by: Chris Angelini
Welcome to the first installment of this year’s six-part Tom’s Hardware Holiday Buyer’s Guide, put together by editors from Tom’s Hardware, Tom’s Guide, and Tom’s Games. We’ve all worked together to compile the hottest list of PC components, gadgets, and gaming titles, which we’ll introduce one part at a time throughout the months of November and December.
Each guide is organized to center on a slightly different theme. This first one is aimed right at our hardware audience and includes gifts for enthusiasts who just want to plug and play—no time for building. But don’t think that we’re only including pre-built boxes here. We cover the gamut, from monitors, to security cameras, to power protection, storage, VoIP, and sound.
Here’s the breakdown for what you can expect to see as the series progresses. Each time we publish a new piece, we’ll update those that came before with links to the newest guides. By the time we ring in 2009, we hope you’ll be enjoying at least a couple of gifts from our six stories!
- Part 1: Tom’s Hardware—No Hassle Hardware Gifts, Good To Go
- Part 2: Tom’s Guide—Top Kid Tech Gifts For 2008
- Part 3: Tom’s Guide—Great Gifts For Tech Gurus
- Part 4: Tom’s Hardware—Hardware For The System Builder In Your Life
- Part 5: Tom’s Games—Keyboards, Mice, Headsets, And More Games
- Part 6: Tom’s Guide—Great Gifts For Tech Novices
Even as the subject matter of each installment changes, you’ll see the same two models popping up over and over to show off the gifts that we showcase.
Before we get into our favorite gear for this year’s holiday season, please allow me to introduce you to our models, who so graciously spent a full day in our Culver City, CA office posing with the massive collection of hardware we amassed for these six guides.
Danielle, the lovely blond with a penchant for Hello Kitty merchandise, is originally from Oklahoma City. She’s an enthusiast in the truest sense of the world—she builds her own PCs and has been reading Tom’s Hardware since high school. She moved out to California for college, where she earned her B.S. in computer science.
Alicia, the beautiful brunette Mrs. Claus, is my wife. She grew up in Bakersfield, CA and went to University of California, Irvine where she majored in dance. She’s a professional ballet dancer now and doesn’t spend much time around PC components, though her interest in technology does spike when boxes of hardware start spilling out of my office into places where they shouldn’t be, at which point they often come back flying at my head.
If you haven’t yet checked out our "behind the scenes" video footage of our photo shoot, you can check that out here.
If you’d like to check out the full photo album for Part 1, you can do that here. There will be others, of course, as this series progresses, so keep checking back!
Now, onto our first piece of hardware!
http://www.dell.com/
$1,999
By: Ed Tittel
Those in search of a big, beautiful monitor for gaming, video, and desktop use will definitely want to include the Dell 3008WFP on their short lists. As with other high-end, big-pixel-count monitors—this one supports 2560x1600 resolution—this monitor comes at a pretty steep price. But those with the gumption or the means to plunk down a couple of grand for a monitor will reap some considerable benefits in exchange for that hard-earned cash.
All of the 3008WFP’s specification details naturally lead to superlatives. We’re talking about a rated 3000:1 contrast ratio, which produces darker blacks for sharp images, crisp text, and greater detail in HD content—especially Blu-ray. At its rated resolution, 1920x1080 represents only 77% of the horizontal resolution and 67.5% of the vertical resolution. The 3008WFP also supports 117% of the NTSC color gamut, which makes for richer, more saturated color that can be calibrated for accurate color representation. This device even supports the Adobe 98 color standard and offers a snappy 8 ms pixel refresh interval suitable for gaming and motion-oriented video content.
A monitor is useless without input connections and the 3008WFP has them in great profusion. In addition to the standard VGA and DVI-D, this unit also supports HDMI (with HDCP), S-Video, component video, and composite video, along with DisplayPort inputs. In fact, you need dual DVI-D inputs (and a graphics card to match) to drive all the pixels on this device. That gives both HDMI and DisplayPort an edge, because both technologies support sufficient video bandwidth to permit a single cable to drive this behemoth.
DisplayPort is interesting because it packetizes data to transport it from one device to another (DVI-D uses an RGB and time clock model at 3.3V that requires A-to-D and D-to-A conversion to transport signals across the wire). This lets the same cable that ferries video from sender to receiver also ferry audio in the current 1.1 version of the DisplayPort specification. A new version (1.2) of this open, royalty-free standard is nearing completion—it not only passes USB traffic over the same cable as audio and video, it also permits daisy-chaining multiple monitors from a single DisplayPort output.
Dell thoughtfully bundles a DisplayPort cable with the 3008WFP. Dell video engineer Bruce Montag informed me that whereas both HDMI and DVI-D cables must be selected with great care and often at significant expense, any DisplayPort-compliant cable can handle the full 10.8 Gbps maximum bandwidth that this technology supports. Finally, DisplayPort circuitry is designed for low-voltage, fine granularity applications (like circuit processes at 90 nm and smaller) so that it lends itself readily to incorporation on motherboards, graphics cards, monitors, AV receivers, and even TV sets (Philips and Pioneer both offer DisplayPort on select products). With more PC graphics adapters adopting DisplayPort, we expect to see this connection put to good use with the 3008 WFP. Too bad USB support isn’t included in this version!
Although the size of this device—its dimensions are 27.43" x 23.74" x 18.98"—will make it hard to hide before Christmas, we can’t think of any computer user who wouldn’t be thrilled to get one. Granted, $2,000 is a lot to spend on a Christmas gift, but those who luck out will consider it the gift of a lifetime.
http://www.apc.com/
$99.99
By: Ed Tittel
At 750 VA and 140 W, the APC BACK-UPS 10 Outlet BE750G (Green Edition) makes a fabulous combination of surge suppressor and power strip, with more than enough backup battery power to get you past most power hiccups without forcing a shutdown. According to a study from N.Y. University’s Wagner Graduate School, the average duration of a power outage in the continental United States from January 1990 to August 2004 was just under 20 minutes. For people whose configurations include all of the following, the unit offers between 36 and 60 minutes of battery power: a mini-tower desktop PC, a 15-19” LCD monitor, stereo speakers, a wireless access point or switch, and a single external USB drive.
Above and beyond the BE750G’s built-in batteries, which can power up to five of its 10 outlets during an outage, there’s a lot more to like about this unit. It can handle an aggregate power draw of up to 450 W, which is enough for most desktop gear, including your PC, a monitor, a printer, a wireless access point or switch, speakers, and so forth. The BE750G also includes a capable surge suppressor that should block power spikes, backed up with a $75,000 protection guarantee against power spikes and surges on the equipment plugged into it.
Furthermore, the device also senses power draw from a device plugged into its Master outlet. This enables the BE750G to shut off all devices plugged into its three master-controlled outlets when the master is turned off. Because that master device is usually a PC and controlled devices are usually speakers, monitors, and printers; APC estimates annual savings on electric bills will be lower by an average of $40 per year when using this device.
However, that’s only half of the BE750G’s green pedigree—though it’s a very nice half, to be sure. The other half comes from its high-frequency design, which requires less copper in its construction. This not only decreases the unit’s size and weight, it also lowers consumption for packaging costs (less plastic is needed to build its housing and it fits into a smaller box) and reduces shipping costs as well (always a cost factor when devices include permanent batteries).
All in all, the BE750G is an attractive, efficient, and usable power management and protection device. The outlets are cleverly situated so that you can plug multiple AC adapters right into the housing without too much crowding. It also includes APC’s well-known PowerChute software (v2.1.1 works with Vista; v2.0 works with XP, Media Center, and Windows 2000; and versions are available for older versions of Windows and other operating systems) for automatic hibernation and safe system shutdown as batteries are drawn down. At under $100, it’s one of the best techno goodies you can gift to any PC owner, including yourself!
http://www.netgear.com
$370
By: Ed Tittel
As more households begin to deploy their own in-home networks to serve multiple PCs, more home users discover the allure of networked storage to accommodate burgeoning media collections, backups, and shared files. Although the term "home network-attached storage (NAS)" may sound like an oxymoron, it represents a viable and growing market niche for networking appliance vendors to pursue. In case you haven’t already guessed, the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo is an excellent case in point. Whereas heavier-duty NAS devices usually include four or more drive bays to accommodate lots of storage, the ReadyNAS Duo includes two bays in a compact and attractive package.
The ReadyNAS Duo is not without its benefits, either. The device supports hot-swapping of drives and its front-mounted swing-open door makes it trivial to get at its easy-swap drive mounts. Slide drives in or out of SATA connectors at the rear of each bay to enable careful but unsophisticated users to switch out drives at will. There is also a Backup button on the front of this unit that fires off a one-step backup of its drive(s) on demand. It also includes three USB 2.0 ports (two on the back, one in front) to which external drives, flash drives, printers, or a wireless adapter may be attached. The ReadyNAS Duo is architected so that a second drive (if installed) automatically mirrors the first drive (this is a RAID 1 configuration) to maintain duplicate copies of everything and to take over automatically if the primary drive should fail.
As shipped, the unit includes a single 500 GB drive (which can be mirrored by any second drive of equal size or greater). With 500 GB SATA drives going for under $85 these days, you may simply want to slap another one into the second drive bay to mirror your storage at a modest price. Those who need more storage can opt for 750 GB or 1 TB models of the ReadyNAS Duo at higher prices.
The ReadyNAS Duo supports a broad range of network clients, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Setting up the device requires designating one such machine to run its management console (RAIDar software) which uses a Web-based interface for set-up, configuration, updates, and maintenance. A Wizard will walk you through the setup process where you’ll handle IP addressing, configure shares, assign users and groups, and select file system types for shares (SMB for most clients, AFP for Macs, NFS for Linux/UNIX, HTTP/S, FTP, and so forth). Client backup works with either Netgear’s own NTI Shadow utility, Windows built-in NTbackup facility, or other third-party packages. That said, if you want to make an image-based backup of a network drive, you’ll need a third-party utility (a capability not included as part of the ReadyNAS Duo’s built-in backup).
The Home NAS angle for the ReadyNAS Duo really comes to the fore when used for media-serving capabilities. It offers support for a photo sharing Website and includes an iTunes server and a media server that works with Windows Media Center, Logitech Squeezebox, Sonos Digital Music Center, the Xbox 360, the Sony PlayStation3, and any UPnP AV-capable networked media-handling device (like Netgear’s own EVA8000 media server). Its GbE interface delivers files and media content quickly and effectively (those seeking to kick up its performance might want to replace its paltry 256 MB PC2700 SODIMM for a 1 GB modules for $25 or so).
Lots of multi-computer households are bound to find the ReadyNAS Duo an attractive proposition. If Santa comes bearing one of these babies in his bag-o-gifts, big grins should break out all around.
http://www.falcon-nw.com
$3,995
By: Chris Angelini
We were really impressed by Falcon Northwest’s Mach V in our recent roundup of high-end gaming systems. So much so, in fact, that we invited Falcon to build something for our holiday gift guide—and it needed to be something even higher on the totem pole of cool. No doubt, the FragBox QuadFire the company sent to us is exactly what we were talking about.
The black box in which Falcon shipped the system weighs 30 pounds, so the FragBox is not your typical small form factor machine—though it is easy enough to pick up by one hand (it helps that there’s a handle built-in to the chassis). Best of all, you give up nothing in exchange for the portability of a LAN party-ready chassis.
Finessed inside this flagship FragBox, you’ll find DFI’s LanParty JR P45-T2RS micro-ATX motherboard, with four DDR2 memory slots and a pair of PCI Express x16 that run at x8 signaling rates. You’ll find two Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 boards populating the PCIe interfaces—that’s 4 GB total of GDDR5 memory and four RV770 GPUs on a micro-ATX board!
An Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 running at 3 GHz helps drive the insane graphics subsystem and is topped with Zalman’s CNPS700 cooler. Meanwhile, 8 GB of Crucial DDR2-800 memory fully justifies the move to Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. A single Hitachi 7K1000 1TB Deskstar and Lite-On 20x DVD+/-R/RW drive might seem somewhat tame in comparison to this system’s go-fast parts, but you could always connect to a speedy storage area network (SAN) through the machine’s Gigabit Ethernet port if you want more storage or at least a RAID 1/5-protected array.
Naturally, all of that high-end hardware requires a meaty PSU, so Falcon finesses SilverStone’s ST1000 1,000 W modular supply into the cramped case.
It’d be a disservice to talk about the hardware Falcon Northwest selected and just stop there. In every way, this is a configuration that any hardware enthusiast can appreciate, no matter how ardently one might insist on building his or her own box. The custom portfolio that Falcon includes lists all installed hardware, a shipping checklist, a QA checklist with BIOS settings, hardware revisions, and software versions, burn-in results, warranty information, and all bundled accessories in one faux-leather folder. Of course, then there are the other Falcon extras: a shirt, cap, logoed coffee mug, and eight ounces of a lightly-roasted, pre-ground, high-caffeine coffee blend.
Priced at $3,995, the QuadFire is everything there is to like about premium hardware—and it isn’t so expensive as to be unreasonable. If you have someone special on your gift list that has been extra-good this year, this is the ultimate way to let them know. And if you don’t have someone special, you can buy one for me if you’d like.
http://www.syspine.com/
$1,500
By: Ed Tittel
Okay, we admit we’re climbing a long way out on a technological limb by including this product in our Holiday Buyer’s Guide. The Syspine DOS A50-4XFO is a four-port Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone system that can handle 4 IP or conventional telephone handsets and hook them up to an Internet broadband link to provide telephone access. It’s sufficiently expandable to accommodate up to 50 handsets in all, with the purchase of additional IP phones, at no additional licensing costs for the base station. This device is essentially an industrial-grade, passively cooled IP-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) server appliance that is compact enough to fit in just about any room or office space.
Better yet, the DOS A50 is built around the Microsoft Response Point (MRP) architecture. In addition to its basic PBX capabilities to set up telephone lines, provide handset-to-handset inside calling ability, use outside lines for external calls, and park and forward incoming calls; the DOS A50 adds a whole new world of affordable functionality to small telephone systems. A Microsoft wizard guides you through setup in minutes (much faster than conventional IP PBX systems) and requires no specialized IP telephony knowledge. Ordinary mortals can set this system up by themselves and start using it quickly and easily.
Other snazzy features of the DOS A50 include voice recognition. Thanks to MRP, this phone system can recognize most spoken works accurately and consistently. This changes the way users place calls—they need only pick up a handset, press the Response Point button (a compelling reason to look into acquiring some of the Syspine SYS-310M IP handsets for about $130 a pop), and speak the call recipient’s name. The system will retrieve the related phone number from a company directory or your Microsoft Outlook address book and call the recipient for you. For those who use the phone a lot, this can be a tremendous productivity boost—no more memorizing or digging up phone numbers with automatic access to all numbers in your online directory or address book. PC screen pop-ups provide incoming call information with audible alerts for users, and a “click-to-call” feature enables placing calls from your PC using Assistant software included with this phone system.
The DOS A50 also features a remote, network-based management console that targets unsophisticated users. Its simple and user-friendly interface enables you to setup a new phone in minutes, to change preferences for voice mail or call handling quickly and easily, or create call distribution lists. A small LCD on the face of the DOS A50 enclosure always provides up-to-date status information and helps diagnose and solve problems when they occur.
A price of $1,500 is a lot to spend for a phone system, but it is not so much for a small office or a big, busy household. For those seeking to move phone technology into the 21st century, playing Santa with the DOS-A50 could pay all kinds of unexpected dividends.
http://www.wilife.com
$230 for Master system (camera and receiver)
$188 for indoor add-on camera
$202 for indoor digital clock-spy camera
$189 for outdoor add-on camera
By: Ed Tittel
As far as I can tell, this Logitech video security offering is like the old advertisement for Lay’s potato chips: once you start down this road, there’s no way you can buy just one! The Master (MSTR) system includes one wireless camera plus a wireless USB-attached receiver for your PC, along with software that lets you set up and configure your cameras. If you visit the Logitech Web site at www.wilife.com, you can use the MyCameras link there to log into your cameras remotely and see what they’re seeing any time you like.
But the basic master system just gets you started. You can purchase additional indoor and outdoor cameras for under $200 each. There’s even a "spy" version that looks and acts just like a digital clock available for just over $200 that’s perfect for observing what your babysitter is up to while you’re away from the house. All of these cameras feed into the Logitech WiLife Command Center software, which can display live, streaming video from up to six cameras—more than enough to keep a close watch on a house or a small business.
The real beauty of the Logitech WiLife products is that they make all the capability and coverage of a CCTV (closed-circuit TV system) surveillance system available at a very affordable price, with no requirements to run cable or manage complex wireless network configurations. All of the networking gear you need is included as part of each camera and the WiLife USB receiver that’s sold as part of each master system. It’s based on the HomePlug powerline technology that uses home electrical wiring for network connections and transport (devices must be plugged in anyway to get AC power). As soon as you plug a Logitech camera into any wall outlet, UPnP technology enables it to transmit video to a Windows PC through the WiLife receiver. In turn, this makes the video available to Windows and the Logitech Command Center software, which can stream that video to the Internet on demand through the Logitech MyCameras Web page. Cameras also pick up images in color and offer 15 frames per second (FPS) at 640x480 or 320x240 resolution.
As soon a Logitech camera detects motion in its field of view, the camera signals the Command Center to start a digital recording of the event. It stores the video on your PC so you can access it at your convenience. Command Center can even create an alert by sending a message to your e-mail or cell phone when recording begins. Command Center can specify motion zones within the video frame, so you can define up to 16 areas of a frame (a driveway, doorway or hallway) but exclude outside street traffic visible through a window. Because Command Center records only when motion is detected, you can store weeks to months of video on a typical PC hard disk.
We can’t guarantee that Santa will show up after you install your video surveillance system, but he probably won’t mind bringing one to friends or family this Christmas.
http://www.sennheiserusa.com
$159
By: Chris Angelini
You spend big money on processors and even bigger money on graphics, so why would you go cheap when it comes to audio? Well, it’d be easy if you didn’t know any better—once upon a time I was perfectly content with AC’97 and bundled 2.1-channel speakers. But then I was introduced to Sennheiser. First, I owned the company’s HD580s. Then, I upgraded to the HD600s. Both audiophile-quality cans, I was talked into picking up a headphone amplifier from HeadRoom and was quickly sold for life.
The HD600s cost more than $300 though, and they’re arguably more headphone than what the average PCs audio subsystem really needs. Hoping to find something a little more apropos to computing, we revisited Sennheiser’s headphone lineup and came across the HD 515 G4MEs. Most obviously, these are over-the-ear headphones designed for comfort. I’ve yet to find a set of earbuds that’d last for more than 15 minutes without extreme discomfort, and supra-aural on-ear headphones can be fatiguing as well. The HD515s fit around the ear, distributing 255 grams of total weight across a well-padded headband and the velvety ear pads.
Sennheiser’s quality carries over from the comfort-enhancing padding to the 1.8” (3.5 mm) stereo jack especially suited to sound cards (many high-end headphones employ 1.4” plugs). And whereas you’d likely expect multimedia headphones to tether you down with a few feet of cord, the Sennheiser setup includes a nine-foot detachable single-sided OFC (oxygen-free, which lasts longer without becoming brittle) copper cable.
The HD515’s open ear cups aren’t meant to save everyone else from hearing whatever you’re playing. Rather, they’re designed with sound quality in mind, letting sound waves propagate freely away from the transducer. A frequency range between 14 Hz and 26 kHz straddles both ends of the spectrum for what a human can hear. And while we’ve fielded ambitious claims from speaker vendors before that just didn’t sound plausible after a lengthy audition, Sennheiser’s audio reproduction is truly impressive.
Although the HD515 G4MEs are marketed toward the gaming enthusiast, these things work well for any audio application on the PC, from gaming to music creation to video playback. There is a price to pay for Sennheiser’s premium headphones, but when you compare them to the price of a multi-channel speaker system, the difference shouldn’t be as jarring.
http://freeagent.seagate.com/
$172 (drive only); $197 (drive plus dock)
By: Ed Tittel
We’ve previously covered Seagate FreeAgent incarnations in Buyer’s Guides for Tom’s Hardware. This holiday season, Seagate has earned another berth thanks to an updated, more attractive package and a slick, drop-in USB-attached dock that lets you carry your drive wherever you go, then reattach it to your desktop PC simply by slipping it into its cradle. Of course, 500 GB is a huge amount of disk space, which is bigger than many desktop drives and provides ample room to carry all of your important files and applications around with you. This model comes in a range of colors, including black, silver, red, and blue that were carefully calculated to lend this FreeAgent some eye appeal.
The drive includes a Seagate backup utility that’s reasonably easy to set up and use. By default, this program saves files to your My Documents folder, but it’s easy to customize its sources and targets to backup most folders on a notebook or desktop PC. There’s also a folder synchronization utility that lets you designate the same folder on two machines that the software will keep current by using the FreeAgent as the repository for new versions that need to be replicated on one machine or another.
This makes it easy to set up a folder that you can use in the office at work, then take home with you to your home machine, while keeping all contents current wherever you’re working at the moment. The only things missing are some kind of drive imaging software and a recovery disk capability that would let you perform a bare-metal restore on your backups, but there are plenty of ways to scratch that itch, including the excellent Macrium Reflect Free package.
As with earlier FreeAgent drives, this one includes a dual-headed USB cable for hooking your drive to a notebook PC. The second USB connector is for power only and is included because so many notebook PCs have trouble delivering sufficient power for an external drive through a single USB port (this shouldn’t be a problem on a desktop PC, however). Your mileage may vary when using or forgoing the second port—the drive worked fine for me on a Dell D620 Latitude with only the primary, but I had to use both connectors on an Asus Eee PC before it would spin up.
This drive is also reasonably speedy for a 5,400 RPM device. We observed sustained read rates of 22 MBps when reading and 17 MBps when writing large files to the drive (> 1 GB). PCMark05 gives this drive a score of about 2,800 points, which is neither especially faster nor slower than most USB 2.5" drives. The combination of its good looks, a convenient dock, and some useful software makes it our portable drive of choice these days. Anybody who wakes up Christmas morning to find one in his or her stocking should crack a huge smile. But you’d better put it on top—this FreeAgent’s dimensions are 1.16" x 3.34" x 2.4".
http://www.eurocom.com
$1,500
By: Chris Angelini
We recently published a roundup of high-end gaming laptops, for which whitebox vendor Eurocom submitted its first Centrino 2 design powered by a Core 2 Extreme and a GeForce 9800M GT GPU. It wasn’t even close to the top of our performance benchmarks, since two of the competitors boasted SLI. But the laptop still served up what we considered to be remarkable performance given its small size and modest spec sheet.
As a result, we were curious when the company offered up its L390T Uno, which is basically a Centrino 2-based platform in a desktop form factor. While it’s certainly not a gaming machine, we were expecting this thing to be a speed demon in productivity applications, since it mixes the best of desktop and mobile technologies.
Eurocom offers the Uno with a long list of compatible mobile processors, but it chose to build our test mule with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU operating on a 1,066 MHz front side bus and 3 MB of Smart Cache. The 45 nm chip is perfect for this sort of application. It only dissipates 35 W of power, yet is still muscular enough to slice through modern applications running on Microsoft’s resource hog of an operating system. To that end, Eurocom armed the pictured sample with 4 GB of DDR2-800 memory. But it’s worth noting that the chipset will take up to 8 GB—a configuration Eurocom sells. While you can also buy the Uno with 2 GB, stick to at least 4 GB.
Despite its size, the Uno actually accommodates two 2.5” hard drives. Ours came with a 500 GB 5,400 RPM model, but there are also 7,200 RPM drives in Eurocom’s list, as well as a number of different SSDs. Some of the little system’s other options include Turbo Memory, an internal TV tuner, external storage, a Blu-ray drive, wireless networking, and biometric security.
Two of the things you cannot change about the L390T are its display and graphics processor. Defined by its form factor, the system is tied to a 19” LCD panel with a maximum resolution of 1440x900. Driving the screen is Intel’s integrated GMA X4500 engine, a DirectX 10 core that, as we recently saw from our GeForce 9300 review won’t do much for enthusiastic gamers.
Nevertheless, at $1,500 we can’t help but think that the Uno makes for a great space-saving workstation in a dorm room or home office. It’s basically a notebook with a 19” screen, after all.
http://www.benq.com/products/Projector/?product=1372
$999 ESP
By: Ed Tittel
Those in need of a quick-and-easy way to move big-image video capability around could do worse than to glom onto the BenQ CP270. Originally designed as a compact, portable video projector for business presentations – it weighs only 3.3 pounds and its dimensions are 7.5" x 8" x 3" – this 1280 x 1024 SXGA device can deal with computer output or DVD playback with ease. It uses TI’s DLP technology to create clear, crisp images as small as 19.2" x 24" to as large as 240" x 300" (that’s 20 x 25 feet!). To accommodate a variety of video hook-ups, the CP270 includes a VGA port, DVI-D, component video, S-Video, and composite video. It even comes with VGA and power cables and a soft-sided fabric carrying case with carrying handle and shoulder strap.
The CP270’s output is rated at 2000 ANSI lumens to help ensure a clear bright image. The TI BrilliantColor technology built into its DLP chipset boosts mid-tone colors on output to increase overall brightness and to boost color vibrancy and appeal. The unit also includes 3D color management software to let presenters or users fine-tune hue, saturation, and gain for primary colors to tweak picture quality for maximum effect. Those who use the CP270 with a variety of signal sources will find its support for 11 preset modes helpful, including Dynamic, sRGB, Cinema, Presentation, Standard (default), multiple selections for dark or colorful movies, AutoCAD, PowerPoint, and other popular graphics programs.
What sets the CP270 apart from other compact projectors comes from its conveniences. You can activate an on-screen timer to count down visually, which helps presenters stay on track and to keep audiences informed about remaining presentation time. There’s a wall color correction feature that lets users adjust for different display surfaces, such as blackboard, walls, or projection screens to help deliver a positive viewing experience. The CP270 also automatically scans for attached video sources as inputs are connected, so that content may be accessed as soon as it’s recognized. There’s also a compact remote control that provides access to all device controls and settings, so that users need not access the front panel directly while the projector is working.
Anybody who travels a lot to give presentations or display video will find the BenQ CP270 a useful and usable device. Even those in search of a compact medium-resolution video projector will find it satisfactory. If somebody on your Christmas list fits the description, why not consider picking one up?
http://www.thecus.com
$466
By: Ed Tittel
As Patrick Schmid observed in his June 2008, Tom’s article "Thecus: M3800 Home NAS and Mini PCs Powered by AMD Geode," the M in this unit’s model number stands for multimedia. That is, the M3800 goes somewhat beyond what a typical network attached storage device can do to accommodate streaming media across a network. That probably also explains why the unit includes a small infrared remote control and features AV outputs (HDMI, component video, AV, and S/PDIF optical) as well. The M3800 also functions as an iTunes server, a Photo Web Server, and a uPnP media server.
The M3800’s media handling capabilities aren’t bad—although the Axentra/LaCie HipServ handles more formats, it offers only 500 GB of storage. On the video side, the M3800 works with WMV9 and WMVHD (no DRM for either format), AVI, VOB, and TS. It also supports the XVID, H.264, and VC-1 video codecs. For audio, the unit handles WMA, AAC, PCM, and M4A (here again, no DRM for this last item) and supports AC3, WMA, WMAPRO, PCM, LPCM, and Blu-ray LPCM (BLPCM) codecs as well.
As Schmid’s article points out, the M3800 is built around the AMD Geode processor—a 500 MHz LX800 processor, to be more specific, to provide RAID 5 support and manage network communications. Under the hood, the M3800 runs the OpenFiler 2.3 storage appliance software (LinuxBSDos.com characterizes it as an rPath Linux derivative). The device includes three drive bays and can accommodate up to 4 SATA hard disks in RAID 0, 1, 5, or just-a-bunch-of-disk (JBOD ) configurations. Stuffed with three Seagate 7200.11 1.5 TB drives in its internal bays, with another one plugged into its eSATA port, maximum capacity sits at a whopping 6.0 TB!
The M3800 is no slouch when it comes to networking, either. It includes dual GbE RJ-45 ports and can handle WiFi using a bundled USB dongle plugged into one of its two USB ports (1 front, 1 rear). The unit handles both TCP/IP and AppleTalk protocols, and works with file protocols based on SMB/CIFS, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, and NFS. It may be configured with a static IP address, a dynamic IP address, and works with PPPoE and DDNS as well. The M3800 works with clients running Windows 98 and newer, UNIX or Linux, and MacOS 9 or X. It also supports WebDisk to deliver Web-based file access, acts as an FTP server, and supports the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) to support USB and other IPP printers.
Although you must also purchase drives for the M3800 in addition to the device (the excellent Samsung 1 TB drives are available at Newegg for $110 right now), it’s a very good buy at under $500. For households or small offices that need extended storage and streaming media services, this is a hard box to beat. Anybody who knows what the M3800 can do will be happy to see one under the tree come Xmas.














