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| — HARDWARE SECTION — |
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Canopus ADVC-100 digital/analog FireWire converter Overall
rating: A quick
review by Eddy
Nivens Recently, we were asked to transfer the content of a Beta tape recorded in 1982 onto a DVD. After researching several options, such as having a video service do the transfer (at $50/hour!), USB-to-RCA adapters, a PCI-based hardware/software solution, and the Canopus, the Canopus seemed the most straightforward and inexpensive long-term choice. While doing research on these types of converters, I learned that if your source is longer than 2 hours, sometimes the audio track could get out of sync with the video track. Fortunately, I was please to read the following on the Canopus web site: "Other converters can lose audio/video sync when converting longer segments of video. The ADVC100 is the first inexpensive DV converter that supports locked audio when converting from analog to digital, assuring perfect audio and video synchronization." My source was over 2 hours and the Canopus kept the audio and video tracks in sync the entire time. The first thing that struck me about the Canopus is its size but don't let that fool you! It'll handle anything that you throw at it. After attaching the Sony Beta machine to the Canopus using RCA video/audio cables, we hooked up the Canopus to the Mac using a standard 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable. We loaded iMovie and clicked on the camera icon and we began to see the contents of the nearly 22 year old Beta tape on our Mac's display! We rewound the Beta and got iMovie set up to record the stream and started over, this time for real. We took in nearly 2 hours of digital video from the Beta that day. Unfortunately, this conversion/transfer process happens in real-time. In other words, a 4-hour VHS tape will take 4 hours to digitize and the process cannot be sped up. This really isn't a consideration, however, as our use will be infrequent and we can let this process happen overnight or while eating dinner, etc. Once the Beta's contents were transferred to the Mac, we were able to edit the video (getting rid of those cheesy early '80s commercials!) and then burn everything onto a DVD with iDVD. Now, we can relive those "thrilling moments of yesteryear" by watching them on DVDs. Not only that, but with the Canopus, we were able to import from a medium that will only steadily degrade in quality over the years and place it on a digitalized medium that will last for decades to come and this digitized content can be readily shared in a variety of ways (e.g. e-mails, QuickTime Movies, etc.). In summary, if you have the need to bring in any video and/or audio stream, from any type of equipment with RCA or S-Video outputs, then the Canopus is the right tool for the job! |
 Top-Front View (Left & Right RCA Audio Inputs, RCA Video input, S-Video input, 4-pin FireWire/iLink input/output) Approximate measurements: 5 3/4" W x 4 3/4" D x 1" H  Front View (Left & Right RCA Audio Inputs, RCA Video input, S-Video input, 4-pin FireWire/iLink input/output)  Back View (FireWire & S-Video inputs, S-Video output, RCA video output, left & right RCA Audio output, AC jack & power switch) |
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Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Camera Overall
rating: A quick
review by Oriana
Mellott |
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Hewlett-Packard 1012 Laser Printer Overall
rating: A quick
review by Eddy
Nivens The only downside, albeit a small one, lies in the software driver for the printer. Using the latest driver version, there's a small flaw in the "standard" preset in the Print dialog box. The "standard" preset defaults to printing in reverse order even though the printer's paper path causes all of the pages to print face down anyway. In other words, the default setting causes the last page of a document to print first and you end up having to manually resort your pages by hand! There's a workaround, however, and it's fairly straightforward: copy your "standard" preset, rename it the to name of your printer to help locate it quickly, select that new preset, select the "Paper Handling" drop-down box in the Print menu, and uncheck the "reverse page order" option and print. Once you print using this new preset, it will remain as the active preset and your pages should come out correctly. All in all, this printer is a great, compact, fast and inexpensive laser printer! You can't go wrong with one of these printers. |
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64MB
USB Flash Hard Drive with CompactFlash Extension Slot Overall rating: 
A Quick Review by Eddy Nivens Submitted: 3/19/2003 OSs Supported - OS X, OS 9.x, OS 8.6; Windows '98SE, 2000, ME, and XP Additional information and technical specs at here Retail approx. $35.00 As one of those individuals with a PowerBook and a digital camera, I immediately liked this flash hard drive (Model CR2AS-64) because it serves two purposes: (1) it allows me to import my pictures from my digital camera's CompactFlash card to my PowerBook without having to use either a bulky, standalone CompactFlash card reader or having to use a PC Card-CompactFlash card adapter and, (2) it gives me a way to read/write data to a cross-platform storage medium (i.e. it can be used on both PCs and Macs). After inserting the flash hard drive into an available USB slot and without having to install any drivers, the drive was immediately recognized and mounted by OS X. I was able to read and write data on the drive quickly and easily. The only reason I gave this product four crowns instead of five has to do with the fact that the drive would not recognize a "high-speed" CompactFlash card. In other words, I inserted a 64MB 12x CompactFlash card in it and the drive would not recognize it. By contrast, when I inserted a regular (read: "regular speed") 64MB CompactFlash card, the drive recognized the card and mounted it on the desktop. I have often written files onto the drive from my Mac in order to work on those files later on a PC and I've not had any problems doing this. The drive comes already formatted for PCs but can be used, as is, by Macs. You can reformat the drive as a Mac HFS+ drive but you would lose the cross-platform capability. Lastly, in case you're wondering how fast it is compared to writing to a floppy, this drive can read at a rate of 12MBs/second and write at 5.9MBs/second! No 3.5" floppy drive that I am aware can read/write that fast! In short, if you need a quick, compact storage device to replace toting floppies around, look no further than this drive. With the added convenience of being able to insert an inexpensive CompactFlash card to increase your storage space, this product is definitely a winner! back to top |
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Dual
3.5-inch Firewire Drive Bay Case w/ 80w Power Supply |
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OWC
Mercury Express 2.5" Portable FireWire Oxford 911 Enclosure
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ADS
FireWire Drive Case |
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EZ Quest FireWire CD-RW (aka: Boa CD-RW 48x12x48 Ext. FireWire Drive) Overall
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HP PSC
750 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier Submitted:
2/28/2003 Retail
approx. $100 |
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| — SOFTWARE SECTION — |
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Overall
rating: Mac OS X has been going though a continuous evolution, and Mac OS X version 10.3 is the latest step in becoming a more evolved species of "Operationus Systemus". As Panther was released on October 24, 2003, there has been time for Apple to release a few updates to it. I am currently using version 10.3.2 (build 7D24). I tried it on 2 iBooks, a “clamshell” 466-mhz and a white Dual USB 500-mhz, neither of which is considered current in these days of G5s, but the first thing I noticed was the speed difference. Now I'm not saying that I was blown away by the sudden increase in performance of my 4-year-old machine, but I will say that it was noticeably peppier. The next thing I noticed were the changes to the Finder. Every Finder window now has a side bar on the left hand side. On the top of this side bar you see all your drives. Hard drives, networked drives, CD/DVD drives. From here you can access all your files more readily, including those on your iDisk. You can also eject drives and media by clicking on the eject triangle next to the drive in the side bar. While you can customize this area, with which drives to show, the real magic comes in the lower half of the side bar. This area is for you to put just about anything you want to see and use frequently. Drag a folder into the side bar and you have instant access to that folder, to see it's contents quickly, or to drag and drop stuff into it. You can also put frequently need files or applications in the side bar. But the best thing about it is, all these items will now appear in every Finder window you open, including the open and save dialog boxes in the applications. You can also place items in the top bar of each window, as you were able to do before, but that area seems more suited for tool like things including the new Action Button. This gives you access to the contextual menus with a single left click and what it shows, varies, depending on what item you have selected at the time. The side bar is also smart in it's appearance. As you resize the window, the items in the side bar will enlarge and shrink to allow you to see as many of them as possible. One problem with OS X's UNIX base is that when you open your hard drive, you have to drill down through the main level, into the Users folder, then actually open your own user folder, before you actually get to your files. The new Finder helps this by having the Finder window open at the user level where all your files are, simplifying things by not showing you what you don't need to see. The next big thing in the Finder is called Expose. Have you ever had a bunch of windows open and needed to find a specific one quickly? What if you could move your mouse or click a key, and have every open window shrink down to a size small enough that you could see every window. This is what Expose does. You can have it bring forward all your open windows, just the windows from the front most application, or move all windows out of the way, for quick access to the desktop. This is controlled either through the F-keys or by moving your mouse into a selectable corner of your screen. iChatAV, having been in beta stage in Jaguar is now complete in Panther. Using your .mac account name or an AIM screen name, you can communicate through Instant messaging, now with voice and video chat. And if the person you are chatting with doesn't have a video or FireWire web cam, you can still do a one way chat, and allow them to see you. File Vault is a tool that will be valuable to portable users. In OS X, all a particular users files are in their own users folder. If you lose your computer or it is stolen, all this information is now readily available to whoever has your machine. What File Vault does, is place your entire users folder into an encrypted disk image. then every disk action is automatically encrypted and decrypted behind the scenes, without the users interaction with no noticeable performance hit. This is opened automatically when you log in, and as long as you use a good log in password, if your computer should end up in the wrong hands, the bad guys will be kept out of your Home folder by 128-bit encryption. Home users, like myself, will not have much need for this, but if you carry sensitive work data, it will prove valuable. Fast user switching allows you to switch from one user to another on your computer without either user logging out. You click on a menu of users, in the right hand end of the system bar, select the user you want, type in the password and with a wonderful rotating cube effect, the desktop transforms into the new users desktop, without logging out the previous user. Just reverse the process to go back to the original user. This allows you to quickly do some work on your own files, while leaving things running in the other user. My iBook, lacking in the video power to use Quartz Extreme, still can use the fast user switching, but without the nifty cube effect. The desktop just fades out then fades back in. While there are some visible improvements to Apple's mail.app, most of the good things are inside. On the outside, we now have colour coded threading, which will allow you to more easily manage your mail, and the improved address book displays email addresses as little object bubbles. This allows you to easily drag them to the To: CC: or BCC: fields or to click on them to quickly select among multiple addresses for a single person. But inside, Mail now uses Safari's HTML rendering engine to give you fast and accurate display of HTML messages and web pages that arrive in your mail. Add to this, improved Junk mail filtering, and better handling of attachments and this email client is more than just good enough for me and many users. iDisk has gone through a few changes in Panther. Besides being internet storage that you can connect to, anywhere you have a connection, it now keeps a copy of you files locally, allowing you to use them when you are not connected. Then, when you do connect, iDisk will automatically sync the information you have stored locally, with your iDisk account. Yes, we all know it sometimes seems to be a Windows world, but what's a Mac person to do, living in that world. Well Apple has made it easier to live in a Windows world. From disc burning that supports cross platform standards, to being able to browse Windows servers. If you use your Mac at work, you can now Use Mail to access MS Exchange mail servers. Panther also supports VPN and Active directory to make things easier for you network administrator. My two iBook network has no problem trading files with my PC, as it runs Windows 98 and gathers dust in a spare bedroom, as a file server. Preview
has been improved to dramatically speed up viewing of Adobe Acrobate
PDF files. Font Book is an application to organize and view all
of the many fonts on your computer. Because of Mac OS X's underlying
Unix base there are thousands of Unix programs that can be run using
X11. And if you feel the urge to do some programming of you own
, then Xcode provides a powerful tool set for the developer. These
are but a few of the 150 new features that Apple has put into this
new OS. |
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iClip - multiple clipboard/scrapbook software application Overall
rating: A quick
review by Steve
Weymark iClip
also has the ability to store sound and video clippings when working
in an audio or video editing program. I tried this in QuickTime
Pro, and was able to copy and past sections of video, with ease,
for my own little iMovie. According to the author, future versions
of iClip, will have the ability to open and extract the contents
of many more types of files as clippings (possibly sounds, movies,
rich text, PDFs) As well as the ability to store file aliases in
the clipping bins (instead of extracting the file contents). This
should provide a lot of flexibility in the way it will be able to
be used. |
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Page Last Updated: Sunday, January 7, 2007 11:01 PM