Dedicated fans of The Simpsons may remember an episode when Homer's long-lost and financially ruined brother tries to revive his fortunes by inventing a gadget that translates baby gurgles into English. This month, the Japanese toymaker Takara announced a similar device, the Meowlingual, which it claimed can translate your cat's noises into speech.

While both products are unbelievable, only the first is fiction. The second is just unlikely. But since

the product is actually for sale for under £50, I defy any cat owner not to be interested. It sounds so good, you're inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

However, consider the free language translation services you get on web search engines these days. Run a sentence through the filter into a foreign language, and then translate it back into English. I guarantee you the result will be utterly meaningless. I'm not criticising translation software, I'm just pointing out that if you can't guarantee the accuracy of automatic translation from English to French, what chance have you of accurately interpreting a meow? Who's to say that a cat phrase interpreted as "Give me a cuddle" wasn't interrupted by a hairball cough and was actually "I've just dumped in your slippers"?

Poking fun is easy when the idea sounds obviously silly but the principle of "hunt-the-flaw" remains the same for many products that seem too good to be true. At the moment, digital imaging devices appear to be a perfect example of this category. It began with scanner manufacturers vying to outdo each other over the sampling resolution of their flatbed scanners, at one point hitting a ludicrous 6,400dpi. This was soon followed by digital camera vendors and their claims for capturing images at resolutions beyond five megapixels in their models aimed at consumers.

The tech industry has finally blown a gasket in this numbers race because it's no longer feasible to keep pushing the figures up and up for products that command entry-level prices. Just as you might snigger at a cat translator, professional camera enthusiasts must think computer users were born yesterday. In scanners and digital cameras alike, resolution is a function of optics just as much as it is of CCD sensor pixel density. The promise of five megapixels is empty if the lens is made of plastic and is half the size of a pea. Haven't you ever wondered why digital shots always look great on the little LCD screen at the back of the camera but disappointingly blurry at full resolution on your PC?

If Takara could reverse-engineer Meowlingual to work the other way, I could ask my cat what he thinks about it all. But I've not seen him since he slunk off in the direction of my slippers.

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