Home movies are great fun aren’t they. Whether it’s a Christmas, a birthday or something a little less celebratory like your mate Steve doing the drunk pants on head dance, we all love to have those moments captured on video to share and re-live. Quite often though these moments pass us by and we don’t capture them because our damn video camera’s are so bloomin complicated that by the time we actually whip them out, get them switched on and have to fiddle about with settings, Steve has put his pants back on and is sitting rather angelically next to his girlfriend again.

What we need is a no nonsense, simple to use, sharp, stylish, convenient, cheap, good quality video camera that you can just whip out and press start. Now that sounds rather demanding when put like that but the Flip Digital Video Camera meets all of those demands and is a limbo dancing world champion low of a price at £99.95.

The Flip Digital Video Camera is so simple that it is literally just a case of pressing the button with “on” written on it then pressing the other button with “start” on it. With 2GB of memory you will have plenty of filming time and with a sharp 640 x 480 pixels resolution in MPG4 format you are not sacrificing video quality. You don’t have to worry about farcing around with stuff like focus and what not either. With a 2x automatic zoom your only job is to stand and point. Perhaps the most convenient little feature of all though is that it comes with a sweet little USB plug that flips out of the side. So there isn’t even any need for cables or any other uploading garbage, you just plug your Flip Video Camera in and away you go! At £99.95 this is bloody good value.

Live life on the wild side? Constantly crawling up the side of cliffs and always wondering where your next feed of adrenalin is going to come from? Well we have the gadget for you. If you spend your days skiing down the slopes, rallying down mountains on your mountain bike, conquering The Alps or diving out of planes you will probably want to capture all those moments right, however, trying to make it up the face of a cliff with a video camera in one hand is probably not the best idea.

With the AT18 Waterproof Action Camera you can capture it all and not have to worry about plunging to your death. This cool Action Camera from Oregon can be attached easily to a helmet, mast, harness, or your handlebars and all mounting equipment is included. It will deliver digital video in 640 X 480 VGA at 30 frames per second and all captured footage can be played on the TV or uploaded to a PC, so you can share your daredevil antics with the whole world. The 32MB on-board memory is by no means a lot but with an SD card slot expandable up to 2GB you will be able to capture a fair whack of danger. With waterproof capabilities of up to 3 metres and being shock resistant you won’t have to worry about it crashing out on you either.

I myself am definitely not a danger man so I’m thinking it can also come in handy for making creative party videos, strapping to the cat or creating your own version of Peep Show. No? Well I’m sure you have your own ideas but one thing is for sure, the AT18 Waterproof Action Camera can come to good use no matter where you are or whatever situation you are in.

So after a recent holiday in Los Angeles and Las Vegas I finally convinced my better half to invest in a compact digital camera. Up until now she has been happy to use disposable cameras which in my opinion have had their day. Her disappointment upon discovering that a number of the photos had not come out as hoped further convinced her that it was finally time to go digital. Now I myself have had a digital compact for some time but it had been a while since I invested any serious time looking at the latest and greatest features offered - and boy was I impressed.

Firstly and probably one of the first things a number of you look for when considering a digital camera is the all important megapixel number. I was amazed to find cameras such as the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W200 boasting a very impressive 12.1MP or the Canon Digital Ixus 960, again capable of 12.1Mp. At this point however I would like to give a warning about being too focused on that magic megapixel number. A general mistake a lot of people make is that the better the megapixel number the better the image is going to be. Now in principle this is of course correct but given that a number of you will only be interested in uploading these to a website such as Flickr or printing them at 6×4 format the difference beween a 12.1MP camera and a 7MP camera will be extremely hard to tell. Of course if you are planning on printing much larger format photos then you may want to pay a little closer attention to the megapixel offering.

So apart from megapixels what other features do some of these compact cameras offer. Well when I started to look under the hood I was amazed at some of the features starting to appear such as 10x optical zoom on the Panasonic DMC-TZ3EB, or the exposure controls on the Sony Cyber Shot DCS-T200 such as adjustable ISO, white balance and multiple light metering options - something that up until recently was only available on more expensive Digitial SLR cameras.

And of course the really nice thing to report is that you can get all of these features in a very nice looking camera for under £200, fantastic !

Oh and don’t forget you will probably want to get yourself a case for you camera along with a memory card, again with falling prices something you can pickup very cheap. Oh and finally there are a number of websites out there such as Photobox which offer a simple to use service for printing your digital images so you can present them in an album or frame as you would with your normal photos from a non-digital camera.