JohnB

Perfect – Our old fridge a Kelvinator 401L about 24/25 years old was starting to get noisy so the search began for a replacement. Would have loved a side by side with an ice and water…

dispenser but we have a townhouse with the kitchen on the 3rd floor. After about 15 visits to JB Home, a few to HN, 3 or 4 to the Good Guys and several to Masters who had a comprehensive display we narrowed our choice down to a Kelvinator 460L with the hinge on the RHS. None of the side by sides would fit up our stairs and my wife wanted a white finish.

This model, similar to the Westinghouse, is made in Thailand. The door has lots of shelves, the freezer is big and it looks good. We got a great price from the local Good Guys. We bought the chrome wine/bottle rack from a westinghouse fridge of the same size at an appliance parts store. We paid $33 for this, it holds about 6 cans or wine bottles horizontally.

After so much study, measuring and comparing we are very happy with our new Kelvinator. We got a great run out of our last one. The fact they are now made in Thailand is immaterial to us. I was prepared to pay thousands for a fridge but very happy with this one which was under $900.

Fabulous, the duplex and wireless printing and scanning a great advance over earlier models – Bought my Brother MFC-7860DW from Centrecom on Jun 30 2011 so it became tax deductible for last financial year. Then had to wait a few days for it to arrive. Paid around $329. …

This 7860DW replaced an earlier Brother MFC-7420 which was starting to play up with paper feeds, etc. The 7420 had done quite a bit of work.

The 786ODW is miles ahead of the earlier models. Being wireless all our computers can print to it, it duplexes and you can scan to any of the computers once the Brother software is loaded onto them. Before the 7860DW arrived we had a couple USB Canon scanners. But with the 7860DW on the job these have been retired.

When scanning you can quickly set the file and the file name where the scanned image will go. There's a choice of how many DPI, colour or black white, normal or duplex. If you have a heap of pages to scan, you can put say 15 in the scanner so it auto feeds. If there are another 15 after this, simply select "continue" do the same again, select finish and it's done.

This is a very good MFC. It's made our office work more fun, more efficient. It's intuitive and setting the file name and folder destination first rather than the other way around just seems so much better.

At just over $300 this is a no brainer. The introductory cartridge is good for about 700 pages. The warning light on our machine came on at about 370 pages. A lot of these had been duplexed. Ignoring the warning we finished up getting about 680 pages before finally the machine wouldn't print. This is how Brothers are made. Replacement toner cartridges are about $120 from Dick Smith and Officeworks. I found an Ebay store in Adelaide and got genuine ones posted to Melbourne for about $93.

Years ago I can remember paying nearly $1500 for a Mitsubishi thermal fax and then about the same for a HP 3100 MFC. These Brothers are like the Hyundais of the printer world. They are functional, reasonably priced and do the job. The 7860DW has been a great step forward on the earlier model.

Recommended! Intuitive to use, wireless, duplexing and a great remote scanning function. Well priced

A lot of bang for your buck, almost perfect for point, aim and fire! – I like small, inexpensive digital cameras, that you can point, aim and fire. Strangely looking around my office I can see my last 3 or 4 cameras, Richoh TF-500D the last of my…

film cameras, then a 2.1 megapixel Canon Ixus that was nearly $1000 new and finally a Sony DSC-W55, 7.2 megapixel with 3x zoom.

Overseas last week I did my duty free shopping for grog on the way out of Melbourne, picked up the catalogue. The Olympus @ $129 duty free caught my eye. 10x optical zoom, HD movies, 14 megapixels, I had a look in Singapore on the way home but they were about $160 duty free in Singapore so no point. They did have an extra colour red whereas Australia seems to have silver, black and purple. I went for purple as silver is too plain and black to easy to put down and be hard to spot.

Initial impressions I wasn't sure. But 4 days later I'm sold. All of the cameras I've replaced above mainly got the chop because they were too slow. I'm mainly interested in how quick the first shot can be taken from turning the camera on. The Olympus is fast. It has some sort of automatic flash that does a great job on indoor pictures of pets for example. The old Sony the flash really washed out the image. With the Olympus you would not know it was a flash shot.

There is also a choice of 3 sounds, "beeps". The beep I've set makes quite an engaging noise. Since getting back and looking at what else is around I've only seen a Pentax with 18x zoom for around $200 that I would have considered with more time.

But for me a 14MP camera with 10x zoom at $150 including a pretty decent sized SD card (8GB for $21.95 duty free which looks like it will hold about 1800 14 megapixel shots) is a bit of a no brainer.

I read some online reviews that were largely positive but some reservations about blurring at the edges on certain zooms, etc. But those tech heads and tech reports will always say there are better models available... if you spend more.

Like it or not we live in an age where cameras like mobile phones improve year by year. Most of us change phones every couple of years because they get scratched or worn out. It's probably the same with cameras. They are too cheap to get fixed if something where to go wrong.

I'm going to enjoy this Olympus. The ability to take clear indoor shots with the auto setting was an unknown bonus.

This is a functional, fun to use camera. At the price how can you really go wrong. I really was a Sony man but try finding a Sony at this price with 10x optical zoom. You won't. Well priced, quick & easy to use, excellent for portraits, etc indoors in poor light Olympus don't make leather cases for their cameras. Would like one of these

Excellent – This is an awesome phone, intuitive to use, a great screen, a real powerhouse. Don't let the small size fool you. With a few apps (mostly free) and your desktop files installed…

you have almost the same function as a desktop computer in the palm of your hand. And still a very good phone. This ia an awesome phone. My 3rd Blackberry Pearl, it follows the first 8100, 8220 but is light years ahead of these. The new screen is fantastic, battery life good (I charge mine every night). For my work I need a phone with a keyboard for SMS and long emails. I'm a big SureType fan where Pearls has 2 characters per key rather than a QWERTY keyboard. Once you adapt to SureType you can really get up some typing speed.

I got this phone as an upgrade on an Optus 24 month plan. My previous plan was $79 month + BB data plan, just over a $100 month. The new plan is $59 so a big saving and huge advances with the phone itself.

When looking at a new phone I thought IPhones have all the apps, i'll just have to do without these going the BB route. However BB app world has an amazing range of apps, all bar 2 of mine have been free. Apps for World Time

(MyTimes), metric to imperial conversion, World Weather (WeatherTrax), Oanda currency convertor. Then if you want to carry your Microsoft Office files there's pre-installed programs "Word to Go", "Sheets to Go" to look at Word and Excel spreadsheets which can be copied across from your desktop.

To make all this work I downloaded just 2 paid apps. File Manager Pro which does a great job of searching thousands of files in my BB and an upgrade of Documents to Go which adds "PDF to Go" to the 2 installed programs. Being able to open up PDFs on the road, zoom in and read often complex docs is a dream.

For leisure there is internet radio. My favorite app is FlyCast and MiRoamer. Cannot get TuneIn radio to stream.

One important point here is for most of these apps to run them via WIFI not the data via the GSM 3G/2G network. Most of the apps can be set up so they only use WIFI. This ensures you don't breach your data limit. Very little

Excellent – Further to my Sep 2009 review when I put 2 CP641s on the back of my Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo it was finally time in early Mar 2010 to replace the 2 Nexen N2000s left on the front…

of the car with CP641s. The front N2000s had done nearly 40,000 and just starting to chop out on the inside shoulder. No doubt they had been on the rear of the car at one stage which can squat down at times.

Had to go to a different tyre outlet this time as my local Beaurepaires who did the last 2 CP641 @ $130 each now wanted $168 each. They said they were going to a different distributor. I settled on Jax Quickfit @ $125 each along with a wheel alignment.

So with CP641s all around the car is very quiet. Here in Victoria with hoon laws, 100-110 km/hr speed limits and speed camera all over the place, spirited driving is not encouraged. Once again I'm extremely happy with these tyres. I'm fairly respectful of putting the boot into the Nissan in the wet as the rear wheels with any tyres can easily break traction and public roads are no place to do this.

For $500 a set these are a true bargain and in my humble opinion a very very good tyre. Quiet, wear well, well priced