Mid Summer Tech Deals

At the recent summer CeBIT trade show in New York, we were dazzled by some deals hitting the retail market.

Good news for consumers: HP/Compaq brought back the PC pricing wars. It's new S4000J series features Athlon's sturdy XP processor up to 2.0GHz, 266MHz front-side bus, tons of RAM (266MHz), a 40GB Ultra DMA hard drive, 48x CD-ROM, integrated graphics with 4X AGP slot, and 3 PCI slots at a entry price of only $399 (excluding monitor).

For the small office/home office market, Lexmark previewed its new workhorse all-in-one print center (Model No. X6170). It scans, faxes, copies and even prints excellent photo quality prints. The big news this year -- Lexmark has added a multiple page document feeder so you don't have to feed it page by page like you did with the original all-in-one office centers. Lots of functionality for the dollar at $249.

Recordable DVD's continue to pick up pace. Panasonic showcased two DVD recording devices: A $600 set-top DVD recorder--think of it as a TiVo but DVD based, that allows you to record and simultaneously watch your favorite TV shows on DVD.

Also for $900 a DVD based camcorder that records on a 3-inch DVD recordable disk. You can record over a thousand times on DVD disks with more than 2-hours of high quality video on a recordable DVD.

Canon has a new flagship Consumer/Prosumer Powershot camera, the Powershot G5. It's 5 megapixels easily allows you to print stunning 13 x 19 images. The Canon also has a nice feature, a flip out LCD viewfinder, just like you'd find in a high-end camcorder. $899.

Finally, CeBIT shows the launch of the new 802.11g wireless networking standard, It's an upgrade of the existing Wi-Fi 802.11b standard, five times faster networking than the current Wi-Fi standard. This Netgear system is going to retail for under $200 and the nice thing about 802.11g is it's backward compatible with the existing wireless networking so if you add this to your system, all your existing cards will remain the same.