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September 5, 1998
News
- Lots of great prizes to give away today, including copies of Windows 98 and FrontPage
98.
- Several new printers are in the news this week, which is probably not surprising given
that last week was the Seybold Expo show at Moscone Center. First of all, Epson announced
a whole new line of color inkjet printers—the Epson Stylus Color 440, 640 and
740—which are supposed to replace the 400, 600 and 800 (although I still see those
printers being advertised). Starting at the low end, the $149, 720 dpi Stylus Color 440
offers true four-color printing, meaning it has both black and color cartridges that the
printer uses simultaneously, at speeds of 4 pages-per-minute, or ppm for B&W and 2.5
ppm for color. Moving up to the $199 Stylus Color 640 gives you 1,440 x 720 dpi
resolution, 5 ppm B&W printing and 3.5 ppm color printing. Finally, the $279 dpi 740
raises the performance bar to 6 ppm for B&W and 4.5 ppm for color while maintaining
the 1,440 x 720 dpi resolution. The printer also offers what Epson claims to be 6
picoliter dots, the smallest of any inkjet printer available. Small dots, which are
different from but related to the printer’s resolution, are important because they
help the printer generate higher quality halftone screens. These better halftones, in
turn, allow the printer to produce higher-resolution color images. The other interesting
thing about the 740 is that it’s the first printer to ship with a USB connector as
standard. Like the 440 and 640, the 740 also has standard PC parallel and Mac serial port
connectors, but the USB connectors and the accompanying drivers for both PCs and Macs will
let you take advantage of the much faster USB connection (and will help free up those
other ports for other devices).
- This is particularly good news for iMac owners and potential purchasers because there is
finally now a printer available to use with the iMac. Before the 740, or any other printer
or other USB device will work properly with an iMac, however, you’ll have to download
the iMac USB Update that Apple introduced this week. As I mentioned last week, it turns
out that there were problems with Apple’s implementation of the base USB drivers,
which is what had led to printing problems with the Epson Stylus Color 600 using
Epson’s USB-to-parallel printer adapter kit. With the patch installed, all printing
problems should go away. In related news, Epson has also released USB drivers for several
of their other existing printers. By using them in conjunction with either the Epson or a
Belkin USB-to-parallel adapter cable, you now have several printing choices available for
the iMac.
- HP also introduced new printers this week, although they still don’t have their USB
drivers and cable adapter kit available for iMac owners yet. HP’s new printers are
the $179 DeskJet 697C and the $249 DeskJet 712C. The 697 is a true four-color printer and
prints at speeds up to 5 ppm for black and 1.7 ppm for color. HP is also offering an
optional $39 Photo Cartridge for the 697 for printing better quality digital photos. The
712C uses HP’s Photo Resolution Enhancement, or PhotoReT II technology, which uses
smaller-sized drops of ink to print higher-quality color. The 712’s speed is 6 ppm
for B&W and 3 ppm for color. Both printers offer a resolution of 600 dpi. HP also
introduced a new web site specifically for their DeskJet line of printers at
www.deskjet.com. In addition, while this isn’t brand new, I also saw that the company
has released a really cool looking free web printing application called Web PrintSmart.
Designed specifically for any model of HP DeskJets only, the Windows 95/98/NT application
can improve your printouts from the Web by better organizing the material on a web page.
Plus, you can use it create a customized newspaper that will automatically pull pages from
your own choice of favorite web sites and then print them out. Of course, it’s
designed to get you to use your printer and ink cartridges more, but it’s still
sounds really cool—especially for free.
- If you’re into high-quality computer audio, then you’re going to want to check
out Creative Labs’ new SoundBlaster Live and SoundBlaster Live Value Edition sound
cards. Both cards are PCI-based, but still compatible with the immensely popular
SoundBlaster standard. The Live cards include a powerful new audio processing chip that
can both position sounds in a 3D space and provide reverberation to those positioned
sounds, thereby creating a very realistic, live-sounding environment. In addition, both
cards offer 256 voices of wavetable synthesis and other onboard processing effects. The
$199 standard card includes a separate daughter card with digital inputs and outputs, a
MIDI input and output, and a wide selection of bundled software, whereas the $99 version
only incorporates traditional analog audio inputs and outputs and smaller software bundle.
- Macintosh web designers looking for new tools will be happy to hear that Adobe has
finally announced version 3.0 of PageMill for the Mac. The $99 package, which has been
available to Windows users for several months, incorporates both WYSIWYG page design
features and integrated site management tools. In addition, it offers several cool
features, such as the ability to search and replace images across a web site, and comes
bundled with tons of clip art, design templates, Javascripts and more. A demonstration
version of 3.0 for the Macintosh (as well as Windows) is available from the company’s
web site now.
- So, is the Internet getting you down? According to a widely reported study published
this week in "The American Psychologist," people who use the Internet as little
as 2-3 hours a week tend to be more lonely and depressed than people who use the ‘net
less often or not at all. Despite the fact that Internet has many social dimensions, such
as online chats, e-mail and more, the researchers found that in the 163 people they
studied, regular net users felt more isolated than those people who didn’t regularly
access the Internet. Researchers projected that the reason for this may be because the
people they studied were often using that time online in place of time spent with other
family members. In an interview I read with one of the scientists involved with the study,
the suggestion was made to put the computer you use to access the Internet in a more
public part of the house, rather than buried in some corner. According to the research,
this will make your Internet sessions seem like less of a private activity and will
encourage interaction with others.
- Looking to increase your security on the web? Then you may want to check out Guard Dog
2.0, the latest upgrade to the $59 security package by CyberMedia. The new version of
Guard Dog adds a ton of new features including the ability to automatically encrypt
critical files so that Trojan horse programs such as Back Orifice can’t upload them,
automatically prevent unauthorized applications from accessing the web, block selective
cookie files, erase the history files of where you’ve been on the Internet, store all
your passwords for individual web sites in a central location, detect and delete viruses
and block potential harmful ActiveX controls, and more. In addition, the program will
automatically check for and download any updates to web-related programs, such as
browsers, to be sure you have all the most recent security patches. Existing users who
purchase the new version are eligible for a $20 upgrade rebate.
- Iomega this week announced another price cut on their Jaz 2 removable storage drives.
The SCSI-based peripherals which, as their name implies can store up to 2 GB on a single
removable disk, are now down $100 to $399 for both the internal and external versions.
- Finally, those of you looking for the ultimate in PC notebooks will finally have your
fill this coming week when Intel introduces a 300 MHz version of the mobile Pentium II
processor on Wednesday, September 9. On that day, many companies are expected to announce
new notebooks based around the chip, including Dell, who’s expected to offer a
version of the Inspiron 7000 with that speedy chip and a whopping 15" display. Up
‘til now the biggest notebook screens you could find have been 14.1", so this
promises to be a pretty amazing machine, particularly if you pair it with the available 2x
DVD-ROM drive and keep the price around $3,000, which is what that configuration is
rumored to be. Sign me up.
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