I am going sway a bit from video gear…actually a GPS does have a screen…

I was in RadioShack yesterday and there was a gentleman buying a few TomTom ONE units. I have been looking into getting a GPS unit. There was a lull in the checkout so I asked him how he likes the TomToms. He said he really liked them and they worked great unless you were in a large city like NYC, the buildings can block the signal but it comes right back.

At Amazon the TomTom ONE sells for $389. So with the $100 rebate your looking at $289, not too shabby.

The other units I had been comparing are the Garmin C330 or the Garmin C340.

The C330 is selling for $309 and the C340 is selling for $399. Apparently the biggest difference is that the C340 says the streets name in the instructions like “take left at Spring Street”. I guess that’s pretty cool but is it worth $90 ? The C330 seems to get rave reviews at Amazon.

The other low priced unit I was comparing is the Garmin StreetPilot i5 for $269. It’s hard enough to compare units sometime from the same manufacturer. It gets a little harder to compare the TomTom to the Garmin Units.

Either way it doesn’t look like you can go wrong with any of these units and they are seem god enough for those of us that need a unit 4-5 time/year. To be honest my current “co-pilot” isn’t the greates navigator in the world. A GPS unit can save my marriage, and $300 is a lot cheaper than a divorce !

It’s nice to see that DVguru agrees with my opinion that DVD camcorders are a little annoying.

As I mentioned I have a few friends that have the Sony DVD camcorder and they seem to really like them. I have also seen them scrambling to change the discs while taping longer events like recitals.

Remember that these camcorders record in MPEG format which is not the best choice at all when editing videos.

I’m glad there are choices but a DVD camcorder is not for me. I would rather get a hard drive camcorder instead.

I update my PC recommendations for video editing. This year the clear choice is a computer with the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor. There are few different flavors of this processor available. The good news is that even the lowest processor in this line, the E6300, blazes.

The sweet spot for pricing is the E6300 or E6400. Both of the have 2MB of L2 cache while the higher level chips have 4MB of L2 cache.

I was able to price together a rather nice Dell PC with an E6300 for about $850 with a 19″ monitor.