Yesterday Olympus showed off its iconic Pen digital camera which had been brought into the digital age. The melding of retro chic and mid-range technology produces a camera which, at £700 and up is surely set to pose relatively few people difficulties when choosing a new digital camera this summer.

The Pen is one of the iconic Olympus models from the late 50s and the Pen-E draws on much of the nostalgia to promote this one. The high price tag is not completely without justification because the Pen E is extremely well made for such a compact camera. The body is made from steel with the outer veneer being aluminium. This not only makes the camera feel sturdy but very heavy.

 
 
Based on the micro 4/3 system, Olympus have made an adaptor so their range of 4/3 system lenses will work on the Pen. The lens photographed above is a "pancake" 17mm (35mm after the crop factor has been taken into account).

Accessories include a viewfinder which our Photography Editor Abir, found to exhibit considerable parallax error. Another annoyance was the LCD screen remaining on while you looked through the viewfinder. One scribe mentioned he could see the screen flickering (something we saw too) and Abir found it distracting. The major design fault with the flash was the centrally mounted bulb and thus increase the opportunity of "red-eye".

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The biggest problem with the Pen-E is the price. Starting at £700, without the viewfinder or flash (the latter of which retails for around £150), it's very hard to see many people shooting with the Pen at this price point.

Asus took the wraps off their latest Lamborghini branded notebook, the VX5. It's a big beast and unsurprisingly costs quite a bit too. Not set to hit the stores until later this summer, the specifications are impressive however. Asus state it will have a Intel quad core processor and be paired with an NVIDIA GT130M graphics chip powering the 16" LED backlit glossy screen.

With space for two hard drives and 4GB of DDR3, it certainly won't be a slouch. The cost however is more Lamborghini than Asus, coming in at £1999 including VAT. However the specifications alone fail to give the complete story, with nice touches all around the machine.

  

  
Although putting the VX5 next to the car isn't the best way to make it look attractive, the small touches on this machine really is nice. The stitched leather on the palm rests is very nice and the ceramic trackpad, although an absolute magnet for fingerprints is also very nice. The overall finish is very commendable, although the unit on show was pre-production.

We had a very short play around with the VX5 and it was nippy, including bootup time. Asus didn't load too much junk on there (with the exception of Norton). We took a real-time video of the VX5 booting up to see how long it took and the number of processes running.

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The VR5 looks the part and isn't too garish. Most will baulk at the asking price but those Lamborghini fans looking for a laptop which was designed with the Revention in mind (quite where the designs meet is up for debate) will have to wait until August.

When it comes to Netbooks, Asus is seen as the benchmark for all others and rightly so, they popularised this format with the launch of the original Eee PC almost two years ago. Now they release their first touchscreen tablet Eee PC, something that may finally proliferate the use of tablet machines. Shown first at this year's CES it finally rucks up to retail outlets at the start of July.


The T91 comes with an 8.9" LED backlit touch screen with 1GB RAM and a combination of storage technologies (a 16GB SSD, a 16GB SD Card and even a 30GB portable hard disk drive, depending on the model you choose). Although CPU specs aren't mentioned, expect it to be Intel's Atom processor. It comes with Windows XP Home, though users can use ASUS' TouchSuite and Widget modes to control the device.

Costing £449 it really can't be classed as a netbook though it does offer the cheapest entry into tablet computing going.

Escape Studios, a well known school specialising in computer graphics announced that they will be offering four 3-day short introduction courses on Maya, Computer Animation, Visual Effects and Introduction to Games for a cut down price of £349 with those who want to take their full course getting a discount. The courses are scheduled to start in August.

Although the games industry, like most is seeing the effects of the current economic climate evidence from this year's E3 goes some way to show that it's far from being down and out. Escape Studios also provides help for those who go through their full courses in getting jobs within the industry. So if you are thinking that working on the games of the future is what you would like to do, Escape may just have the taster course for you.

On Wednesday we finally get the latest installment of the Terminator story, Salvation. After the mixed response of the third film which came out in 2003, a combination of actor Christian Bale and director McG has managed to build up some serious hype to this one. Helped by the excellent, albeit cancelled television show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, this is shaping up to be a good couple of hours worth of entertainment.

We recently got sent some clips from the film and most were the usual action shots which, we've come to expect from the Terminator films. However I picked this one as it really seemed to pique my interest and hopefully yours too. Terminator Salvation opens on Wednesday 3 June.

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In what may not be a huge shock, the founders of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright laws. The trial which has garnered mass media attention finished a while back with the verdict only coming today. The surprising aspect is the sentence dealt out to the four founders. Not only do they have to pay around £2.4 million in fines but have been handed one year jail sentences.

It is fairly clear that this sentence is set to be a deterrent to other sites, however the implications are much more than just a distance shockwave from what can only be called a seismic event in the P2P world. In many ways this has now set the precedent for record companies, film studios and software developers to take on such websites even in traditional "copyright unfriendly" lands such as Sweden.

The Pirate Bay Four are set to appeal their custodial terms and have already said they are not willing (and unable) to pay the fine. Most say that it is unlikely that the website will be shutdown though.

A long time ago the 3DVelocity Folding@Home team was setup and achieved considerable success, at times being in the top 20 of all teams participating in the project. However in recent years it has become somewhat dormant and we've slipped down the rankings.

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project aiming to find out more about how proteins "fold" and gain a better understanding of how this can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and many other cancers. Think of it as a useful incarnation of Seti@Home.

If you wish to take part and donate your spare CPU/GPU or PS3 cycles to the cause, you can download a client from here and join team 11987 when prompted in the client. The team statistics are available here. A forum is also up in our community, Chattershop.

Earlier today VisionRacer a company who caters for gamers with a panchant for driving launched a "driving rig" for the ultimate race experience in your living room. Coming in at £700 for just the seat, it does represent a hefty investment but be prepared to shell out more if you want to mount an LCD screen directly onto the rig.

  

  
The fit and finish of the VisionRacer is very high and the whole shebang looks very much like a quality product. As to whether the wife or girlfriend will approve is another matter but in the middle of a dedicated gaming setup this thing is sure to make your mates lust just a little.

VisionRacer also provide a complete package which includes PlayStation 3, a fully kitted out VisionRacer rig, an LCD screen and a Logitech Driving Force GT wheel for £1700. We'll get more information on which LCD screen is included but expect something in the 26"-32" range.

Justifying a £700 racing seat in the current economic climate may be tough but if you can afford it and are serious about your driving simulators the VisionRacer will already have your attention and rightly so.

Psion, the British company previously known for their PDAs have staked their claim to the use of the term "netbook". Psion did produce a sub-notebook back in 2003 called the NetBook and as we can see it doesn't look to different to the current crop of machines from the likes of Asus et al.

Dell however are making a stand against Psion trying to overturn the supposed patent infringment. On top of that the Texas based computer giant is claiming that Psion are trying to fraudently utilise the patent to gain funds. With other netbook manufacturers more than likely to side with Dell on this, the plucky Brit better have their house in order (one would hope they did their research before trying to bite off more than they could chew).

Maybe mourn isn't the correct verb as many, like myself, thought it was dead well over a decade ago, however today Pioneer announced that it would finally cease production of Laserdisc players. The reason? The reason clearly isn't an ability to meet demand or it's recent loss to Blu-Ray in the format wars. No, it's because no one in their right mind has wasn't to spend money on a format which failed to catch on back in the 80s. According to this article, it was due to the cost of parts required to manufacture the player.

Considering the fact that Laserdisc were usurped by DVDs let alone Blu-Ray (which is being peddled by Pioneer) one has to consider why they didn't come up with the decision to pull the plug on Laserdisc earlier. Farewell Laserdisc, we doubt anyone will miss you too much.

Arriving late to the party, Sony launched their small netbook sized laptops yesterday at a pre-CES event in Las Vegas. Drawing the most attention in what was a relatively drab press conference, the Sony Vaio P Series does seem to be one of the most desirable notebooks to be announced since Apple's MacBook Air.


The 1.4 pound, 8-inch machine will sport an Intel Atom processor, come with either an 80Gb hard drive or a 128Gb SSD unit have Microsoft Vista with an "instant on" Linux interface and be available in five colours (green, red, white and both matte and gloss black). The P Series is well connected too with GPS, 3G (in the US this would be connected to the Verizon network), WiFi, Bluetooth and LAN.

  

The entry level version will retail for around $900 with the SSD version coming in at around $1400.

Although available in the US from the end of this year, Sony representatives were unable to tell us when this will arrive on our shores. Although the State-side model utilises Verizon's network, it won't be sold through their stores, so this doesn't look like a carrier subsidised device.

There seems to be enough features and a decent keyboard/screen in the P Series to shrug off any suggestions of this being an expensive toy, however Sony representatives were keen to point out that the P Series isn't meant for any processor heavy usage - i.e. we're still in netbook territory here. The choice of Vista was put down to it being the current mainstream operating system, a point which is still highly debatable. 

Popular Mechanics lifts the lid on how the film industry is transforming silver screen classics to high definition formats such as Blu-Ray.

Interestingly there doesn't seem to be a one-size fits all to this transformation with painstaking work being carried out on a frame-by-frame basis on some films to not only recreate the director's vison of the film but also to clean up and perfect mistakes from the original. A really informative read about the things you shouldn't notice when watching a film at 1080p.

Last week we heard that Hitachi will team up with Intel to produce solid state drives for the enterprise market. After this we couldn't wait to find out more, so we got in touch with Nick Kyriacou, EMEA Director of Hitachi GST to answer some questions.

The article addresses some concerns with SSD drives in general and we look at other possibilities from the Hitachi stable. It seems SSDs have finally been accepted by a major hard drive manufacturer.