Steve Litchfield

These are becoming more and more popular and I thought a few suggestions on use would be helpful. Essentially a power station is a huge power bank that has its own mains inverter and, usually, a light and a solar (MPPT) input. An all-in-one err... 'power station' if you will. Ahem. Managing expectations A power station, even the biggest Jackerys , won't power an entire house and indeed won't power anything for very long. We forget just how much power every day items - fridges, freezers, kettles, fan heaters, boilers, ovens, and so on, take. The first two, fridges/freezers, can be powered from power stations rated at 1kW (i.e. 1000W) and above*, but the rest are out on the whole. Anything involving the production of heat, in fact, is out unless you have a 2kW monster power station, and even then you'll drain it in an hour. * that was in fact one of my first real world tests, our 5ft fridge-freezer peaked over 500W and therefore shut down my Jackery 500's inverter...

Having already pitched the new iPhone against Sony's top contender , along comes Google lending me their new flagship, the Pixel 7 Pro, also boasting a lot of imaging smarts.  Again, on the iOS front, it's true that, by default, Apple also does a load of edge enhancement to iPhone 14 photos, but the Pro models (14 Pro Max here) let you toggle on ProRAW, a format that can be shared in the same way as regular cookie-cut JPGs (including for analysis here and download below) but which forgoes all the populist sharpening and enhancement, so you get the best of all worlds. You get the Deep Fusion and multi-frame combinations, all the software magic that makes modern flagship cameras work, but you don't get the 'nasty' last bit, the enhancement to make photos 'pop' on phone screens - the images are left alone, purer and more useable after the fact.  Google doesn't give quite the same capability - although you can turn on RAW in Camera's Settings, there'...

These are perhaps my two top picks for imaging in the smartphone world at the end of 2022. Yes, there are some wacky Chinese imaging flagships, and yes, there's Samsung, but I still disagree with so much that Samsung does in terms of colour science and image processing. It's true that, by default, Apple also does a load of edge enhancement to iPhone 14 photos, but the Pro models (14 Pro Max here) let you toggle on ProRAW, a format that can be shared in the same way as regular cookie-cut JPGs but which forgoes all the populist sharpening and enhancement, so you get the best of all worlds. You get the Deep Fusion and multi-frame combinations, all the software magic that makes modern flagship cameras work, but you don't get the 'nasty' last bit, the enhancement to make photos 'pop' on phone screens - the images are left alone, purer and more useable after the fact.  Sony provides, by default now, Photography Pro, and as the name suggests, it already spits out u...