kidding right? Mine works straight away and it's ancient too. Gotta get a nice new one soon. I want hi-res, not for movies but to use it as a giant PC monitor of course!

Devils Child great up to 5 but then you had no 5?

:LOL

ok bit of thread necromancy their chiefy ;)

but without looking at how old this thread was i was thinking
dont buy a 10mega pixel camera?
last year i bought a 12x optical zoom 8mp (i think) for £200 ish well sub £300 and its nearest relative is way less now (as is everything else)

i'd avoided going digital for so long
some ccd's were low mega pixesl and the SLR type or 'bridge' with a decent enough 'real camera' zoom were out of my budget
i didnt want a pocket camera i wanted a camera that i could see the stage from even if im half way into the crowd

my 200 lense offered me a good enough range of the glastonbury pryamid stage when stood at the mixing tower (when i was last there in 2002?)
anything i could afford at the time would just be a 'lets take a pic of the bloke next to me cos it cant see very far'

even though i resize down to web friendly i keep the 3000 odd by whatever for when i want to crop out a better image (or if the band in question does as i sometimes send links out to what ive eventually photobucketed and if they request an original sized copy i can supply)

but I finally stummped up to digital cos film was getting too expensive and limiting
i was on APS (the v2000 of the vhs/betamax wars) and had a film scanner oop norf which took about an hour to scan all 40 shots
and found boots were doing one hour photo with CD for a tenner
so my limited myself to 5 rolls Cambridge folk festival set me back £50 ontop of what i paid for the films in the first place

so whatever i paid for my camera now, or a similar model of today, has more than paid for itself in film developing
instead of limiting myself to x ammout of shots per band or the added expence of another £10(+film) CD i found myself confronted with 3 bands on the firsst outing going digital with the net results of damn near 50 shots each

and as SD cards can be rewitten i dont have to worry too much about having too many SD cards knocking around
although i do have half a dozzen or so as most of my toys are SD based
12x optical zoom panasonic camera
pocket fuji camera
zoom h2 podcasting microphone
zoom h4 2 input 4 track
so now i look for card input as a feature as well, i dont want to buy an XD or memory stick if i can avoid it

The PS3 is a decent console... aside from the amount it can increase your electricity bill, and Vista is fine. I know many people who use it as is, without any major hassles.

but as this thread is one year old ...

Vista is not this bad after the service pack 1.

Vista is fine, I have it on my machine, but there is still no reason to buy it if you have XP...

Hehe... I didn't even notice Ginger Tea :)

Speaking of thread necromancy, here is an old writing on why not to buy Draft-N routers: http://www.wifinetnews.com/archives/006507.html

I'll just add that this is like a huge group of monkeys deciding to play with your software when it is still in development. They will inevitably whine and complain when it is actually finished and ready for use, because it will be different. Instead, there is a good chance that improvements will have to be reverted for the sake of customer relations.
I can see something just like that happening with Wireless N gear. Besides which, it is confusing people. Really, it should just be an instant transition when N is ready; right now, there is a reason to have the choice, but the point of a universal standard like this is that there shouldn't need to be a choice!

Heh, 17" screen is still higher def than regular TV :). Just because you already have a 1080 TV

In at number 5 ..

iPhone
======
Contract lock-in, no video recording, integrated battery, 2 megapixel camera, overpriced, and overhyped to hell and back

Why shouldn't I buy a 10mpx digital camera?

Surprised how many of those points have been made irrelevant/have-been-surpassed a year later. o.O
(except #3)

Does anybody have any relatives they really want to see in that high of a resolution?

For your average person, perhaps not.

I on the other hand like the high resolution as it gives me more room to clean/adjust the image up before I scale it down to a more web-friendly size. Also good for working on stuff 300dpi and higher.

The puppy I got sports 12mpx and a 5x optical zoom, and I've never looked back on purchasing it last year.
(aside from its ability to drain a battery like nothing else)

That's an absurd argument.

Canon EOS D-SLRs are mostly 10mpx+. As are the likes of the Nikon D-SLRs.

Anybody who is anywhere near serious about photography wants the best image quality possible. They're the choice of professionals and amateurs alike. Quality is everything.

well for me its not how close i am to the subject but how FAR

12x optical zoom and 3000 odd pixels along and when resized to net friendly looks ok
but when cropped to net friendly look even better
cept mine like most others in the digital world have spaz attacks when the stage lights change
mine really hates purple lights on african skin tones, 9/10 without tripod it cant focus yet is cristal clear on white guys

the first outing of my camera was strawberry fair in cambridge in 2007, i only had the camera for a week or two so had nothing much to show but test shots of my desk and visual periodic table poster, i could read the text till i took the shot and as i wasnt used to the weight and the 12x zoom makes the wobble worse the net results were camera shakes

yet 'the idiot' whom had had his similar camera for 6 months, instead of using the zoom to take all those annoying photos of me eating a crepe damn near stuck it in my face ... and i damn near stuck it where the sun dont shine
i swear hes got a photobucket folder of 20 'tony eating a crepe' photos

and like i said up there, i more than broke my 'film limit' on 3 bands alone, so that totally advocated the migration to digital (not that i was against it, it was the mega pixel, zoom and price ratio i was waiting for)

and who in their right mind would have a digital camera with anything less than 1024*768
you wouldnt have a 32" monitor if all you could display was 640*480

or

i hear george lucas is making the next starwars film on a camera phone

I've been on vista64 ultimate for about 8 months when I built my new computer and am very glad I went with it. when I was first putting it together I did have 1 driver issue but was because I went 64bit... vista is fine and is getting a bad rap although I would of never upgraded an XP machine to it.

blu-ray and ps3... bad advice. I just bought a ps3 for $299 as my blu-ray player(a new sony credit card credits you $100). the ps3 is the best player on the market and fully upgradable to the next spec. now if you're waiting for the 360 bluray addon or console then sure, wait. as a gaming console my 360 is a far more complete product and the interface kicks butt though the thing is as loud as a jet!

movie downloads.... blah... I've yet to see anyone offering full HD downloads and I doubt you will anytime soon.

obviously there are times to wait... like I waited for either bluray or HDDVD to win. I waited until 1080p lcd were available before switching from my tube. I'm waiting for the 3g iPhone just around the corner now... you have to know -what- you're waiting for... if it's just the next good thing then you will always be waiting and rarely enjoying.

Unless you have a family of super models, high resolution isn't necessarily better. This is one of the issues with high def tv. What newscasters were tolerable on standard tv look horrid on high def.

Taking nature shots, is a different story. The higher resolution, the better.

gah!

given the gb size of a normal DVD movie, id hate to see the gb quote of ANY hd movie file

im on a fixed data allowance so im rarely on youtube (after going a bit (iir 60mb) over budget and almost doubling my bill)
im happy with the size of the drwho iplayer streams and it upscales nice enough, although being on mobile broadband i suffer alot of flash spinning access screens (more so last week cos alot tuned in to oggle rose tyler again)
200 odd mb vs 4/500mb for a 30 day download
(if i had the 7gb taffif i would probably dl each one and look for a crack so i could keep it till i got the dvd box set)

edit:


if your windows display is lower than the image and you do a 1:1 zoom you get whatever cropped by the centre (unless otherwise in psp etc with sliders)
if the image is smaller than the resolution and you are doing a slideshow with preview you get borders and not the image scaled to fit ... i sometimes use low res for my slideshows to reduce said border on low res images when using that as a screensaver cos i cant be bothered setting one up for real

so although we are at the point of having 1280*1024 monitors as standard, if/when we start going larger we'll want our images to fit the bill
well 10mpix cameras are already there for you and no doubt when we do get huge*whatever 16:10 displays digital cameras will be even larger

I skipped most of this, so forgive me if i've never read someone's post.

I really don't understand the Playstation 3 and 10 MP camera suggestions though. From what i understand of cameras, there comes a point when the more light sensors you cram onto the image sensor, the picture quality gets slightly fuzzed or what-not, but i'm pretty sure that's not a 10 MP. And that's only really regarding the non SLR cameras. As Gfk points out, surely you want more detail for cropping and zooming an such.

And the Playstation 3. Who cares if it's not making money? Sony will keep it a float. Consoles have never really sold for a great profit anyway. The strength of the games will decide it's future, and there is some pretty decent games out for it already, and it's a pretty good Blu-Ray player built in too. And i believe (just from memory) the consoles are selling pretty well in Japan, alot better than XBox 360's.

Doubley agree about the noise of the Xbox 360. A nightmare to quietly play games at night time :o(

Plus, it's an AOL link, so it must be ropey ;o)

Actually, there is -- Megapixels alone don't tell the entire story. Especially in the point-and-click segment of consumer cameras (ignore the high-end digital SLR's here for a moment) the actual optical image sensor in most of the 10 MPixel models are the exact same size as those in the 7 and 8 Mpixel range...

So when saving it to an image, the majority of the higher megapixel cameras are intrapolating the sensor data and up-scale it, and actually add a bunch of noise in the process.

Many of the 7MPixel models score a lot better in the tests than their bigger brothers.

Now, if they actually start using larger / more expensive image sensors in the consumer cameras that might change, but for the time being you're just paying extra for another meaningless bullet point and noisier up-scaled image...

i had a quick compare with my 2 digital cameras
(not a side by side test mind just looked at the width/height of em both)

the larger one (dont know the mega pixel) 3600odd
the pocket one just over 3000
not much difference in all, i dont think id notice the loss of 600ish horizontal pixels

but i do notice the lack of decent iso range, its only got one (listed as auto) 100
and the lack of decent zoom 4x compared to 12x

so although probably not 10mp id rather (for now) have a huge zoom (saw an out of my budget 18x when shopping for this one) and a good mega pixel than a huge mega pixel and hardly any zoom

ive seen some pro DSLR's go for the price of a car and sometimes thats without a lense!
I dont think my dad would have gone to one of those, he, like myself would probably be happy with a good zoom and good enough mp
he (perhaps) would use RAW more than even the highest jpg setting as he used to do the odd bit of wedding photography and sometimes, just sometimes, people dont want compression artifacts showing up
he was used to seeing uncle derek and clive and aunt sally wondering arround the church with those almost disposable quality pocket film cameras, so he'd always let them worry bout their quality settings and any other duff shots

vista = evil.

Fortunately, my house came complete with a door, which I go out of sometimes (personally I enjoy landscape photography). There is plenty of stuff out there to take pictures of, without resigning myself to hasty snaps of my mum with her hand up to the lens and the dog asleep in front of the gas fire.

(I don't live with my mum - that was for comedy effect)

I have a Miss World in my family, does that count?

Though I only have a 7.1 megapixel camera. :)

Vista isn't that bad, I haven't found anything terribly wrong with it.