Motorola Moto G4 Play review – CNET

The Good Motorola’s Moto G4 Play is the most affordable phone in the G4 line. It’s splash-resistant, comes loaded with a near stock version of Android 6.0, has great battery life and takes good outdoor photos.

The Bad The G4 Play lags when playing games and taking panoramic photos. The display can be hard to read in direct sunlight and you won’t be able to customize the phone using Motorola’s Moto Maker website.

The Bottom Line If you’re on the hunt for an affordable phone with pretty long battery life, the Motorola Moto G4 Play deserves your attention. But the regular Moto G4 gives you even better features for just a little more cash.

Visit manufacturer site for details.

If the Moto G4 didn’t exist, the stepped-down (and even cheaper) Motorola Moto G4 Play would be the deal of the century. For just $150 (or $100 for Amazon Prime members who submit to Amazon Prime ads, like this), £130 and AU$279, you get a budget phone that’s surprisingly pleasant to use, for a rock-bottom price.

But there is a Moto G4, and it comes with a larger screen, a better camera and a much faster processor. Best yet, it only costs a little more — $50 or £39 — than the G4 Play (it doesn’t sell in Australia, but the G4 Plus does). So for my money, I’d invest a little more and get the G4 over the G4 Play.

That said, the G4 Play is actually a great budget find on its own merit. I never encountered a moment where I thought, “I can’t use this.” The G4 Play is the Toyota Corolla of phones; it has that wonderful balance of price and value to do real-world things like text and email, upload photos and snap pictures of cute little Fifi.

Motorola’s Moto G4 Play in the wild
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The Moto G4 Play is pretty much identical to the Moto G4, just a tad smaller (see how specs compare over the page). Despite having a relatively low 1,280×720-pixel resolution for its 5-inch screen, images and websites looked fairly crisp and sharp. But even with adaptive brightness enabled, you might have trouble reading in the noontime sun.

Canon EOS M5 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

With the EOS M5, Canon takes a step toward offering a mirrorless model that might finally compete with its entry-level dSLRs as well as other interchangeable-lens competitors. The camera has the specs and the features to surpass the EOS Rebel T6s/760D, at roughly the same price. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a tacit acknowledgement that while entry-level dSLRs are still selling, the popular ones are around $600 or less, so it doesn’t matter anymore to Canon if they cut into the next price tier up.

Canon plans to ship the body and a kit with the EF-M 15-45mm f3.5-6.3 IS STM lens in November for $980 and $1,100, respectively. I don’t have non-US pricing for anything yet, but those directly convert to roughly £740/AU$1,310 and £830/AU$1,470. A kit with the EF-M 18-150mm f3.5-6.3 IS STM lens for $1,480 (£1,120, AU$1,980) will follow in December; you’ll be able to buy the 18-150mm lens for $500 (£378, AU$670).

Canon’s new EOS M5 mirrorless looks more…
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That new EF-M 18-150mm lens is a compact substitute for the older 18-135mm IS STM, with a longer maximum focal length of 240mm-equivalent, intended as a general-purpose option for the single-lens customer.

What’s notable

• The sensor. One of the biggest complaints about Canon’s previous mirrorless models (like the M3) has been sluggish performance. Canon incorporates its Dual Pixel CMOS into the M5, the same sensor that’s in the 80D, which should provide much better autofocus speed and tracking performance than the hybrid CMOS in the M3 and T6s/760D. It also facilitates the M5’s finally competitive continuous-shooting rating, 7fps with autofocus and autoexposure, and Canon claims its image quality will match or surpass that of the 80D.
• Image stabilization. With the M5, Canon joins the club of mirrorless manufacturers offering hybrid (optical plus sensor shift) stabilization, with 5-axis compensation.
• Design. It has a far more dSLR-like appearance. This is the first Canon mirrorless to incorporate a built-in electronic viewfinder and a real grip. The touchscreen display tilts down for selfies.
• Features. Canon picks up Olympus’ formerly unique capability of using the back LCD as a touchpad when you use the viewfinder to select autofocus areas. Like some of Nikon’s cameras, it also adds Bluetooth for maintaining a persistent low-energy connection between the camera and your phone, in order to quickly wake Wi-Fi for remote shooting and file transfers.

My take

It’s nice to see Canon finally taking mirrorless seriously and the M5 looks like the company’s first real contender in that market.

But it still has to face the similarly priced Sony A6300, which has several advantages, including faster continuous shooting with a sophisticated autofocus system, the ability to shoot 4K video, better battery life, a more compact body and support for a larger selection of lenses without requiring an adapter. However, Canon’s hybrid optical stabilization system does get a win over the A6300; Sony stuck with optical-only for that camera.

Comparative specs

Epson FastFoto FF-640 review – CNET

The Good The FastFoto is a fast scanner with that streamlines the process of digitizing your printed photos. It handles mixed sizes in a stack quite well.

The Bad The scanner can’t handle 1970s-era Polaroids, and the software makes the mistake of equating fewer features with simplicity, making the system a lot less useful than it could be.

The Bottom Line The Epson FastFoto does what it sets out to do — lets you quickly scan your masses of old print photos — but some folks will find it an expensive and incomplete solution.

Visit manufacturer site for details.

Anyone born before digital photography became popular — oh, let’s round it to the year 2000 — or who has parents or grandparents who became adults during the 20th century knows the pain of trying to do something, anything, with the surfeit of physical photos accumulated over time. If they’re anything like my family, they’ve been added to and removed from albums, secreted in tons of locations around the house, and scattered across multiple family members. The more organized actually wrote notes on the back of each one. Scanning them with a flatbed scanner is insanely tedious, and most feeders can’t handle stacks of photos in varying sizes.

So Epson’s taken its decades of scanner know-how and created a scanner designed specifically for the — shall we say, “technologically uninterested” — to digitize the reams of photos they have. The $650 FastFoto (about £495, AU$870, directly converted) can scan a stack of up to 30 photos, in different sizes ranging from tiny 2×2-inch (51x51mm) up through 8.5×120-inch (22x 305cm) panoramas. (That expansive dimension applies only to Windows users. Mac folks will have to make do with 8.5×14.5 inches.) It also has a second scanner inside to scan the backs of the photos to capture notes, identification and processing-date stamps, which can be very useful.

Epson FastFoto adds some twists to photo…
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And it’s pretty fast: I timed it at 1.6 seconds per photo for a 4×6 at 300 dpi, and at 4.2 seconds per photo at 600 dpi. That doesn’t include the pause during processing, though.

As intended, the scanner’s easy to set up and use. You peel off a lot of tape and attach the output tray, go through the step-by-step software installation, and connect to your computer via USB. There are a handful of configuration steps to go through, such as defining what applications launch when you press the buttons on the front, choosing resolution, how to handle scans of the back, and what kind of enhancements to perform automatically.

After you load up a stack of photos, you press a button on the front and it launches the scan utility. Optionally, a dialog will pop up giving you the ability to incorporate a date and keywords into the file name. This is really useful: in addition to giving a specific year, you can get fuzzy and specify “1970s” and “winter”, for example.

It scans the entire stack and processes them afterwards, followed by launching into the application of your choice. Sort of. Your options are Epson’s own FastFoto application on Windows or Finder, Photos or Preview on the Mac. There’s no option to not launch an application, which is annoying when you’re just trying to power through stacks of photos. Epson’s FastFoto application (as opposed to the driver/utility of the same name) lets you browse the photos, share, upload or edit them. The editing options are rotate, crop, auto-enhance, remove red-eye and restore colors. There’s also an option to add a date to the photo that appears in the metadata as a creation date, which is nice.

However, there’s no way to batch rename or update the files in the software — say, if you accidentally named them with 1971 instead of 1972, as I did. And that’s not an easy thing to do without downloading a third-party utility.

Sony UBP-X1000ES Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Sony

In August Microsoft said it was supporting 4K Blu-ray discs in its revitalized Xbox One S game console. To follow suit, rival Sony was expected to announce its new PlayStation 4 Pro would also support the new hi-res format — one which it had also helped create. But sadly it was not to be. A week later, however, and Sony is finally announcing a real player, but even so it’s probably not what we had hoped for.

Yes, the UBP-X1000ES is a 4K Blu-ray player, capable of spinning virtually any other kind of optical disc too, but no, you won’t be able to buy one off the shelf. Like Sony’s other high-end “ES” components released in the US, this model will only be available through custom installers.

From the outside, the X1000ES looks very similar to the “premium” 1080p UHP-H1 player, and it performs many of the same functions, such as streaming Amazon Video and YouTube. But it has the added benefit of playing 4K discs.

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray is the latest disc-based standard and includes features such as 4K resolution (3,840×2,160 pixels), high dynamic range (HDR) and better color depth.

From a hardware perspective the new player includes a high-end 32-bit processing DAC, which will play disc-based media like SACD and CD, as well as stream native DSD (at up to 11.2MHz) and PCM (up to 192kHz).

Sony has yet to announce pricing and says it will be available in spring 2017, which is a little later than originally announced.

My take: Too little too late?

Oh, Sony. You had one job: make a 4K Blu-ray player that people can actually buy. Sony is the most popular manufacturer of Blu-ray players and this distinction could easily translate to the 4K version. But the company has seemingly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for the second time in a week.

Given Sony’s history of popularizing disk formats through enabling native support in new consoles — PlayStation 2 and DVD; the PS3 and Blu-ray — Sony was widely expected to announce support for 4K Blu-ray with its PS4 Pro last week. It didn’t — the console can only do 4K streaming — and Sony has extended the disappointment with the UBP-X1000ES.

Despite being one of the first companies to produce 4K Blu-ray discs, it appears Sony is reticent to let people play them on anything. Subconsciously or not, the company is helping to scuttle the format with this lack of hardware support. And the UBP-X1000ES doesn’t really count.

ES components are only available through custom installers in the US, probably because the company has the potential to make more money than in the cutthroat retail market. But this isn’t helpful to ordinary people who just want to buy a Sony 4K Blu-ray player. At this stage, only if you have enough money to install a home security system or a dedicated theater room will you be able to drop a lazy grand (I’m guessing) on a 4K Blu-ray player.

Sure, 4K Blu-ray is a couple of years later to market than it should be to really have a chance, but it’s a real format and the company is selling the discs already.

I still hold out hope that Sony will now announce a companion player, at a sensible price, for release at a similar time to the UBP-X1000ES. Perhaps then 4K Blu-ray will have a fighting chance.

2018 Mercedes-AMG GT Roadster Release Date, Price and Specs – Roadshow

2017 Nissan Sentra Release Date, Price and Specs – Roadshow

2017 Mercedes-Benz E43 AMG Release Date, Price and Specs – Roadshow

2017 Chevrolet Bolt Release Date, Price and Specs – Roadshow

Falcon Northwest FragBox (2016) review – CNET

The Good The Falcon Northwest FragBox can fit two brand-new graphics cards into an very compact chassis, and configurations are incredibly flexible. Performance, as expected, is outstanding.

The Bad Even basic configurations are expensive, and just adding a single paint color to the box drives up the price quickly. The tightly packed interior makes it hard for tinkerers to swap components as easily as in bigger desktops.

The Bottom Line The Falcon Northwest FragBox can be configured anywhere from pricey to super-expensive, but making a big investment in this expertly assembled compact gaming desktop is a way to future-proof against the next generation of VR and 4K gaming.

Configure at Falcon Northwest.

The FragBox by Falcon Northwest is a gaming desktop you could say we’ve had some experience with. This compact powerhouse has reinvented itself over and over again, and the latest version is packed with new components for an unmatched virtual-reality experience, in a chassis that’s about a small as any Oculus Rift- or HTC Vive-ready desktop gets.

Before this, the most recent full review of a FragBox is from 2013, when it featured a fourth-gen Intel Core i7 CPU, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 GPU, and Windows 8. The oldest review I could find on CNET was from 2003, when the FragBox, in an earlier version of its toaster-like case, ran a Pentium 4 CPU, an Nvidia GTX 5600 GPU, and Windows XP.

View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET

That’s all to say, this company and this compact gaming desktop line have been around for a while. When we slotted the latest FragBox into our roundup of gaming PCs equipped with Nvidia’s newest GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards, it stood out in a couple of ways. It was obviously the smallest, although the Alienware Aurora and Acer Predator G1 are fairly compact as well, but it also squeezed two new full-size video cards into its cozy case. Most PC makers dare only do that with a larger chassis that has plenty of room for fans and airflow (after all, liquid cooling can only do so much on its own).

But if you peer through the vent holes on top of the case, you will indeed see not one, but two new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 cards, packed tightly together. It’s a feat of expert system building and cable bundling, and what’s more, even under heavy use the aluminum exterior never gets very hot (although it’s definitely on the high side of warm). The system fans, while audible at times, don’t have that loud hurricane effect that some gaming systems do.