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Showing posts with the label Mark Pickavance

Thermal Master DV2 review: This thermal camera could be the perfect accessory for those observing nature at range, but only if the software improves

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Thermal Master DV2: 30-second review The Thermal Master DV2 is a handheld thermal imaging monocular that the maker positions in different ways depending on which storefront is visited. On its own birdwatching page, it is billed as the first dedicated thermal camera built specifically for spotting birds and wildlife. Elsewhere in the same company's catalog, and on Amazon, it appears instead as a general-purpose thermal monocular for hunting, camping and rescue work. Whatever your interest, the hardware underneath is identical. At the centre of the device sits a 256 x 192 sensor with a 12-micron pixel pitch. Thermal Master runs that raw feed through what it calls the RazorX engine, a three-core processing pipeline built from an FPGA, an ASIC and an AI upscaling block badged X³IR. The result is a 512 x 384 output image, twice the native resolution, though this is achieved through interpolation r...

Vtoman FlashSpeed Pro 3600 V-Beyond review: Finally getting a UK launch, here's what I found with this 3096 Wh portable power station

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VTOMAN FlashSpeed Pro 3600: 30-second review The FlashSpeed Pro 3600 V-Beyond is VTOMAN's biggest power station yet, built around a 3,096Wh LiFePO4 battery, 3,600W of continuous AC output, and a claimed two-hour full recharge from the wall. It rolls on built-in wheels, carries an IP65 rating, and undercuts most rivals of similar capacity on price. Launched about a year ago in the USA, this hardware now has regional versions with outlet connections for the UK and Europe. While this unit could be used at home to provide backup power during a power cut, its true calling is for those going off-grid, perhaps on a building site or while camping, where they need to power appliances away from the power grid. With its expansion battery option, it offers up to 6kWh of capacity and 3600W of output (peaking at 7200W for high-demand starts). That’s enough for most tools and appliances, and it won’t be exh...

Chuwi UniBook review: New Intel silicon makes it an affordable laptop, but it comes with a few caveats

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Chuwi UniBook: 30-second review The Chuwi UniBook is a 14-inch Windows laptop built around Intel's newly launched Core 3 304 processor, part of the Wildcat Lake family and the first Series 3 chip to appear in a laptop at this price. It weighs a claimed 1.2 kg, comes housed in an anodised aluminium chassis, and pairs a 16:10 IPS display with 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. Positioning this model directly against Apple's MacBook Neo, undercutting it by around $250 while offering a larger screen, the same memory and storage as the base Neo configuration, and a far wider set of ports. Early benchmarks of the Core 3 304 from other devices suggest genuinely strong single-core performance for a chip this cheap, which makes the UniBook one of the more interesting budget launches of the year on paper. The critical caveat is that macOS runs reasonably well with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, where...

Fanxiang PS2000W review: A solid portable SSD that's another victim of the rising memory prices

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Fanxiang PS2000W: 30-second review Fanxiang is a Chinese storage brand, most commonly known as Shenzhen Fanxiang Information Technology. The company grew out of a team with a decade of prior experience in storage design, firmware, and product sales, and they've built their range around four main product lines: solid-state drives, mobile storage, memory modules, and storage cards. It’s been making external SSD storage for about five years, with a wide range of devices and specifications. The PS2000W appeared in 2025, and delivers capacities from 500Mb to 4TB in a slim aluminium case. It comes with a soft carry pouch and a cable that has an integrated adapter for both USB-A and USB-C connections. The quoted performance is 2000MB/s reads, and 1800MB/s writes, but that assumes you have a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port, and that’s not a common standard. More realistically, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port will achieve ...