Aperture surprises: Apple slips in new release when fans were losing hope

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 16th 2010 | Discuss (0)
Categories: Software Review
Tags: apple review faces adobe lightroom geotaggin images photography aperture photographer

Aperture 3 is here and Apple has made it a lot more flexible and friendly. In fact, Apple has reversed the waterfall and pulled the popular Faces and Places feature in iPhoto up to Aperture. Features like photo books, which have existed in both products, have become easier to use in Aperture but there are also more options. Aperture, if you don’t remember, is a photo management tool introduced for professional photographers. It was brought forth sometime before Adobe introduced Lightroom and it caused a sensation. It handled some of the most common tasks performed by professional photographers—and in so doing…

Software Review: Making Muvees

Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 15th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Software Review
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Of all the tools out there that promise to make video making easy and fun, Muvee has been one of the best and one of the easiest. The way Muvee works is to let you select video clips and still pictures, add a soundtrack, and pick a style. The templates add some graphics elements, such as a scrapbook, stars, cubes, and also a style for cuts and transitions. Then you just push a button and see what you get. The developers at Muvee have been pretty quiet and that’s because they’ve been working away re-architecting the software to take advantage of…

The new Zune review – HD at work

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 19th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
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Microsoft's latest assault on the portable media market is the Zune HD. It is a lovely little piece of hardware that gives Microsoft a play against some strong. In fact, it reminds me of my beloved Samsung Yepp YP-P2. Samsung has upgraded that line with a new P3 and of course, Apple is the power house with the iPod Touch. Microsoft developed this generation of Zune, the HD, with Nvidia’s Tegra and the added power is evident in the beautiful bright screen. It also has a nifty interface, a long battery life, and a software infrastructure that needs work. Table 1:…

Corel Digital Studio 2010

Posted by Kathleen Maher on October 28th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Software Review
Tags: video media photoshop corel studio ilife editing elements

We believe that there are about 16 million people working with digital media all over the world—and around 35% of them are in the United States. The vast majority of those people are not professionals, they are people who are taking pictures, editing them, and creating videos and picture books, because they like it. Some of them are good at it, many of them wind up spending a lot more time on what they’re trying to do than they ever intended. Corel has taken a look at the market and brought a new suite for working with video, pictures and creating…

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone

Posted by Kathleen Maher on October 15th 2009 | Permalink
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Tags: apple facebook iphone flickr photoshop adobe online photos sharing social media

Adobe has released a new photo program for the iPhone and it’s designed to complement the company’s online strategy introduced with Photoshop.com. Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone lets users quickly edit images including crop, rotate, and flip, and they can adjust exposure, saturation, tint and add effects and borders and it’s easy to upload photos directly to the online version of Photoshop.com. Photoshop.com has shown steady improvement. It’s reasonably fast and it integrates with online sharing sites including Flickr and Facebook, making it easier to publish photos. This app for mobile devices will make it easy to upload images taken with the…

The Insight drive—simple and sweet

Posted by Kathleen Maher on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: apple storage disk verbatim hd backup time machine nero

Verbatim has been building its storage business with products that are easy to use and give customers a little something extra. Their latest product, the InSight drive, adds a small, 32x128, always on LCD display that includes the drive’s name and the amount of storage left on the drive. It’s a little thing, but in situations where there are a number of drives being handed around with video files, audio files, pictures, and backup data, it’s helpful to be able to see the name. If you change the name of the drive, the Verbatim drive updates after a safe removal, but…

Seeing is believing - Putting photo editing products through their paces

Posted by Kathleen Maher on August 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Software Review
Tags: apple avi microsoft mov roxio wmv quicktime google

Roxio Photoshow is easy and fun. There’s something nice about having just a few options and getting something done quickly. Luckily, the templates, styles, and music, are pleasant and not too childish or silly as is so often the case in similar programs.Remember this: nothing is easy on a computer unless you stay within your boundaries. You like the Mac, stay there, you like Windows, stay there. Things might work out okay if you stay in your own backyard but then again they might not. What was a simple test of free online software can turn into a maddening exercise in…

The Nanovision Mimo UM-710 - USB powered external monitor

Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 3rd 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
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No points for neatness here, but the ability to fold the desk up and hide all the business going on in this desk is important and the Nanovision Mimo 710 provides a little more screen real estate at almost no real cost in space. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)According to the compact little manual, getting the Mimo display up and running should take about a minute. So okay, it took me longer. First, there was a bit of head scratching about how to attach the microphone as the instructions told me to do, but ohhh, this is a 710, it doesn’t have…

Canon PowerShot XS10IS; Learning to live within limitations

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 9th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
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Musician David Lindley at the Fillmore in San Francisco—this shot was taken from the audience about mid-way back in the hall and zoomed in. This is a pretty amazing shot given everything going against it—low light, zoom, high ISO, etc. etc., and it has been sharpened.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) If there is any activity guaranteed to teach you that you usually get what you pay for, it’s buying cameras. I don’t know how many times I have succumbed to a cheap camera when what I really wanted was the top-of-the-line camera. This time was different. What I really wanted was a…

The HP MiniNote 1000 XP for the road

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 9th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Hardware Review
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The HP Mini 1000 XP starts at $359.99 for the 8.9-inch model. Options include SSD or HDD storage upgrades, Bluetooth, external storage with slot, HP Mini Mobile Drive up to 8 GB, HD integrated audio.(Source: Hewlett-Packard) A few companies have embraced the netbook, or mini notebook—some perhaps against their better judgment. If you talk to these companies, they will tell you that the mini-note class is not intended to replace a regular laptop or a desktop—it’s intended to be an on-the-go computer. Their low-power processors are designed for long battery life, as opposed to the kind of heavy-duty processor you might…

The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion; by Ben Long; published by O’Reilly

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 9th 2009 | Permalink
Categories: Book Review
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The Canon Digital Rebel is the most popular digital SLR camera on the market. In fact, it’s fair to say that Canon has created the entry-level dSLR market—Nikon and its fans may disagree, but Canon has built the field, taken the ball, and run with it. Ben Long’s detailed manual for the Rebel XS/1000D is a necessary accessory. Long combines information about the camera with basic photography lessons, as well as lessons in digital photography. Now, for those of you who know all about photography and digital photography and think you are way too smart for this book, let me say…

Adobe’s CS4 features major changes for photographers

Posted by Kathleen Maher on September 29th 2008 | Permalink
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Adobe has been readying the market for its new CS4 lineup of software products for months now and anticipation is high. This is a performance release as well as a feature release, although we saw a few features that are going to need a little more work. This fast review is a quick overview concentrating primarily on the imaging tools. We will follow up with a look at the other modules as soon as we catch our breath. With CS4, Adobe has worked hard to finalize the integration of the Macromedia products and the Adobe products. For the most part, there…

Adobe blends Flash with Acrobat in Acrobat Pro

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 28th 2008 | Permalink
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Adobe’s CS3 brought new interoperability between the company’s product lines, especially by extending support for Acrobat throughout the content-creation tools, making PDF a common format for markups. With Acrobat 9.0 Adobe has increased the integration of Flash in Acrobat. It’s safe to say that this is a trend users can expect to see throughout the product line as Adobe increases the ability of its products to work together and to create interactive pieces. One of the earliest products to be released for Adobe’s next gen is Acrobat 9 Pro, which will be integrated into the Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and…

Samsung takes on Apple’s iPod Touch – the P2 works its way to functionality

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 30th 2008 | Permalink
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Samsung YP-P2JAB P2, 4 GB media player The P2 has several interface options for its touch screen. The screen, as you can see, is very reflective but one I figured out the brightness controls all was well. Right out of the box the Samsung P2 is a thrill—it’s sleek, it has a whizzy interface, and it promises to do anything for you. Reality sets in later duing the experimental phase. There’s a media store, but it’s not active in the U.S. yet. There’s Bluetooth but it doesn’t have anyone to talk to. Why in the world does the USB connector have…

Pinnacle Video Transfer

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 30th 2008 | Permalink
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The Pinnacle Video Capture and its little friend iPod. In this case the device is recording as you can see by the red lights and it’s recording to “better” mode because the two blue lights are lit up. It’s a very elegant system. Pinnacle has learned well from experience.(Source: Jon Peddie Research) Such a simple idea and it works. The Pinnacle Video Transfer box has plenty of forerunners and they too were often capable machines if a tad complicated. The Pinnacle Video Transfer box is a simple analog video recorder that attaches to your machine via composite, S-Video, or Stereo Audio.…

Corel 4 - a big box of tools

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 2nd 2008 | Permalink
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Figure 1 Corel has added several useful features to its package of tools for graphic artists including tables, as shown in this example. The basic tasks required to create good-looking pieces including brochures, newsletters, business cards, ads, etc. are all here and easy to use. Note the object manager on the right side, the tabs give users fast access to hints (that usually don’t apply, but at least they’re trying) and to ConceptShare to post work online for comment and even interactive chat with comments. CorelDraw is pretty much the alternative to Adobe’s suite of products for graphics professionals, especially Photoshop…

Futuremark’s 3DMark vantage benchmark

Posted by Kathleen Maher on May 5th 2008 | Permalink
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We’ve been testing Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage since early March, and you may have noticed it in some of our previous reports. Well, the program is completely vetted now, and it’s gone from the early beta we first got to Gold. Along with it have been some driver tweaks by AMD and Nvidia, and no doubt Intel and S3 will follow suit. Included in the new benchmarks are four tests (two different CPU tests and two different GPU tests) and six feature tests. In addition, Futuremark has introduced four PC presets that augment the variety of PCs that can be tested. Presets…

Photoshop for free?

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 7th 2008 | Permalink
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Photoshop Express is Adobe’s free online application that links to popular online sites like Flickr, and Facebook. Here, I used the Sketch feature to make my friends look mysterious and pensive. They usually aren’t. Adobe has made the latest version of its Photoshop software available absolutely free. Photoshop Express is yet another example of an online application but it has quite a bit of sophistication in comparison with other sites that we have used. Now, for the sake of honesty, we’ll say tha we use primarily Picasa on the desktop and Flickr online. Photobucket is one of the latest contenders and…

Graphics chips, boards, and systems

Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 24th 2008 | Permalink
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What an amazing couple of weeks this has been, the biggest rush of new, exciting, and interesting graphics parts since we can’t remember when. We got to examine two new IGP motherboards, two new dual GPU boards, and a two GB memory boards. Here’s what was released, and came into the lab, in the last couple of weeks: AMD’s Radeon HD 3870 X2 dual GPU AIB. AMD’s 780g chipset with hybrid graphics. AMD’s FireGL V8650 with 2GB AIB. Nvidia’s GeForce 9800 GX2 dual GPU AIB. Nvidia’s nForce 790i chipset with three SLI slots. And we still have some other slightly older…

Kindle

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 11th 2008 | Permalink
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Star Trek crew member accessing data on his PADD. (Courtesy CBS Studios) In December, in one of the best-executed PR programs since the iPhone, Amazon announced and then released the Kindle. It was the Ebook only better: a larger display, and always on-line for almost instant down loading of books, and Web surfing. Kindle had all the things Sony's Ebook didn't; granted, Amazon had two plus years to figure it out. Nonetheless it was sold out the day it went on sale (300k units we were told) and was in such demand (mind you this was just before the holidays) that…

Graphics boards and killer computers

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 11th 2008 | Permalink
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FIGURE 1: 3DMark06 tests of three AIBs on an AMD Spider platform. (Courtesy CBS Studios) FIGURE 2: Relative performance gain over a single HD 3870 on a Spider platform. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) TABLE 1: Analysis of the data and benchmarks per dollar. It has taken us almost three weeks to do all the testing needed for this article. It was a labor of love. We had two motherboards with new CPUs, and three AIBs, not totally equal in all specifications, but all with interesting features and prices. The equipment: AMD Spider with Phenom quad-core processor. Two Radeon HD 3870 AIBs.…

HP’s latest tablet is good to go – and it’s not bad as a couch companion either.

Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 17th 2007 | Permalink
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HP has designed a new tablet computer for business users—the Compaq 2710p and, best of all, they sent it to JPR to try out. We've been really curious about going to a tablet since we spend a lot of time listening to people and taking note. Also, we spend a lot of time travelling. For this, the 2710p is a good size, not too big, not too heavy. The screen size is comfortable and the keyboard, one of the critical aspects for me, is very nice. It has a nice snap to it. HP has opted for an embedded pointer mouse…

Fastest twitch mouse in the world

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 19th 2007 | Permalink
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At Siggraph, we discovered a 3D mouse from Sandio Technology and have been playing with it for the last couple of months. There are three joy-sticks built into the mouse, one on either side (where your thumb and ring finger hold the mouse), and one on top in front of the wheel. That gives you a total of 12 movements, plus the wheel and the conventional left-right mouse buttons—that’s a lot of control, you can see two of the joy-sticks, which have a blue light behind them, in the following photo. Table 2: Benchmarks/dollar for the various AIBs. (Source: Jon Peddie…

Application Interface Boards

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 19th 2007 | Permalink
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This was a busy week for the elves at Mt. Tiburon Testing labs (MTTL), not that it’s every slow around here. Stuff piles up almost faster than we can experiment with it, but as we’ve said many times before, this is so much fun it’s hard to imagine getting paid to do it. Well that’s a lie, it’s not always fun, in fact sometimes it’s so damn frustrating all you want to is throw the computer and whatever it is you’re trying to get to work out the window and then run and jump up and down on it while screaming…

Verbatim forms partnerships that work

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 5th 2007 | Permalink
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It's no secret that memory prices have completely crashed through the floor and we now have gigs of memory available on tiny hard drives as well as flash and even mobile phones. A quick web check reveals a tiny 12 GB Verbatim drive for $107.99 and if you're willing to pack something larger there is a 100 GB Diskgo portable drive for $104. These days 2 GB drives are practically free as companies put their product data on give-away drives. As a result, companies selling memory are facing serious challenges as they put their products out there against competitors with shinier…

RESOURCES FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS

Posted by Kathleen Maher on October 8th 2007 | Permalink
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As enthusiasm for digital photography has grown, so has the lineup of tools available for photo editing and management and many of them are free. In essence, photography tools fall into three categories with a wide gulf in the middle. At the top is Photoshop and its plug ins used widely by professional photographers. There is a mid-range of tools that generally cost no more than $100 and many that offer suites of capabilities including video and audio in addition to photo imaging. The leading competitors include Paint Shop Pro from Corel, Digital Image Suite from Microsoft (you can at least…

Alien Skin offers instant paint plug-in

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 16th 2007 | Permalink
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PRODUCEABLE ART There’s no such thing as easy art but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep trying. Snap Art, a plug-in program from Alien Skin, seems to promise users a shot at becomming high art with a few push buttons. In the end, you can get some pretty interesting creations but as in all things, the more effort you put into it, the better your end result will be. And, this being a computer and all, the old rule, garbage in/garbage out still holds. I have used several Paint Programs and I enjoy them a great deal. The leading example is…

Photography reviews

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 16th 2007 | Permalink
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Introduction Camera technology has reached a major inflection point. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say cameras are looking for an inflection point. The camera body designs, lenses and sensors have all settled down into a comfortable arms race. Customers can have all the megapixels they want even in low-priced cameras. If they’re savvy enough to discern quality, consumers can opt for high quality digital SLRs with optional lenses of any description. Now, it’s all about money and brand. There is one more detail—formats. He who owns the format owns the data. And that, in a nutshell is why imaging companies…

Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 16th 2007 | Permalink
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Did we ever tell you that we love TV? We do, we really do and always have, and it just keeps getting better and better—and more accessible for everyone everywhere—TV to the max! And loving TV as much as we do you can imagine we’re always interested in seeing new ones and new technologies. This week we got to look at a couple of new units from Pinnacle and got a pleasant surprise. Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro There are a lot of PCTV USB tuners around—many of them work, a lot don’t. So it’s with a bit of trepidation that we…

Matrox’s TripleHeadToGo – Digital edition

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 2nd 2007 | Permalink
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Those cunning Montrealites have extended their external frame buffer manager into the digital domain and now have a DVI version of it. Shown in the picture is the PC side of the unit, and it also has a VGA input connector since most laptops don’t offer a DVI connector. Figure 1: Matrox’s TripleHeadToGo Digital Edition. (Source: Matrox) The unit looks like a giant second monitor to your PC and can drive an image up to 3840 x 1024 (if you have enough frame buffer memory to support it). That works out to be the equivalent of three 1280 x 1024 screens.…

Confessions of a digital media junkie

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 4th 2007 | Permalink
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If that Amazon bill ever gets into the wild in our household I am toast. Ditto that Paypal history. When it comes to buying media players I just can’t help myself. As readers of this column know, I am in serious love with the Creative ZenW media player. I take it with me everywhere and I have given serious thought to leaving my computer at home and just taking the media player. Why not? I can listen to music, use it for storage, play videos, record podcasts, play the radio. It synchs with Outlook so I have my calendar and appointments…

Cyberlink updates its video lineup

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 4th 2007 | Permalink
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Cyberlink has just introduced its latest version of PowerDirector and Media Deluxe Pro. Cyberlink is a wildly crea-tive company and that adjective is chosen carefully. The company draws from a deep well of creative talent in Taiwan who are associated with the University, thanks to the company chairman Jau Huang and his longstanding relationship with the school. For instance, Cyberlink is pushing the boundaries of PC TV to places that TV would never go alone with its new Media Deluxe Pro. Media Deluxe Pro The company has put itself out ahead with its new video analyzing and editing features. For people…

Dynadock: The almost

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 4th 2007 | Permalink
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It works well and exposes the idiosyncrasies of USB peripherals Figure 1. Setting up the Dynadock. (Photo: JPR) This week we’re testing a nifty little 2001 A Space Odyssey–looking monolithic device from Toshiba called Dynadock. The concept is amazingly clever: simply plug it into a USB 2.0 socket on your laptop (or desktop for that matter), and you’re done. Plugged into the Dynadock is your RJ45 CAT5 Ethernet cable, your DVI second monitor, your optical S/PDIF and/or 3-mm stereo jack, and whatever other (up to six) USB devices you use (e.g., keyboard, mouse, disks, etc.). Is that a great idea or…

Graphics boards and chips

Posted by Kathleen Maher on May 21st 2007 | Permalink
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Testing the AMD HD2900XT AMD and Nvidia try to excite—no sale In the last week of April AMD held a little party first in Tunisia and later in the week in Sunnyvale, because those AMD folks really like to party and stack up the mileage points. To attend either of these shindigs you had to sign a NDA promising you wouldn’t say or write anything about what you might hear at the event until May 14, 2007. On Tuesday April 24 we were given details about the R600 chip and the AIB it would grace, the Radeon HD2900. We were not…

AMD likes four

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 26th 2007 | Permalink
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A couple of months ago we reviewed AMD’s 4x4, possibly the most powerful machine that one can still call a PC. Now AMD has brought out the RS690 chipset, and among its many features the one that caught my eye (no pun intended) is the ability to drive four displays—another four for AMD. There have been a lot of IGPs in the market, and all of them, up until now (at least as far as we know) shut off the IGP’s GPU when an AIB is plugged into the PCIe slot. AMD changed the rules, in many ways, with this new…

Sandio’s Game O 3D mouse

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 8th 2007 | Permalink
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The Sandio Game O 3D gaming mouse is a well-designed device that incorporates three mini-joysticks for either six degrees of freedom in 3D applications, or whatever the user custom-programs them to do. Other features of the mouse include a removable palm rest base and two additional programmable buttons, which when pressed in unison cycle the mouse on the fly through four dpi settings ranging from 400 to 2000. The software is quite easy to use and installed without a hitch. I created a profile for web use where I programmed the joysticks to page up and down, home, end, bookmark, print,…

NEC omnibus display

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 8th 2007 | Permalink
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NEC 37-inch LCD monitor, 3735WXM. (Source: NEC) NEC invented the multisync monitor in 1985—22 years ago. The company was king of the hill for computer monitors for a long, long time, but slowly lost market share to aggressive Taiwanese monitor companies like LLLL and in 2000 merged with long-time rival Mitsu-bishi. NEC was also one of the first to bring out LCD monitors. Recently NEC Display Solutions (formerly NEC–Mitsubishi) brought out a killer 37-inch LCD multi-sync display that can be used for almost anything, and they loaned one to us to test. Well suited for home entertainment systems, gaming arcades, conference…

Photoshop reloaded – make that Adobe reloaded

Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 4th 2006 | Permalink
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Got work to do? Do not go near Adobe Labs or you’ll get sucked right in. If you don’t find big fun playing with Soundbooth, Adobe’s new sound editor for non-sound editors, you’ll lose hours organizing your photos via Lightroom or picking the colors for your guest room using Kuler, shown above. CS2 users will get a shot at the very latest in Photoshop. As we have commented here before, the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe has brought on a fundamental change in Adobe’s corporate culture—not to mention its software architecture. We’ve been seeing this evolution from the very start as…

Pure Foto Magic, a mini USB TV tuner, and how (not) to download movies

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 6th 2006 | Permalink
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I know, some of you think the “F” in PFM stands for something else, and it does, but in this case it stands for both—read on … This is a sad story with a happy ending. My dear aunt Joy died last week, in her bed, asleep, no pain, about as good a way to go as there is. She was 93, led a great life, had three daughters, five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, but only one nephew. I flew back to Philadelphia for the funeral and met with my cousins, who I haven’t seen for five years. We grew up together and…

Roxio’s Creator 9

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 6th 2006 | Permalink
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$79.99 In this day and age of low-cost consumer video products, it can be pretty hard to make a buck. Roxio met the challenge by combining its formidable disk-creation software with video- and photo-editing and charging a premium for the suite compared to similar products. The ace in the hole for the com-pany was their CD/DVD-burning tools acquired with Adaptec. Well, time marches on—Sonic Solutions acquired Roxio and now the company has all kinds of expertise including DVD-making, video, audio expertise, and -backup. An adequate review of Roxio’s new Creator 9 should probably take a few months and a few disasters…

Creative media player: The Vision:W

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 6th 2006 | Permalink
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$299 (30-GByte version) Figure 1. The wide-screen appeal of the Vision:W is obvious. The high-resolution screen can easily handle movies. Now, if only it were easier to get TV shows and movies for non-iPod devices. (Source: Creative)   It’s always Christmas at the Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs, at least when it’s not Halloween and time for tricks or treats. This week brought a real treat in the mailbag—the Creative Vision:W media player. This is a top-of-the-line Creative media player with a 30-GByte hard drive (it’s also available in a 60-GByte version), 4.3-inch high-resolution color screen display, and a replaceable, rechargeable battery.…

MTTL melts ATI’s Radeon X1950XTX

Posted by Kathleen Maher on August 28th 2006 | Permalink
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Figure 1. ATI’s X1950XTX and X1950CF. (Source: JPR) True to their word, given at Siggraph, ATI promised to send samples of the new AIBs to us, and they showed up last week—a X1950XTX, and a X1950 CF. To us that means they are in production; we have found this to be a pretty solid rule. Notice the dual-link connector on the CF version (AIB on the right), and the heat tubing running through the copper heat sink. It’s filled with a glycol. We plugged them into an Asus A8 R32 MVP Deluxe 3200-based mobo with a 2.6-GHz dual-core FX 60 AMD…

Jon tries to make a movie for his PSP

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 5th 2006 | Permalink
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Here’s the way it should work. You pick a source file, say a DVD, or maybe a WMV or AVI. You jam in your memory stick, tell the program where it is, or if it’s a really smart program, what it is—you let the program find it, and press Go. You can’t do that for a zillion reasons. Some of the reasons are all the damn file formats, other reasons are the source locations (CDs, USB memories, HDDs, web, etc.), then there are all the output formats, and finally the output media. Several companies produce “DVD” burning and copying programs and…

2-4-$1 – Nvidia’s Dual-GPU AIB

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 5th 2006 | Permalink
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Well, it’s not quite two for the price of one, but it’s close. Long anticipated, since Nvidia showed its Quad solution in the big Dell tent at CES, the company has come out with a consumer version of the dual-GPU AIB. And by installing two of these SLI-ready GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics AIBs into an nForce 4 SLI or 590/570 SLI-based motherboard, authorized system builders can build quad-SLI systems. So, quad is still not for consumers after all, sorry. The GeForce 7950 GX2 offers two GPUs working simultaneously on a single card, which when added up gives you 48 pixel pipes…

Windows Vista tests

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 5th 2006 | Permalink
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We had lots of stuff to play with this past three-day weekend—too much, as usual, but we gave it our best effort. We went from the very large to the very small. Having just gotten back from WinHec with a fresh Vista Beta build, and having a new motherboard and Intel Duo processor to check out, we went to work. Todd Sparks (our IT manager) and Jon set up a new system with an Intel Pentium D 3.4 GHz with 1 GByte of 533-Mhz PC 4200 DDR2 memory (the fastest we could get, even though the chipset will support 800), an…

Devices that work

Posted by Kathleen Maher on May 22nd 2006 | Permalink
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KATHLEEN HAS BEEN CORNERNING THE MARKET IN RIO MP3 PLAYERS. A trip to eBay reveals that these players are still available and many of them are selling for less than $50. Rio was a pioneer in the industry, and the company got a lot of things right. What’s really wonderful is that it is expandable with an SD memory. The devices have gotten a bad rap for dependability, and indeed one of the players, a cute little khaki-colored Rio 256-MByte player, did go south—worse, it went south on a defenseless younger relative of ours who was given the thing as a…

Never buy another keyboard

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 11th 2006 | Permalink
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Now that’s the last thing our friends at Logitech want to hear, but you get your hands, er, your fingers on a G15 keyboard, you’ll never want anything else, and you probably won’t need anything else. This is the keyboard that does it all. It’s branded as a gamer keyboard and it’s that, and whole lot more. Logitech positions it as being designed by gamers, for gamers. The company says its engineers and designers spent hundreds of hours talking to pro gamers, getting feedback through questionnaires, interviewing casual gamers, and observing gamers of all ages and levels of expertise. We can…

Big boards, big fun – looking at Nvidia’s 7900GTXs

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 11th 2006 | Permalink
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Figure 1. Benchmark results for ATI and Nvidia. (Source: JPR) You may recall we recently tested dual Nvidia GeForce7800GTX 512 AIBs in SLI mode against dual ATI Radeon X1900XTX AIBs in a Crossfire mode. The results are on our website. No sooner had we finished than Nvidia announced the GeForce 7900 GTX So we called Nvidia and asked if we could borrow a couple of the new AIBs to do some testing. And, true to the reports we’re been reading on The Inquirer and The Register, there were no AIBs available, to us. I happened to be whining about that to…

We do Crossfire – SLI tests

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 28th 2006 | Permalink
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We got a new Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe socket 939 motherboard with the new ATI Crossfire chipset (that we're not permitted to talk about now, but will do so in the next issue) and built up a new computer. AMD sent us a new dual-core 2.604-GHz 64 FX-60 processor and we beefed up the system with a 550W power supply and 1 GByte of 400-MHz DDR; we were ready to rock and roll. Comparison of SLI and Crossfire systems. (Source: Jon Peddie Research) (Note: Nvidia doesn't run AA in SLI mode.) Sitting next to the CF-based system was an SLI-based system,…

What a chassis – the Lian Li memorial chassis, that is

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 28th 2006 | Permalink
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Figure 1. Lian Li's memorial chassis. (Source: Lian Li) We recently stumbled across the Lian Li 20th anniversary memorial chassis and thought it was exactly how a Crossfire or SLI chassis should look, like a giant exhaust fan. Further investigation, however, revealed it also to be very cleverly designed, and strikingly interesting looking, as well as totally unique, cabinet (see Figure 1). A little more investigation led us to Hardware Logic's page, where they took the cabinet and built a PC using it (Figure 2). Figure 2. Lian Li 20th anniversary memorial cabinet loaded and exposed. (Source: Hardwarelogic.com) You can see…

Apple introduces Aperture; Adobe counters with Lightroom

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 30th 2006 | Permalink
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Apple has been saving most of its surprises for the consumer end of its business, but just before the holidays the company rolled out Aperture as a gift for its dedicated professional customer base. The new photo-management and image-processing tool is a gorgeous complement to Apple's Cinema displays—which are making their way to being affordable—and the new Quad G5 computers, the last of the Power PC Apples. Figure 1. The Loupe in action with Apple's Aperture Layout feature. (Source: Apple) Aperture represents an archetypal Apple approach to design. The new software for photo post-processing does not do much that a myriad…

If you like four how about a 2 x 2?

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 16th 2006 | Permalink
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AMD just announced its long-awaited dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60. Long-awaited not because it is late but because there is such a pent-up demand for it in the enthusiast community. You can expect to see this part fly off the shelves. The demand for high performance in PC games and digital media content has steadfastly escalated, challenging Moore's Law while reviews have shown the AMD Athlon 64 dual-core processors outshining the competition. So the 64 FX-60 dual-core processor will take its place as the highest performing dual-core consumer processor from AMD. The company claims it is showing an average 34% improvement on…

Living with the Xbox 360

Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 21st 2005 | Permalink
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The Xbox 360 is clearly this year's Tickle-Me Elmo. Stores started reporting shortages shortly after Thanksgiving. If you want an Xbox 360 and you just can't find one you might try going to Japan because we hear the machines are sitting on the shelves. According to a survey conducted by Japanese publishers Enterbrain, Microsoft has sold less than half of the 159,000 boxes the company has shipped to Japan for the first week of sales. Enterbrain publishes the Japanese game magazine Famitsu. Editor Munetatsu Matsui of Famitsu says the reason for the slow sales of the Xbox 360 is because gamers…

Photo album software comparison

Posted by Kathleen Maher on September 22nd 2003 | Permalink
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The biggest problem of the digital age will not be how to get the digital media—it is flowing to and from the computer from every imaginable source including TV, video cameras, still cameras, Internet downloads, etc. The biggest problem will be how to organize the data. Photo album software has been around for some time but very little of it works well. New products have come out and each one is an improvement over the last, but no program has the perfect mix of features. The first requirements are ease of use and flexibility enabling the hobbyist to easily keep track…