An Adequate Workgroup Printer * Four Workmanlike Hard Drives * A Sextet of Sufficient Monitors
In the Quick Labs game, it sometimes feels like feast or famine. One month we get more products than we can hope to test; another month, it feels as though vendors are hibernating and new products are frightfully scarce. And it's not just product availability that leads to a boom-or-bust sensation: Sometimes it's overall product impressiveness.
Most months, there's at least one product in one of our testing categories that emerges as a real star. It could be a printer that raises the output-quality bar, a hard drive that sets new price-per-megabyte records, or a gorgeous monitor with easy-as-pie controls. Almost as often, one of the products we test stands out as a real loser -- a bona fide dud you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. (It's almost as much fun to warn you of the lemons as it is to trumpet the stars.)
But as this month's batch of products attests, there are times when all the products are solid and workmanlike but nothing to do cartwheels over. Across all the categories, this month's crop performed solidly on our tests, and all the products were acceptably easy to set up and use. No horror stories, but no jubilation either -- although the products do the jobs they set out to do, which is certainly cause for quiet celebration.
Next month, we'll be announcing some changes to Quick Labs that will help us better address product-availability fluctuations and ensure that we continue to furnish the most up-to-date, useful product information. Stay tuned.
One New Workgroup Laser Printer
With the Lexmark Optra R+, we were tempted to take the easy route -- simply cutting the review of Lexmark's Optra Lx+ from our last Quick Labs and pasting it here. Except for the RAM configuration and the paper tray, there's not much difference between the two printers: The Optra Lx+ comes standard with 4 MB of RAM and a 500-sheet paper tray; the Optra R+ comes with 2 MB of RAM and a 200-sheet paper tray (you can also hand-feed it legal-sized sheets).
But it's a good thing we tested the $1,700 Optra R+, because we learned a few things in the process. Our first lesson: Most users should purchase extra RAM for the Optra R+ right away -- its standard 2 MB proved insufficient to print our graphics-laden, PageMaker test file. Lexmark suggests having at least 8 MB if you plan to print complex PostScript files, but we were able to print our PageMaker file after installing just 2 MB of additional RAM ($169). The Optra R+ can handle a maximum of 64 MB and uses standard 72-pin SIMMs.
Once we'd added the extra RAM, the Optra R+ performed admirably: Line art and text were crisp and clean at 1,200 dpi. It printed grayscale photos and art with excellent detail and consistency and at a respectable speed. As you'd expect, pages print about twice as fast at 600 dpi as they do at 1,200 dpi.
The Optra R+ also comes with MarkVision, Lexmark's network-printer-management utility. It lets network administrators adjust printer settings and get progress reports on print jobs from anywhere on the network.
Reviewer: Roman Loyola
Testing: Jim Galbraith
Estimated Resolution Warranty Text Graphics Paper Support Comments Pages Per Minute
Rating Street Price Quality Quality Handling
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) Lexmark Optra R+ $1,700* 1,200 dpi 1 year Outstanding Outstanding Acceptable Acceptable Some files require more than the standard 2 MB of RAM.
* With 2 MB of RAM.
Four New Hard Drives
This month's quartet of hard drives collectively offer an interesting range of features and price/performance. All ship with straightforward manuals and simple, versatile software, yet none stands out as a star.
The Microtech BLUE Storm 2000 (pictured) is the most sophisticated -- and expensive -- drive in the batch. Its SCSI-2 connectors attach directly to the logic board (without cables) in order to minimize signal noise, and an LCD supplies drive-status information. Although impressive, this wizardry is worth the extra cost only for the most-demanding situations, such as digital-video playback.
The MacProducts Magic Quantum Lightning 730 MB, an appealing buy at $269, ships with a handy active external terminator. The 700-MB capacity, once seemingly vast, is now rather meager, however. The Mac Zone Performantz 1GB External Hard Drive offers a more practical capacity and a slightly better price per megabyte, but it lacks an active terminator and offers a measly one-year warranty.
Large and boxy, the MacProducts Magic Quantum Grand Prix 4.2 GB drive offers this month's best price per megabyte. It has twice the capacity of the Microtech drive, at a lower price, but lacks active termination.
We tested drive speed by using MacBench 2.0's Disk Mix test. The results are relative to that of a 250-MB Quantum IDE drive in a Quadra 630, which has a score of 10.
Reviewer: Jim Shatz-Akin
Testing: Martin Wong
Estimated Formatted Price Per Warranty Case Sofware/ Support Comments MacBench 2.0 Disk Mix Score
Rating Street Price Capacity Megabyte Manuals
Very Good (4 of 5 mice) MacProducts Magic Quantum 4.2 GB $1,198* 4,103.1 MB $.29 5 years Acceptable Acceptable Outstanding Fast. Great price/megabyte. Big. No active terminator.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) Mac Zone Performantz 1GB $379.98* 1,027.8 MB $.37 1 year Acceptable Acceptable Acceptable Good general-purpose-drive value. Skimpy warranty.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) MacProducts Magic Quantum 730 MB $269* 696.9 MB $.39 2 years Acceptable Acceptable Acceptable Attractively priced, but bigger would be better.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) Microtech BLUE Storm 2000 $1,400 2,045.5 MB $.68 5 years Outstanding Acceptable Outstanding Business users won't appreciate advanced, costly design.
* Direct price.
Listing Is Alphabetical Within Groups of Equal Mouse Ratings.
Six New Monitors
With this month's crop of monitors, strengths and weaknesses conspired to cancel each other out, resulting in a lackluster field. Top image-quality honors, for example, go to two PowerMax displays -- the 17-inch PM17T and the 20-inch PM20T -- but clumsy push-button controls detract from their great looks.
The 20-inch IBM P201 (pictured) has a similar story -- excellent focus and color image quality good enough for demanding desktop publishers, but adjusting its push-button controls, which lack numerical indexes for color and geometry settings, is tough.
In theory, on-screen-menu controls, such as those on the Princeton EO15, the Samsung SyncMaster 6Ne, and the Smile CA2111, are far easier to use than the older-style, push-button ones. But you still have to use buttons to invoke the menus, and the Princeton monitor's buttons are so tiny that they may be awkward for the large-fingered. And alas, with the exception of the Samsung SyncMaster 6Ne, the monitors boasting on-screen menus yielded image-quality results that were just better than acceptable in our tests.
The image-quality scores reflect the results of our tests for image sharpness, focus, brightness, uniformity, pincushioning, color range and accuracy, and vibrancy. Keeping focus and sharpness on larger monitors is harder, so they tend to score lower than smaller ones. 1.0 is considered acceptable.
Reviewer: Roman Loyola
Testing: Brian Fikes
Estimated Screen Maximum Warranty Manuals Support Controls Comments Image-quality Score
Rating Street Price Size Resolution
Very Good (4 of 5 mice) Samsung SyncMaster 6Ne $699 17 in. 1,024 x 768 pixels 3 years Acceptable Acceptable Outstanding Great combination of good image quality and controls.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) IBM bP201 $2,675 20 in. 1,600 x 1,280 pixels 3 years Acceptable Outstanding Acceptable Good monitor for desktop publishers, but expensive.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) PowerMax PM17T $839 17 in. 1,280 x 1,024 pixels 3 years Poor Outstanding Acceptable Great image quality, but controls lack elegance.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) PowerMax PM20T $1,849 20 in. 1,600 x 1,280 pixels 3 years Poor Outstanding Acceptable Almost the same as the PM17T, with similar image quality.
Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice) Princeton EO15 $400 15 in. 1,280 x 1,024 pixels 1 year Acceptable Acceptable Outstanding Average image quality but great controls.
Acceptable (3 of 5 mice) Smile CA2111 $795 21 in. 1,600 x 1,280 pixels 1 year Acceptable Poor Outstanding Very inexpensive, but lackluster image quality.
Listing Is Alphabetical Within Groups of Equal Mouse Ratings.
