The Stuff Hot Five

We see a lot of products every week here on Stuff. But come Friday, which are the ones we actually want to take home with us? Every week, we condense all of the many products we see into the Hot Five — the definitive list of the best new gadgets to lust after, buy and use. These are the best products, the top apps and games, and the best tech accessories to blow this week’s savings on.

5) Asus packs gaming muscle into a skinny notebook

The Asus ROG Zephyrus is a trend-bucking beast of a laptop, its eye-watering price ($2,849 USD) the only outward sign of its monstrous processing and graphical power. With understated (but attractive) styling and a skinny form factor, you’d be forgiven for dismissing this as a gamer’s machine. However, it not only manages to handle everything you can throw at it while maintaining smooth frame rates, it does so without cooling becoming a toasty, thorny issue. Shortish battery life dictates that you’ll never want to wander far from the mains, but if you’re looking for a luggable laptop that’ll run Vermintide 2 like liquid gold, the Zephyrus should be top of your list.

4) Light’s Camera is All Eyes

Look at the front of the Light L16 at you’ll count 16 individual lenses, a seemingly insane number of peepholes for a camera so compact. And yet, this near-frightening array of glass – which includes wide-angle, normal and telephoto lenses – is key to the Light’s attempts to revolutionise digital photography. The camera’s digital brain sucks up the data from all the lenses when you push the shutter button, compiling them into a highly editable 52MP image that can be tweaked to your heart’s content after the fact. The idea here is to shoot first, and sort out the look and crop of the photo later, which is a sort of antithesis to the “Kodak moment” approach to snapping. We’ve been hands-on, but look out for a full review soon.

3) Atari’s mystery console now has a name

For gamers of a certain age, the name “Atari” conjures up memories of sunlit Saturday afternoons wrenching at awkward joysticks and gawking at blocky graphics – graphics that happened to be incredibly state-of-the-art at the time. The company is back in the console business, and back to making consoles with wood flippin’ veneer on them to boot! While we don’t know much about the VCS (for that is its name), Atari assures us that it won’t be an empty exercise in nostalgia-mining, but a device that’ll “change the way you interact with your TV”. We’re eager to hear more.

2) We’re longing for Epson’s short-throw projector

Ever wished you could buy a projector for huge screen home entertainment but chickened out when you realised that setting the thing up is a huge pain in the posterior? Epson has heard your anguished cries, and delivered a solution that subtracts the struggle: the EH-LS100. While most projectors need to be set up way back from your wall, the LS100 can create a 70in image from just 6cm away. Pull it back to 50cm and you’ll get 130in. Finally, owners of normal-sized flats can experience the kind of eyeball-filling images once reserved for owners of large flats! It’s not all roses, of course – there’s no 4K support here, the LS100 is a hulking 11kg brute of a machine, and it’s pretty darn pricey – but for those hollering for a cinema-style picture size without the space for a traditional light-thrower, it could be the best solution around.

1) Panasonic’s compact cam is a globetrotter’s best friend

For travellers who want to document everything they encounter, a smartphone’s camera isn’t going to cut it. Sure, whipping out your phone for a quick snap of a perfect peach-coloured sunset or a plate of particularly appetising grub is fine, but what about zooming in on far-off subjects, or going ultra-wide to capture the scale of a rugged landscape? That’s where a big-zoom compact comes in handy. Small enough to slip in your sling bag without weighing you down but offering far more flexibility than a phone, the Panasonic TZ200 is one such camera. With its 15x optical zoom, you can creep right in on local fauna, while the large 1in sensor ensures image quality is a step up from even the best mobile snapper. Balancing price, ability and size, we reckon this just might be the best travel camera on the planet.