For this comparison we looked at eight "AV Notebooks" — portables that can both capture video and export it back out. The notebooks we received came in a variety of speeds, the slowest being a Pentium III 750MHz and the fastest a Pentium III 1GHz.
All the machines shipped with 128MB of RAM, a 20GB hard disk drive, network adaptor, modem, and Windows Me or Windows 2000. We also took a look at the all-new Apple PowerBook G4.
While movie editing on desktop PCs is becoming pretty much mainstream, capturing and editing video on notebooks is just now becoming a reality. The internal graphics processors built into portables have long been the bottleneck for video editing, but in many of the latest high-end notebooks they're fast enough to produce an excellent production.
Most of the notebooks shipped with a single IEEE 1394 FireWire port, which enabled us to both capture and output video. We did, however, receive a few notebooks that offered only S-video out, and no way to capture video. We solved this problem by fitting those notebooks with an IEEE 1394 PCMCIA card from QDI.
| Product | Review | |||
| Editors' Choice | Read Review | |||
| Notebook Benchmarks | Read Review | |||
| Acer TravelMate 351TE | Read Review | |||
| Excel 2700C | Read Review | |||
 IBM ThinkPad A22m |
Read Review | |||
| NEC Versa Txi | Read Review | |||
| Pioneer PowerBook 1G 2200 | Read Review | |||
| Sony VAIO PCG-R505CT | Read Review | |||
| Targa Visonary |
Read Review | |||
| Sidebar Apple Titanium PowerBook G4 | Read Review | |||
| Sidebar PowerPad 160 | Read Review | |||
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| = Editors' Choice.
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