Aimed at both Amigas and PCs, the 560 megs on here cover a vast range of formats, from PageStream to Print Shop, with the obligatory load of black and white IFFs and a generous helping of EPS images. One nice addition is the rather large selection of color IFFs and brushes. For some reason, most of the color IFFs revolve around animals, and the brushes are largely either Disney characters or images you might find in a store...
The disc also includes utilities for the Amiga and PC. The Amiga utils, largely (if not totally) lifted from the Walnut Creek Aminet CD-ROM (as the README file suggests) revolve around decompression. The PC side includes its own uncompression programs, as well as a couple of low-level paint programs.
The logical companion to the above, this 580-meg CD surprisingly enough has the same utilities directory, you can find the standard Adobe, CG, and PostScript selections, as well as the "standard" Amiga type, color fonts, PageStream, PCX, and ProDraw fonts.
The selection is huge, no question about it, but some of the files, inexplicably, are compressed with LHA. No huge complaint here, since after all it means you're getting more font for the space on the disk, but it strikes me as odd considering that there's still a good 70 megs or so free...
Whereas the Weird Science CDs double-target the Amiga and PC markets, the BCI CD is presented as Amiga-only. The clip-art comes in IFF, EPS, and PCX (which doesn't exactly rule out PC-use), all of it black and white, and the fonts are Adobe and PageStream-only. A rather convenient file- and directory list are included on the main directory, as is a rather extraneous CRC list.
Within 540 megs or so is a large enough collection to keep anyone busy for a time.
This CD is the only one brave enough to stake its Amiga identity clearly enough to actually use mixed upper-and-lower case lettering. The 133-meg package headlines the 600 Amiga Font package, 670 fonts in both PostScript and CG format, 1200 EPS images, and (of course) a complete boatload of black and white IFFs.
And, as a bonus to the desktop publisher who doesn't want to spend all of his or her time desktop publishing, about 20 games are included on the CD. A nice gesture, and some of the games (MegaBall, in particular) are actually pretty good.
So, you're looking for an upshot to all of this? Any of the above four CDs are going to give you enough to load up your FONTS: and graphics directories. The Micro R+D CD was a bit surprisingly small, but also seems to have the largest "standard" set of fonts in the 600 Amiga Fonts package. The BCI disc is well balanced, although the clip art leans towards the EPS category. The Weird Science CDs are cornucopias of whatever could be found, in any category, and not all of it will be useful to everybody. But, with such similar prices, the decision is largely up to the end user.