Plustek OpticFilm 135

Digitise your 35mm slides

With the rise of do-it-all printer/scanner/toaster/hoovers, you don’t often see separate scanners these days. Something you can’t usually do with those you find on multi-function devices, however, is scan 35mm slides. This requires three special features: a way of getting the slides in accurately and efficiently; the ability to shine light through them (known in the trade as ‘transmissive’ rather than ‘reflective’ scanning); and a very high resolution, because you’re going to want to view and print the resulting digital images much bigger than the postagestamp originals.

EpsonExpression Home XP-432

A small all-in-one printer

From a distance, the XP-432 looks much like any other inkjet printer/scanner/copier. Then you realise you’re not seeing it from a distance – it’s just very small. That makes it an attractive option for a crowded desk. As with Epson’s other budget printers, the colour screen is tiny – even smaller than the one on the back of your average digital camera – which makes it less useful than it should be for previewing photos from the SD card slot.

Dell Optiplex 5040 Mini Tower

A PC that does the business

Look around any electronics shop, and you’ll find the computers they sell from the shelves aren’t the same ones they use on the counter. That’s because most big PC brands make entirely different ranges for consumers and businesses.

Dell’s Optiplex 5040 series is definitely aimed at the office, not the home. But it’s cheap enough to consider for home use. The first thing we noticed was the quality of the case. Most affordable PCs come in a basic black plastic box that aims to keep costs down, or a curvy multi-coloured confection designed to catch shoppers’ eyes. By contrast, the Optiplex looks like a piece of serious industrial equipment.

Mesh Elite Inspire CA

A complete PC with good peripherals

There are two questions people always ask you when your job is writing about PCs. One is when's the best time to buy a PC, and the other is when's the best time to get rid of it. Well, here’s the answer to both: there is no right time. Whenever you do it, you might have got a better deal a month later. Sorry, we realise that’s not helpful. But the good news is, if there’s no right time, there’s no wrong time either.

Huawei MediaPad M2 10

A stylish Android tablet

The tablet market has gone a bit quiet in the past few months. Even Apple’s iPads haven’t been selling quite as well as expected. There’s a feeling that maybe everyone who wanted a tablet has got one and is quite happy with it, thank you. They don’t get broken as easily as phones, and we don’t rely so much on their cameras, so there are fewer incentives to replace or upgrade them.

Samsung LC27F591FDUXEN

Honey, I bent the screen

Once upon a time, TV sets bulged like fishbowls around the cathode ray tubes that fired electrons at the glass screen. Later, Sony’s Trinitron all but eliminated the curve from top to bottom, but not side to side. Only with the switch to LCD did we get completely flat screens. And finally, the electronic display was perfected.

HTC 10

You get what you pay for

It’s a cunning plan to call your smartphone ‘10’. Hmm, I wonder how many marks out of 10 we should give this? Well, sorry HTC, we only go up to five.

If only getting a positive review was as simple as sticking a number after the product’s name. In reality, the product has to impress us. That’s not something HTC proved very good at with last year’s M9, which was basically their previous phone with a different rubbish camera and the battery life of a turnip.

LG Stylus 2

A phone with a pen

Does anyone else remember PDAs, or did we dream them? Before there were smartphones, there were pocket computers from companies like Psion and Palm. And their black-and-white screens came with that essential accessory: the stylus.

It seems odd to feel nostalgic for something we were only too happy to give up. Glorified cocktail sticks are frustratingly easy to mislay, after all, but we can generally find our fingers.

Never download junk again

Downloading free software can be a minefield. If you don’t know which boxes to untick, your PC could end up riddled with junk. Here, Jane Hoskyn reveals how to install the best programs safely

You’ll already know your pups from your PUPs (one is a cute young canine, the other is a troublemaking program that sneaks into your PC along with reputable software, and can be a right old dog to remove). PUP stands for ‘potentially unwanted program’, a laughably polite term for unwanted junk that can cause great harm to your PC.

But you know how to avoid them, right? You choose safe, big-name software from trusted companies like VLC, Adobe and AVG, instead of junk-riddled nonsense like Free YouTube Downloader and “too good to be true” freebies like CamStudio, which claims to be a realistic alternative to the superb £250 screen-recording program Camtasia Studio. You probably also know that certain download mirror sites, such as Cnet’s Download.com pack their installers with dodgy extras that are easy to miss if you’re in a hurry or unfamiliar with the process.