Monthly Archives: August 2006
Oki – C3300n
Not strictly speaking a colour laser printer, OKI’s latest workgroup C3300n colour printer has a 1,200 x 600dpi resolution and, like many of its siblings, uses LED technology to print. This achieves much the same effect as a laser printer only with generally faster print times and, it has to be said, lower print quality….
Positech – Kudos
You join this reviewer as he’s undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. You see, for the past three hours he’s been a struggling waitress by the name of Deirdre who takes her meagre income (supplemented by a handful of tips) to pay for acting classes, in the hope of making a break into the…
Mio – C710
It is no longer enough to produce a dedicated navigation system that can get you from A to B by shouting “at the next junction, turn left” and similar phrases. Navigation systems have to do a lot more than that these days to warrant a second glance from prospective purchasers. So along comes Mio’s C710,…
X-oom – Podcast Studio
There’s an increasing trend among software publishers to lump a set of applications together and tack on a label such as ‘Suite’ or ‘Studio’, no matter how well or poorly those applications interact with one another. That was certainly our initial fear with X-oom’s Podcast Studio, and at first it looked like our worries were…
MSI – NX7600GS T2D256EH
It doesn’t take a detective to work out that the graphics chip at the heart of the MSI NX7600GS T2D256EH is an Nvidia GeForce 7600GS, however it’s not immediately apparent how the 7600GS differs from the 7600GT. The answer is that the 7600GS chip only supports DDR2 memory instead of DDR3, which effectively limits the…
TAS – Zebra
TAS Zebra is an unusual name for an accounting program, but the program itself is a tried-and-tested implementation of traditional double-entry bookkeeping. Where it differs is in pricing: less than £50 for a program accredited by the Institute of Chartered Accountants and backed by parent company Sage is something of a bargain. There’s an ongoing…
BenQ – FP202W
The BenQ FP202W is a 20-inch widescreen TFT display with a resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 pixels, and while it’s quite cheap that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good value. Once you’ve clipped the rectangular base onto the slab-like stand and taken a look at the display, you start to wonder whether it was designed…
Sweex – Blue Bay
Sweex is a firm which, over the past year or two, has slowly but surely positioned itself against the likes of Trust at the budget end of the hardware market. The company’s 2GB, solid state Blue Bay MP3 player clearly expresses that intention, thanks to bog standard blister packaging that finds room to scream ‘Manual…
Apple – 20-inch Cinema
The specification of the Apple 20-inch Cinema TFT display gives you all the facts, but that’s a bit like saying that a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild consists of fermented grape juice; it’s accurate but not very helpful. The resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 pixels gives a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:10 and the only input is…
Lexmark – X2470
In recent years Lexmark has majored on selling into the cheaper end of the market, euphemistically known as entry-level. The company’s done very well at it and last year it introduced both a printer and an all-in-one based on a single-cartridge design. One three-colour, £12 cartridge was all you needed to buy; quick and simple….