Shola's Home Gadgets

The HV565E spare battery I bought recently lasted over 2 hours while recording a driving lesson in my car, though it was not capturing in HD mode, as I only had a 2GB SD card, and needed to film continuously for 120mins.



I don't know if I had a larger capacity SD card if the battery in the Hitachi DZ-HV565E HD camcorder would have lasted the 2 hours in the HD mode, but I do know it lasts over 1 hour.

So far I'm happy with the performance of my Hitachi pocket HD camcorder and the batteries.

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My new Hitachi DZ-HV565E HD camcorder.

I have just bought a spare replacement battery for my Hitachi HV565E HD camcorder, it is the energiser FLNP60 3.7 1100maH Litium rechargable battery, because I needed to record longer driving lessons videos, and the orginal cell only lasted about 1hrs and 10minutes when recording in full HD mode.



It is much cheaper and affordable than the original Hitachi HV565E battery, and also lasts a little longer.

So if you want an extra battery or need a replacement, then why not order yours today.

The VHS tape recorder is not dead in my house at least.

In a recent house cleanup, we found some old children's VHS tapes which we hadn't watched for years, and since I have a five and 4 year old boy and girl, we decidec that they might want to watch these Veggie Tales videos which while available on DVD, we wanted to see if our Sony SLV-E720 VCR would still play them since it had been sitting on our consumer electronics shelf for years.

Well plugging in the Sony SLV-E720 into the mains, connecting the SCART cable to the TV and popping the video tape cassette in produced an excellent picture on our CRT TV, so we've been watching some of these old VHS tapes.

It was back in 2005 that Dixons announced they would stop selling VCRs and 35mm film cameras and it is now virtually impossible to buy a Video Tape recorder anywhere.

So the VHS recorder has followed in the steps of the sony betamax, 8 track car music players, vinyl, and the siclair ZX81 to the history books. I will be keeping my Sony VCR for as long as it works, hopefully my electronics background will deal with any minor repairs like cleaning the video heads, though lack of spares will probably mean one day I'll have to give it up totally.

I remember the days when we used to have cassette tape duplicators to produce copies of audio sermons at V2V church, now it is Podcasts and MP3s!

I have just got an email from Vodaphone saying that they will no longer be selling the Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 on their network through their shop outlets anymore.



I had pre-registered with the vodaphone shop to know when the newer version of my current Sony mobile phone would be available, put it looks like the X2 will now not be officially sold through any of the 4 UK cell phone networks.

The email does not give any reasons for dropping the Xperia X2 from its portfolio in the UK, but it did mention that it will be stocking the X10 after it is released in Febuary 2010.

I think O2 has also planned to sell the Xperia X2, but has since shelved those plans.