Turn your vanilla PC into a digital darkroom, DV editing station, personal music studio, or telecommuter's dream machine. We've tested an array of products that get you from here to there.

The beauty of the PC is its flexibility. Each beige box is a tabula rasa waiting for the imprint of its owner, and with the right mix of hardware and software, the possibilities are nearly limitless.  With this premise, we gathered four fairly standard machines--Dell Dimension XPS B866r PCs, each with a Pentium III/866, 128MB of RAM, and a 30GB EIDE hard drive running Windows 98 SE--and gave our experts one instruction: turn this functional but boring Honda Civic into a kickin' hot rod.

The results are eye-opening. We wound up with a digital darkroom for the professional photographer, a digital-video-editing station suitable for business, a PC perfect for the home office, and an audio mixer powerful enough for any musician. There's a lot that goes into making this successful. We'll tell you what you need to consider and help you narrow the choices.

Contents

	Darkroom sans chemicals
	Video's Middle Ground
	Remote Location, with View
	Check Your Fidelity

Darkroom sans chemicals

Photos speak volumes. And improvements in digital camera, scanner, and printer technology combined with falling prices mean it's never been easier or more affordable to put professional-caliber photographs into marketing materials, Web sites, and presentations. Our resident imaging expert, Sally Wiener Grotta, has worked as a professional photographer for 18 years and has tested and reviewed hundreds of pieces of equipment for PC Magazine. We asked her to assemble a digital darkroom suitable for a business or the amateur photo enthusiast.

"The key function is input and output, of course--getting pictures in and out of your computer," she says. So the core components she assembled are a digital camera, a scanner, and a photo-quality ink jet printer.

The most important factor in digital imaging is resolution: the measure of how much data a digital camera, scanner, or printer can capture or produce. Resolution requirements will depend on what you want to do with your pictures. If you plan to print your pictures for publication or for professional use, you'll want a camera that delivers a resolution of at least 2 million pixels (2 megapixels).

But for e-mail and Web site images, using large pictures will bog down transmission and downloading considerably. If you know that you will never want to print out your images, you could save $500 or more by buying a 1-megapixel camera. As for scanners, all good flatbeds have at least 600-dpi (600-dot-per-inch) optical resolution. If you need a film scanner (which creates digital images from slides, transparencies, or even APS film), look for a resolution of at least 2,500 dpi. You need this higher resolution, because the originals are so much smaller, requiring greater density of data per inch scanned.

Contents

	FIRST PURCHASE: Digital Camera
	SECOND PURCHASE: The Scanner
	THIRD PURCHASE: Photo Printer

FIRST PURCHASE: Digital Camera

All reviews by Sally Weiner Grotta PC Magazine

For businesses that use a lot of photos in promotions and presentations, a digital camera is a must. They take high-quality pictures that you can add to your documents in minutes, alleviating the time and expense of developing film.

Consumer point-and-shoots--those in the AU$300-to-$1200 range--are usually too limited for business needs. But professional models can cost anywhere from $3500 to $40,000--too expensive and often too difficult to operate for business users. Between these two ranges are the prosumer models we tested. These provide everything businesses need at relatively affordable prices: AU$1500 to $4000.

SECOND PURCHASE: The Scanner

All reviews by Sally Weiner Grotta PC Magazine

If the images that you're working with come from a library of already existing photos, you'll need a scanner. There are two classes of scanners to choose from: those who will be inputting prints need a flatbed scanner, and those working with slides and negatives usually need a film scanner. Although some flatbeds come equipped with transparency adaptors that can handle slides, they can't really match a film scanner's ability to produce top-quality, high-resolution images.

Considerably faster than the CanoScan, the ScanMaker is also relatively silent. Pictures were crisp, with excellent details in shadows, and colours were pleasing. To top it off, Microtek includes great software such as Photoshop 5.0 LE.

THIRD PURCHASE: Photo Printer

All reviews by Sally Weiner Grotta PC Magazine

If you routinely print out pictures, consider a photo-quality inkjet. These devices produce finer dots and greater detail in shadows and highlights than general-purpose printers, and they offer more colour control, all of which help create prints that can pass for real photos.

Printing is slower than with other inkjet printers, but the stunning photos are worth the wait. In fact, on our image-quality tests, the Epson Stylus Photo 2000P received an unsurpassed 10--for both text and graphics. The Canon and HP both got A's for great though not perfect output. Colours are bright and accurate, with great detail throughout the dynamic range. If you can live with its slow throughput, this is the printer to get.

The PhotoSmart has two separate trays, one for plain paper and the other for 4 x 6in photo paper. You don't have to tell the interface which one to access; the PhotoSmart has a built-in optical sensor that can tell which kind of paper goes with which settings. And for business use, Hewlett-Packard offers an optional duplexer (Model 1218) for double-sided printing.

Setup and software installation is a no-brainer. The driver is powerful and comprehensive--one of the best we've seen for photo printing. Output is fast and silent. Despite all these pluses, photo image quality lagged behind the other two units, but in business graphics it tied the Canon BJC-8500. The HP PhotoSmart 1215 is a versatile device: a reasonably priced compromise between photo and business printing.

Video's Middle Ground

Video editing on the PC has occupied two very distinct niches: entry-level for hobbyists who want to make frequently tedious home movies more watchable and high-end for professional production companies and videographers. Missing was a middle ground: robust but affordable real-time systems for businesses that need in-house video capabilities for training, marketing, and other purposes. That is, until recently.

"Take virtually any combination of the products discussed here and throw in a hot computer and you'll have video production capabilities superior to systems costing AU$100,000 or so only a few years ago," says PC Magazine contributing editor Jan Ozer. Ozer has been covering digital video since its inception (circa 1993), and has authored two books on the subject. So we asked him to build a DV station suitable for business. The core components he chose are the video-capture card, the DV camera, and a PC's hard drive.

Fortunately for businesses, PC hardware caught up to the demands of DV editing a couple years back. Our Pentium III/866 test-bed, with 128MB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive, was certainly up to the task. But this is one area where more speed--say, 256MB of RAM married to a 1.2GHz or faster processor--would certainly be put to use. A few seconds saved previewing here, a few minutes rendering there, and soon you're talking thousands of dollars saved in production time.

The capture cards we tested come bundled with DV-editing software (namely Adobe Premiere), which makes the AU$1,900 to $3,000 price tag easier to swallow. We picked two midrange video cameras (from DV powerhouses Canon and Sony) that deliver excellent video quality, and we also tested four hard drives that deliver the capacity and speed you'll need to render video on the fly.

Contents

	FIRST PURCHASE: DV Camera
	SECOND PURCHASE: The Capture Card
	THIRD PURCHASE: Photo Printer

FIRST PURCHASE: DV Camera

All reviews by Jan Ozer PC Magazine

Designed primarily for professional videographers but simple enough for most novices, the Canon XL1 (AU$9,110) records great audio and video. The only real drawback is the camera's bulky body, which limits portability.

The XL1 is easily twice as large as the Sony DCR-TRV900 we tested. It weighs over six pounds fully loaded, but that includes a swivel cushion to support the camera on your shoulder, distributing the weight and adding valuable stability. The XL1 has a large rubber eyepiece cover, which means even those who wear glasses can be comfortable. And the viewfinder uses a zebra striping effect to identify overexposed hotspots--a useful feature formerly found only on much more expensive cameras. The zoom controls are silky smooth to operate. There is no LCD panel, however, complicating over-the-head and other awkward shooting angles.

Pros love the XL1, because gain, iris, white balance, and shutter speed are controlled by accessible dials on the camera's body, not buried under menus. This also eases experimentation for novices, who can quickly learn to adjust for challenging conditions. Audio recording is another key strength, with a detachable boom microphone eliminating camera noise and separate volume gauges and controls for two audio inputs.

Given the dominating size of the XL1 lens, you'd expect good quality, and Canon doesn't disappoint. In real-world testing, the XL1 waltzed through low light, direct sunlight, and fluorescent light tests, maintaining excellent colour fidelity, image quality, and contrast. Audio quality was also quite good, with minimal tinniness.

The TRV900 features a large LCD panel, accessible audio/video outputs and playback controls, and a host of programmed exposure modes. In addition to progressive-scan video-recording capabilities, the TRV900 can also store 640 x 480 progressive-scan still images in memory for easy downloading.

Where the XL1 provides most relevant controls as knobs on the camera body, the TRV900 buries them under menu selections, which complicates adjustments. Like traditional camcorders, the microphone is embedded beneath the front lens, producing a slight audio hum, and there are no incoming audio gauges.

The camera proved stable and easy to operate in automatic modes and is certainly much more portable than the XL1. Zoom controls are twitchy and hard to control, however, and the small rubber eyepiece is unfriendly to bespectacled videographers.

The TRV900 performed well in laboratory tests, resolving 500 horizontal lines. But video shot under low light conditions was clearly fuzzier than the XL1's output, and colour fidelity degraded slightly under florescent lights. In addition, audio exhibited more noise and a seemingly less dynamic range than the XL1. This adds up to a camera that's great for occasional, informal shoots, but those seeking a camera for serious shooting should invest the extra money for the XL1.

SECOND PURCHASE: The Capture Card

All reviews by Jan Ozer PC Magazine

Unattainable only a few years ago, affordable real-time DV cards are now a reality. Real-time editing solutions add their video effects as you work, whereas older systems had to render the effects in a final, often time-consuming step at the end of the process. Each of the three cards reviewed here offers a unique profile of real-time effects.

We tested the DV Storm using Adobe Premiere 5.1 (Canopus was in the final stages of 6.0 certification). Transition options are extensive, with 2D effects supplemented with 3D effects from Boris Factory and SoftXplode. Real-time filters include colour and brightness adjustments and many artistic effects, though we found the titling utility, Boris Graffiti, unnecessarily complex. Chroma key and picture-in-picture controls were easy to use and powerful, and producers in a hurry will appreciate DV Storm's capture and editing utilities for simple projects.

Matrox offers a wide range of real-time effects, including picture-in-picture, organic wipes, particle effects, page curls, and 3D tiles. The ability to apply these effects as filters or transitions enables creative flexibility unavailable on the other products we reviewed. But there were some shortcomings. There's no DV-tape-scanning utility or a video preview function in the titling program, TitleExpress. Also, the package does not yet support the Premiere 6.0's audio mixer.

When pushing the creative envelope, you'll enjoy the special effects provided by Hollywood FX and complete support for 16:9 videos, though the DV500 uses ordinary Premiere controls for transparency and picture-in-picture effects. In addition, the DV500 renders fewer combined effects in real time than both the Canopus and Matrox and must render all effects before writing back to DV tape.

THIRD PURCHASE: The Hard Drive

All reviews by Jan Ozer PC Magazine

Veteran video producers gravitate toward the more expensive SCSI drives because of troubling memories of IDE's inadequacy. But two trends combine to make IDE drives a smart buy for many producers. First, there's the bigger/faster/better trend that has boosted the performance of all computer components. As IDE moved to EIDE and interfaces transitioned from ATA to Fast ATA and eventually all the way to UltraATA/100, transfer rates improved from mere kilobytes per second to rates in excess of 100MBps.

At the same time, transfer-rate requirements for video editing have actually dropped, courtesy of DV's compact nature. Back in the early days of video editing, professional systems such as those from Avid, Media 100, and TrueVision (which was susequently bought out by Pinnacle Systems) captured in motion-JPEG format. Producers often captured at 7MBps to 10MBps, because higher capture bandwidths translated to superior video quality. But to preview a transition in real time, a computer must simultaneously retrieve two data streams that might total 20MBps--a tremendous load.

By contrast, DV is derived from motion-JPEG, but it's a fixed-bandwidth format, requiring only 3.6MBps. To perform the same real-time preview, a DV system must retrieve only about 7.2MBps, a comparative breeze for most hard drives today.

On our High-End Disk WinMark 99 tests, though the DiamondMax trailed the Atlas, it still pumped 21.4MBps at the disk's inner edge, where performance is slowest--more than sufficient for DV editing. Our picture-in-picture, dual-stream testing confirmed this finding, as all drives successfully retrieved two DV streams for over eight minutes.

The DiamondMax had a slightly slower access time than the SCSI drives, but this proved insignificant when we compiled our 33-minute test video, since times for all the drives were within a 10-second range. More important, the DiamondMax rendered our test production to tape without dropping frames, successfully accessing and reading more than 200 source and temporary files in real time.

Of course, SCSI still provides a unique value in a range of ultra-high-bandwidth applications such as video servers, Web servers, and RAID drives. For dual-stream DV editing, however, 7200RPM EIDE drives like the DiamondMax offer more than sufficient performance at a much more attractive price point.

Remote Location, with View

Whether you're setting up a small home office or equipping an employee to telecommute, there are several staples you'll need. We had longtime contributing editor Bruce Brown survey the current offerings and test select multifunction printers, home gateway products, and CD-RW drives that don't require advanced technical expertise to install, maintain, or use.

"Nothing supports productivity better than a great chair," Brown says wryly. Beyond that pearl of wisdom, Brown encourages any home-based worker with more than one PC to set up a simple network. "You can share files and folders on the drives of the networked PCs and access printers installed to them," he points out. You can also share Internet access, which is appealing if you have broadband access and practical if you use a single phone line for dial-up access. Choices abound for home networking, and so do a slew of competing standards: wired Ethernet, HomePNA (which uses the phone line in your home to link two or more PCs together), HomeRF, and 802.11b (a popular wireless office standard that is coming down in price). Brown tested three residential gateways, a relatively new class of products that act as the central traffic cop for a home network, routing data to the proper devices, doling out Internet access, and serving as a firewall to protect connected PCs from outside intrusion.

For printing, a multifunction unit like the three we tested--which combine a printer with fax, scan, and copy capabilities--makes the most sense. These take up less space and cost less money than if you bought individual devices. And since home-based workers are often isolated islands of information, you'll want to be sure you have a reliable, easy-to-use backup medium, such as one of the CD-RW drives here, to make sure you can get to the beach or the links after a hard day at home knowing that the work you did is stored and safe.

Contents

	FIRST PURCHASE: Multifunction Device
	SECOND PURCHASE: Residential Gateway
	THIRD PURCHASE: CD-RW Drive

FIRST PURCHASE: Multifunction Device

All reviews by Bruce Brown PC Magazine

Multifunction devices (MfDs) shine in home offices. Using one device as a printer, copier, fax, and scanner saves desk space and limits the amount and type of supplies you need on hand. We asked the leading MFD makers--Brother and Hewlett-Packard--to submit their latest entries.

The MFC-9200C connects directly to a PC via either USB or parallel-port connections, and it also has an optional network print server, linking it to the network via a hub for shared access. The device can also be a standalone image centre. Separate CompactFlash and SmartMedia slots on the front of the unit let you plug in memory modules from a digital camera and print directly from them, without loading the images onto your PC. Even on plain paper, we could print useful photo-image index pages directly from a memory card and then pick the ones we wanted to output on glossy colour stock.

The unit uses separate ink tanks for each color, which saves money in the long run, since you don't have to replace all of the cartridges when you run out of only one color. You can send a fax while printing without interrupting the task, and if you receive a fax or make a copy, the machine stops printing until the fax or copy is done. Black text and colour copies are very good, although in default mode the copies were a bit grainier than the originals.

SECOND PURCHASE: Residential Gateway

All reviews by Bruce Brown PC Magazine

If you plan to add a second PC to your telecommuting mix, consider networking the computers. You'll be able to share files between machines without the floppy-disk shuffle, and you'll be able to output to a single machine from any PC--desktop or laptop--on the network. But the real draw is sharing Internet access: people with a dial-up connection need only a single ISP account and phone line, but those with broadband can take advantage of the high-speed Web on every machine. The home-network bargains today are in neatly packaged, relatively inexpensive devices that combine broadband Internet access routers with firewall protection and wired Ethernet network switches.

Even though the Linksys and Netgear products have only four ports, you aren't limited to that number of networked PCs. You can daisy-chain multiple hubs or switches (relatively inexpensive components exist, typically under $250 for an eight-port 10/100 switch, for example) with a network bridge to expand your network. A bridge is a network peripheral used to integrate multiple networks. If you use both Ethernet and phone-line networking, for example, Linksys and Netgear make phone-line-to-Ethernet bridges that plug into the 10/100 ports on their combination devices.

As with the Netgear and Linksys routers, you configure the 3Com box using a browser. Simply enter your broadband ISP information, set the device to connect automatically with the Internet on request, and configure each Ethernet/Fast Ethernet PC to use DHCP to get IP addresses automatically. And since the box has Ethernet inputs, it effectively acts as a bridge that lets you link wired and wireless devices on a single network. As with wired home networks, there are also bridges available to expand wireless networks.

THIRD PURCHASE: CD-RW Drive

All reviews by Bruce Brown PC Magazine

Along with eating broccoli, making backup copies of our critical data tops off the list of things we know are good for us but we avoid anyway. This task is especially important for home-based workers, who don't have the luxury of an IT staff to back up the central servers--and who have no one to complain to when the system crashes and data is lost. For telecommuters, the only way to increase the chances of making backups is probably to buy an external drive. Our favourites are CD-RW drives, since they are both affordable and easy to use. The fact that you can use them to burn your own music CDs is a great bonus as well.

A single CD can hold 650MB of data, which should be fine for most workers. You'll be storing only data files on them; operating-system, utility, and application files can always be restored from the originals if disaster strikes. CD-RW drives are available in internal and external versions with parallel, SCSI, and USB interfaces. We tested three external drives with USB interfaces--the easiest to install and move between PCs, but also the slowest.

Check Your Fidelity

Not long ago, musicians who wanted to record at home were limited to four tracks on a multitrack cassette recorder. Serious recordings were possible only in a studio for hundreds of dollars per hour. But the pc has changed the tune for working musicians.

-Today's computers are powerful enough to shame the studios where many classic albums were recorded," says Matt Graven, a PC Magazine's contributing editor, and a musician with his own indie record label who cuts tracks on his computer-based home recording studio.

With a pc, it's possible to produce an entire album from home. At the heart of your studio, software such as Cakewalk Pro Audio and Steinberg's Cubase vst serves as a virtual recorder and mixing board. With these products, you can record audio, insert samples, program midi tracks, layer in effects, and mix down your final project. When everything is perfect, you can burn your tracks to cds or convert them to mp3s and upload them to the Web.

The software is useless, however, without high-quality audio. Standard sound cards simply aren't powerful enough for serious projects, and with their single line inputs, only one instrument or one voice can be recorded at a time. With that in mind, we asked Graven to test two pro-quality sound solutions.

Contents

	Digital Audio Interfaces
	PERFORMANCE TESTS
	Introduction

Digital Audio Interfaces

All reviews by Matthew P. Graven PC Magazine

Though most typical sound cards today support 16-bit audio--the standard for CDs--the norm for professional recording projects is 24-bit audio. The two models we evaluated deliver 24-bit sound quality, but that's just the beginning.

The beauty of the Layla24 is that it is so nonrestrictive. With its eight balanced analogue inputs, you can record up to eight independent tracks simultaneously, and its eight analogue outputs let you run each of your recorded tracks separately to an external mixing board. Optical and S/PDIF ports let you acquire audio from digital sources such as ADAT (optical ports let you transfer this data to your PC without any degradation of sound quality). The Layla24 even acts as a MIDI interface for equipment such as synthesisers and drum machines, with in, out, and through ports.

When recording 24-bit, 96khz audio, the sound quality is astonishing--quite a difference from a standard audio card. And because the Layla24 is external, it picks up less noise from drives and CPU fans.

The US-428's standout feature is the mixing console, which provides hands-on control over recording software. For example, the volume faders and panning knob let you mix your project without using a mouse. Though it doesn't offer as many audio inputs or support as many simultaneous tracks as the Layla24, the US-428 is still a good option for a home recording studio.

PERFORMANCE TESTS

A high number of lines indicates a good resolution. Digital Benchmarks (www.digitalbenchmarks.com) performed the analyses of these cameras.