The Kodak CX6200 digital camera. This camera is hot for the price. If you’re just looking to get your hands on a simple, yet functional digital camera, this one is perfect. It’s very inexpensive and takes great pictures. It only comes with 8MB internal memory which isn’t very useful but I don’t know why you’d get a digital camera and not get a memory stick anyway. Miraculously, we managed to get a 128MB memory stick for a meager $25.00! The sales woman swore it was on sale for $25.00 and I mean, would you argue? Considering a 128MB stick is equal in price with the camera! The software bundled with this camera is lame, but I very rarely use software that comes with virtually any new device I get. This camera goes with me everywhere and I definitely recommend it to those who are just looking for their first digital camera.

Toy number 2: BUSlink USB 2.0 cd burner. I’m one of those unfortunate ones who must use an external burner for my laptop, unless of course, I wanted to dish out about $350.00 for one specifically for my laptop. I got this one for roughly $90.00, which isn’t too bad. My previous burner was a refurbished BenQ that I got for $60.00. That beast gave me a over 100 solid burns before it retired from it’s short career of burning and now just functions as an extra cd-player on my Linux box.

My last and final toy is a Philips DVD player that we acquired just last night. We are dvd-aholics. We tend to purchase about three DVDs a week. Our previous DVD player only played MP3 CDs and I’ve since wanted one that played other formats, or at least play VCDs. This particular player was on sale for $80.00 and it plays all of the abbreviations: DVD+RW, DVD+R, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3-CD, VCD, S-VCD and Picture CD Formats. And it is a Philips to boot. It was a bit of a compulsive buy but makes for a nice companion to our new burner. It has a sleek design with a ton of options and preferences. So, instead of pooling the money for all of these devices together and getting a PS2 we opted for three new toys. Needless to say, we are far from disappointed. Besides, we’re very content with our 8 bit Nintendo.