Okidata Trio * Hard Drives with Style * Apple Monitor Seen but Not Heard
Brian Fikes and Roman Loyola
Bread-and-butter product sets for Quick Labs are monochrome laser printers, high-capacity hard drives, and monitors. We review a slew of these products in each issue, so you can stay informed and up-to-date on the flood of new hardware that hits the street every month. Most of the products we review in Quick Labs are solid performers, but a few truly stand out.
This month, a new monitor from Apple wins a special round of applause. It boasts a good-looking display, a time-saving calibrator, and well-designed software controls. If this monitor looks familiar to you, you're right. It's a version of Apple's AppleVision 1710av multimedia monitor aimed at users who can live without the AV model's built-in speakers in order to save some money.
Okidata's trio of monochrome laser printers covers both ends of the business spectrum -- from small businesses and home offices to workgroup environments. All three are solid workhorses that can be counted on to get the job done.
For storage, La Cie's pair of stylish-looking Tsunami drives proves that image isn't everything. What counts most is rugged reliability and convenience -- both areas in which the new Dynatek drive has a slight edge over La Cie's offerings.
Three New Printers
In the printer spotlight this month is Okidata, with its latest lineup of monochrome PostScript laser printers. Two of the new printers, the OL610e/PS (pictured) and the OL810e/PS, are tailor-made for small businesses. The third, the OL1200/PS, is designed for workgroups that have relatively high-volume printing needs.
Priced at $949, the OL610e/PS has a 6-ppm engine and comes with 2.5 MB of RAM, expandable to 18.5 MB. The printer's standard print resolution is 300 dpi, but for better-looking output, it can print at 600 dpi by using interpolation. Because of its relatively slow engine and limited paper capacity (100 letter-sized sheets of paper), this printer is best used in small businesses and home offices.
Moving up the price scale, the $1,439 OL810e/PS is faster and can hold more paper (250 sheets) than the OL610e/PS. The OL810e/PS has an 8-ppm engine and comes with 3 MB of RAM, expandable to 19 MB.
Intended for medium-to-large workgroups, the $1,839 OL1200/PS has a 12-ppm engine and 6 MB of RAM, expandable to 34 MB. It can hold 500 sheets of paper and prints at 600 dpi. An Ethernet card costs an extra $479.
The print quality of all three Okidata printers was just OK. Overall, the most distinguishing characteristic was heavy, dark images and text. When we printed grayscale images, for example, the results from all three printers lacked detail in shadows. And on our text document, printed characters weren't as finely reproduced as those from some other printers we've tested.
Of the three, the OL1200/PS produced the best-looking documents. Graphics and text weren't quite as heavy as those printed by the other two devices.
Reviewer / Roman Loyola
Tester / Jim Galbraith
Estimated street price
Color or monochrome
Technology
Resolution
Warranty
Text quality
Graphics quality
Paper handling
Support
Comments
Okidata OL610e/PS
3.5 of 5 mice
$949
monochrome
laser
600 dpi*
1 year
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Suitable for small businesses and home offices. Dark output.
Okidata OL810e/PS
3.5 of 5 mice
$1,439
monochrome
laser
600 x 1,200 dpi
1 year
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Fuzzy-looking grayscale output.
Adequate text-output quality.
Okidata OL1200/PS
3.5 of 5 mice
$1,839
monochrome
laser
600 dpi
1 year
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Decent output quality. Good speed.
*Interpolated; standard resolution is 300 dpi.
Listing is alphabetical within groups of equal mouse ratings.
Okidata 609-778-4184
Three New Hard Drives
Hard-drive design has come a long way since the early days of computing. In contrast to the nondescript boxes that housed the first drives available for the Mac, two of the drives tested this month boast sleek, stylish cases.
However, although the La Cie Tsunami 1280 (pictured) and the Tsunami 2160 look good, they use dated technology. The Tsunami case material isn't as rugged as it should be, and the drives have DIP switches for setting SCSI IDs -- lose the manual or forget how to set a new ID, and you can end up in a SCSI version of Russian roulette. If you're looking for a more rugged case design from La Cie, check out its Joule-drive line. La Cie bundles its Silverlining driver software with all of its drives. If you're using System 7.5.3, make sure you have Silverlining 5.6.3, which installs the necessary SCSI Manager 4.3-compliant drivers. The Silverlining upgrade can be downloaded from La Cie's Web site (http://www.lacie.com).
Dynatek's newest offering, the Orion HDA 2.21SD-M1, has a more modern case design. The case is large (2.3 inches high, 6.4 inches wide, and 9.8 inches deep), but it's sturdy, has a clean design, and uses the more conventional push wheel for setting the SCSI ID. Its cost per megabyte is also lower than that of its closest rival in this product set, the La Cie Tsunami 2160. The Dynatek drive's software, Compass Pro 3.0, does a good job, but it lacks an initializing feature, standard in most formatting software.
All MacBench 3.0 Disk Mix scores are relative to that of a 1-GB Quantum internal drive in a Power Mac 7500/100, which has a score of 10.
Reviewer and Tester / Rick Oldano
Product
Rating
Estimated sTDeet price
Wide SCSI
Formatted capacity
Price per megabyte
Warranty
Case
Software/manuals
Support
Comments
Dynatek Orion HDA 2.21SD-M1
3.5 of 5 mice
$599
no
2,000.3 MB
$.30
5 years
Acceptable
Acceptable
Outstanding
Well-designed case. Good price.
La Cie Tsunami 1280
3 of 5 mice
$369+
no
1,251.9 MB
$.29
5 years
Poor
Acceptable
Outstanding
Case lacks ruggedness. Dated hardware features.
La Cie Tsunami 2160
3 of 5 mice
$669+
no
2,113.3 MB
$.32
5 years
Poor
Acceptable
Outstanding
Case lacks ruggedness. Dated hardware features.
+Direct price.
Listing is alphabetical within groups of equal mouse ratings.
Dynatek Automation Systems 416-636-3000
La Cie 503-520-9000
One New Monitor
This month Apple's 17-inch AppleVision 1710 gets our undivided attention. It's the same model as the AppleVision 1710av but with two key differences -- it doesn't have speakers, and it's about $200 cheaper. The 1710 teams excellent image quality with flexible, well-designed software controls and automatic color calibration.
The monitor's software controls are installed as a control panel that replaces your system software's Monitors control panel. The software controls communicate with the monitor through the ADB port (don't worry about losing your ADB port -- the monitor's base has ADB ports into which you can plug your keyboard or mouse) and let you control the monitor's geometry, convergence, and color. White point, gamma, and even ambient-light settings can be saved, so if you have favorite settings you use for various kinds of documents or lighting conditions, you can easily call them up. You can also import and export ColorSync profiles.
The 1710 uses DigitalColor, a technology developed by Apple that automatically calibrates your monitor. How does it work? Each 1710 is calibrated at the factory, and the data created during calibration is stored in memory inside the monitor. When you do your calibration of the 1710, it measures its own red, green, and blue values. If they don't match the data in the monitor's memory, the monitor recalibrates itself -- a real time-saver compared to the typical calibration process with external equipment.
We liked the AppleVision 1710, but it is somewhat pricey. You can buy the ViewSonic 17GA, for example, for about the same price, and it comes with speakers.
Image-quality scores reflect the results of our tests for image sharpness, focus, brightness, uniformity, pincushioning, color range, color accuracy, and vibrancy. A score of 1.0 is considered acceptable.
