Latest Posts in From the Lab

Review: Rocstor Rocpro 850 500GB hard drive

Rocstor Rocpro 850

You’d struggle to find a more generic-looking desktop hard drive than the Rocpro 850. But while other drives seem more fashionable, the Rocpro 850 has speed on its side, leaving competing non-SSD desktop hard drives in the dust. It also offers versatile connection options and a competitive price. Though designed for audio-visual professionals, budget-conscious consumers will also find the Rocstor 850 an appealing drive.

The Rocpro 850 is equipped with two FireWire 800 ports, an eSATA port, and a USB 2.0 port. The drive comes with a handy-carrying case and cables for each connection type, and Rocstor even includes a FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 cable.

At just under three pounds, the Rocpro 850 will be safely relegated to your desk. Its physical dimensions are similar to that of Verbatim’s Professional Quad-Interface Desktop Hard Drive () or Seagate’s FreeAgent Desk for Mac (). The Rocstor 850 is a couple inches thick, about half a foot wide, and rectangular. You can throw it into your backpack, but you’ll feel as if you’re carrying a laptop.

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Gauging Snow Leopard's speed boosts

Apple describes Snow Leopard as a top-to-bottom refinement of existing features. One major goal of those refinements: Improved performance.

Snow Leopard aims to run leaner and faster on current and recent Macs, in part by dropping support for legacy Power PC systems and focusing solely on Intel-powered Macs. And while some of Snow Leopard’s potential performance gains won’t show up until software developers optimize their applications for the new OS, others are apparent right now.

To check the performance benefits, we tested Snow Leopard on three different systems: a 20-inch iMac Core 2 Duo/2.66GHz () with 2GB of RAM; a 3GHz Xeon 5300 eight-core Mac Pro with 4GB of RAM (this Mac Pro was released in April 2007); and a 15-inch MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo/2.8GHz () with 4GB of RAM. The hard drives in each system were partitioned into two equal sizes, and we installed Leopard (OS 10.5.8) on one partition and Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) on the other. We booted into one OS, timed different tasks, then rebooted into the other OS and clocked those same tasks.

What’s faster

The good news is that, of the 16 tests we ran, eight were indeed faster under Snow Leopard compared to Leopard. For example, an initial Time Machine backup to an external FireWire 800 hard drive was between 10 and 15 minutes faster in Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard was, on average, 32 percent faster with Time Machine backups across the three systems. Of course some of that performance benefit is due to Snow Leopard’s smaller hard drive footprint - the iMac, for instance was backing up approximately 27GB worth of files under Snow Leopard, while Leopard’s files and folders took up around 34GB of disk space.

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Review: ViewSonic VG2427wm LCD

ViewSonic’s VG2427wm, a 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor, performed well in our image-quality tests. Text on a page of fonts of different sizes looked sharp, even when at a very small (6-point) size.

The VG2427wm also did a fairly good job of rendering color, though in one photo--a picnic scene with various red, green, and blue hues--we found the color to be slightly dull in comparison to other displays we’ve tested.

In our motion tests, the VG2427wm stumbled a bit, displaying some just-detectable jittering of our test image. Although the jittering was slight, it was noticeable enough that active gamers might find it distracting.

ViewSonic VG2427wm

The VG2427wm’s 1920-by-1080-pixel native resolution theoretically makes it 1080p-ready and well-suited for HD content. Unfortunately, the display lacks an HDMI input, offering only DVI and VGA ports for connecting to a Mac. If you have a Mac that has only a Mini DisplayPort, you’ll need a Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter ($29). ViewSonic says that the monitor is intended for corporate and office use; but to take full advantage of its resolution, an HDMI input would seem to be a necessary feature. The VG2427wm does include three USB ports at the rear.

Four buttons on the bottom of the front bezel control the on-screen display (OSD). The power button lies at the center of the cluster of buttons, which, unfortunately, increases the likelihood that you’ll press it by accident while aiming for the button for cycling through the OSD’s menus.

The display tilts and swivels with ease. It also has a height adjustment, which works smoothly as well. Its bezel has a pleasant, charcoal-black finish.

Macworld's buying advice

The VG2427wm is a good choice for users who need a big screen for text-intensive work, but the less-than-totally-smooth video playback and the lack of an HDMI-in port may disappoint gamers and movie watchers.

[Kalpana Ettenson is a senior editor for PC World.]

Review: Kodak EasyShare Z915

When Kodak’s 10-megapixel EasyShare Z915 was announced at this year’s PMA show, one feature stood out on its spec sheet: its 10X optical zoom, rarely found on compact cameras, and definitely never seen on a camera of this price. To support its zoom range, the EasyShare Z915 uses optical image stabilization, which worked like a charm in our testing, even when subjected to severe shaking.

Though the 10X optical zoom range is impressive, it’s only one of several features that make this budget-friendly camera an outstanding bargain. The Z915’s Kodak Retinar zoom lens doesn’t offer much at the wide-angle end (35mm wide angle to 350mm telephoto), but the camera’s generous array of features should make it a big draw for anyone who wants to learn photography without dropping a ton of money on a megazoom camera or a digital SLR.

Kodak EasyShare Z915

The Z915 comes through with the best range of manual controls we’ve seen in a camera at this price. The manual controls start with two modes traditionally found on cameras that cost $350 or more: Aperture Priority mode and Shutter Priority mode. Aperture settings are limited (F3.5, F6.2, and F8.3 only), but they enable you to experiment with different depth-of-field effects. Shutter speeds are much more extensive, ranging from 0.001 second to 16 seconds in shutter priority mode.

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Review: Rocstor Airhawk A9 portable hard drive

If the hard drive market is nothing but a sea of similarly priced gray boxes, then Rocstor’s Airhawk A9 is something of an anomaly. The portable storage device with a triple interface features a 7,200 RPM hard drive mechanism and a matte exterior that is distinctively futuristic looking. Unfortunately, while the device looks like a speedy stealth fighter, the results are more similar to a more pedestrian DC-10.

The Airhawk A9 (we tested the 250GB version) is equipped with USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 connectors. The cables are included with the unit, including a Y-cable for the USB connection that will allow the Airhawk A9 to draw power from two USB ports, ideal for older laptop models that can’t generate enough power to spin the drive’s mechanism.

Rocstor Airhawk A9

External hard drives are more workhorses than fashion statements, and so it’s nice to see a company develop a fun and functional design. The angular exterior of the Airhawk A9 is reminiscent of a stealth jet and the blue LED activity light at the front is a distinctive quadrilateral shape. It runs quietly despite its bus-powered 7,200 RPM Seagate mechanism. Rocstor uses Fujitsu and Hitachi mechanisms for their 5,400 RPM models.

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Review: Pentax X70

Pentax’s 12-megapixel X70 boasts an impressively wide and exceptionally long 26mm-to-624mm-equivalent lens, which can be kicked up to a downright-ridiculous 3,900mm by using the digital Intelligent Zoom feature. It zips from wide angle to telephoto with surprising speed, considering its range.

Pentax X70

By refraining from adding any extraneous buttons, Pentax has also made the X70 very simple to use. The thumb dial at the top is well placed and makes shifting between the ten camera modes (including advanced options such as shutter priority and aperture priority in addition to program and manual modes) a quick and easy process without the need to dive into on-screen menus.

For those who simply want to point and shoot, the dial also has a fully auto mode and a scene mode that offers access to the usual suspects, from the handy “night scene” and “kids” to more-obscure options like “fireworks” and “museum”. With the X70’s manual and semimanual modes, you can easily adjust shutter speeds and aperture settings.

The X70 has a 2.7-inch LCD.

Another of the X70’s surprises was its ability to shoot 11 frames per second when set to continuous mode. True, the images drop from 12 to 5 megapixels in size, but that’s pretty standard in such operations, and 11 fps is faster than what nearly every other camera in its class provides (the exceptions being a few jaw-droppingly high-speed Casio models, such as the EX-FH20, the EX-FC100, and the EX-FS10).

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Review: HP 2009m LCD

HP’s 2009m is an affordable 20-inch widescreen display that produced impressive image quality in our subjective tests. We saw nuanced, accurate skin tones in photographs, and found small fonts easy to read. The screen has a glossy, anti-reflective coating that gives the display a nice sheen—and thankfully, the coating also seems to enhance the screen’s readability rather than detract from it.

HP 2009m

The 2009m’s 16:9 aspect ratio and 1,600-by-900 native resolution makes it appropriate for showing HD content. However, the 2009m does not have an HDMI connection—-it offers only VGA and DVI ports. The ports are set in at the back of the display; to plug in cables, it’s actually easier to lay the display down on its face, which isn’t the best (or most convenient) thing to do.

If the lack of an HDMI port and the placement of the existing ports aren’t deal-breakers for you, the 2009m won’t disappoint. Our motion tests showed little visible blurring, a good sign that the display should be a fine choice for watching movies or playing games.

To access the easy-to-navigate on-screen controls, you must use buttons that are set into the lip of the bottom bezel. The display can swivel only on its stand, and tilts with a slightly aggressive push. It cannot pivot.

Macworld’s buying advice

Despite a few drawbacks—no HDMI connection and little physical adjustabililty—the 2009m is a very reasonably priced monitor that offers great image quality.

[Kalpana Ettenson is a senior editor for PC World.]

Review: Canon PowerShot SD780 IS

Quite possibly one of the more fashionable point-and-shoot cameras out right now, the sleek, solid-colored PowerShot SD780 IS (available in gold, red, black, and silver) isn’t just a looker. It also performs very well, with great image quality, a powerful flash, nice high-ISO shots in low light, a great selection of scene modes, and excellent optical image stabilization.

Canon PowerShot SD780 IS

This is a very slim-and-stowable camera, measuring just 0.7 inches thick and 3.4 inches wide; it’s about the size and thickness of a half-deck of playing cards. A durable plastic body surrounds the metal lens casing, and the contoured edges of the camera add to its slick looks.

In our lab’s jury evaluations, the 12-megapixel SD780 IS netted an overall image quality score of Very Good, earning some of the highest marks we’ve seen for a point-and-shoot this year for its lack of distortion, its color accuracy, and its image sharpness.

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Review: Iomega eGo Mac Edition 500GB portable hard drive

Iomega eGo 500GB

Well-detailed, shiny, and compact, Iomega’s eGo line of portable hard drives injects some style into a sea of grey brick-shaped external drives. Known for its iconic sleek designs, Iomega updated the eGo hard-drive line with improved speeds and more versatile connectivity (we tested the new 500GB eGo).

The eGo is light, portable, and only slightly larger than an iPhone. The drive weighs less than 7 ounces and easily can fit into your pants pocket. While the unit is sleek, it still has its design quirks. The activity light is at the rear of the drive next to the ports; it’s plenty bright so you’ll know it’s on, but it seems odd to not have it on the front.

The drive has USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 connectivity and is bus powered. Iomega also includes a Y cable that draws power from two USB ports in case you have an older Mac that doesn’t generate enough power through a single USB port. This Y cable makes the eGo more versatile than competing portable drives, many of which don’t include such a cable.

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Review: Canon PowerShot SD990 IS digital camera

As a fan of Canon’s Digital Elph cameras, I was a bit disappointed by the current flagship model of the series, the 14.7-megapixel PowerShot SD990 IS. My disappointment lies mostly with the build quality of the PowerShot SD990 IS; it produces image quality that’s among the best we’ve seen of cameras of a similar ilk.

I expect a camera priced at around $400 to feel solid. The PowerShot SD990 IS, which has a plastic body rather than the titanium casing of its predecessor (the PowerShot SD950 IS), feels a bit cheap. This, coupled with a handful of other shortcomings, chips into the camera’s excellent performance.

Canon PowerShot SD990 IS

The image quality is indeed outstanding. The PowerShot SD990 IS netted an overall score of Superior in the our lab’s jury evaluations, producing some of the best results for color accuracy, lack of distortion, and exposure quality we’ve ever seen in a point-and-shoot.

However, the plasticky build and some design choices hinder its overall score. Canon released the SD990 alongside the 10-megapixel PowerShot SD880 IS (), its less-expensive (and excellent) Digital Elph sibling. The PowerShot SD880 IS, though, feels as solid as a rock, despite the fact that it, too, has a plastic chassis.

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