Monthly Archives: May 2005
Kyocera Mita – FS-820
This is the first mono laser printer Kyocera has produced at the entry-level end of the market. With a street price of around £150, it goes head-to-head against budget models from HP and Lexmark, but still hopes to take advantage of its lifetime print engine, which means the only consumable is toner. Styled by FA…
Roxio – Easy Media Creator 7.5 Supersonic
The clue, as they say, is in the title. Amidst the various corporate manoeuvrings of last year, Sonic Solutions picked up the small matter of Roxio’s software business. Cunningly, the company has decided not to wait too long to exploit the – are you ready? – ‘synergies’ of the deal, and this sporadically brilliant compilation…
HP – DesignJet 90
Although there are several colour printers on the market for run-of-the-mill document and photo reproduction, that will produce good quality and colour authenticity, professional photographers and graphic designers will usually have to pay considerable sums for larger prints, either at photo labs or with their own specialist equipment. HP’s DesignJet 90 series, however, is deliberately…
UbiSoft – Playboy: The Mansion
According (obviously) to a friend of ours, the average cost of a top-shelf magazine is around the £4 mark. A second-hand copy of the original Sims game will cost you around a tenner. And, arguably, that combination hits the same bases as Playboy: The Mansion, but by our calculations at half the cost. And yet…
AJP – D900T
It used to be the case that if you were a serious PC gamer you had to deny yourself the pleasures of blasting aliens in your favourite first-person shooter when you went on the road. Laptops just hadn’t developed to the point where 3D cards could sit comfortably inside such a small space without overheating….
UbiSoft – Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Tom Clancy’s special operations agent Sam Fisher has become as much of a gaming icon as Lara Croft and Sonic the Hedgehog. The mixture of cool and moody graphics, allied to a cool and moody hero who specialises in stealth tactics and clever disposal techniques, has ensured that this latest instalment in the Splinter Cell…
Avanquest – Qudos System 3
The bane of most medium to large companies’ existence is the need to keep abreast of all the compliance demands made on it by changing legislation and improvements in business efficiency. Allied to this headache is the need to keep employees informed of all plans, actions, alterations and complaints in a simple, straightforward and uniformed…
Canopus – Let’s Convert AV
With the majority of modern day video capture devices and software showing clear preference for digital camcorders, it’s refreshing to find that Canopus hasn’t forgotten about those of us with trusty old analogue equipment. So if you have a pile of analogue camcorder tapes, or perhaps even a bit of VHS, then Let’s Convert AV…
VMWare – Workstation 5
VMWare Workstation is a computer virtualisation package that lets you install multiple PC ‘guest’ operating systems on one computer and have them running at the same time, with none of the inconvenience of dual-boot configurations. Currently it’s available for Windows and Linux, so we decided to try out both versions, testing on Windows XP and…
Acoustic Energy – Aego P5 MkII home cinema speakers
It may be controversial but this reviewer would like to suggest that there is no point in having anything more than stereo speakers hooked up to your PC unless you want to watch movies, in which case they should be 5.1-channel and offer surround sound decoding. Music plays back in stereo, although regular 5.1 speakers…