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March 2006
David Em davidem@earthlink.net
www.davidem.com
Copyright 2006 David Em.
Power users do not live by workstations alone. The right peripherals are as important to a productive workflow as a fast processor and a buttload of RAM. Over the last few weeks I've tested three peripherals that have impacted the way I work.
The first is Hewlett-Packard's (http://www.hp.com) $599 L2065 TFT LCD screen, the second is Seagate's (http://www.seagate.com) new $220 portable 120GB USB2 drive, and the third's Delkin's (http://www.delkin.com) archival gold-plated DVD-R media (about three bucks per disc).
It's simply amazing how LCD display quality's gone up and prices come down over the last couple years. Hewlett-Packard's 20.1" L2065 represents the latest convergence of these two curves.
HP's pushing the L2065 as their flagship business display, but it has many other applications, including imaging, video, and gaming. HP sent me one to evaluate a couple months ago, and I've been putting it through its paces.
The L2065 has 1600 x 1200 native resolution and a .255 pixel pitch. That translates to extremely sharp detail. The screen's combined 300 nits of output brightness and 800:1 contrast ratio yield an image so bright I had to tone it down by about twenty percent. The backlight's rated to 45,000 hours of life, at which point HP represents it will output half-brightness. If this is so, you should get quite a few years of useful life from it.
I like the ergonomics. It has a 178-degree viewing angle, a 25-degree vertical tilt, a 45-degree horizontal swivel, and rotates 90-degrees to portrait mode. The screen surface has antiglare and antistatic coatings. You can also take it off its stand and mount it on the wall as a panel.
This display isn't as slick as some on the market, but its thin silver bezel is very presentable. There's a pretty good cable management system (subtle - I never would have know it was there if I hadn't read the manual) and a USB 2 hub that provides one upstream and four downstream ports. There are dual DVI inputs, so you can plug two systems into it. An optional audio speaker bar attaches to the lower bezel.
I tested the L2065 with a wide variety of programs. The super-sharp text made writing and editing in Microsoft Word a real pleasure. I laid out some side-by-side two-page book spreads in Adobe InDesign and had no difficulty making precise adjustments and reading fine page text. I also found cruising web pages and reading newspapers in portrait mode more satisfying that landscape mode.
More impressive is the screen's 8ms refresh rate. That's fast enough to edit video in Adobe's Premiere Pro without any discernible frame-to-frame stutter. That's been a problem with most of the LCDs we've tested in the past. The fast refresh also produces a much more satisfying gaming experience.
The L2065's colors are well-saturated and generally accurate. The screen's native temperature is set to 6500 Kelvin, a better match for the neutral tone output of many imaging programs than most LCD color settings that default to a much cooler 9500K.
However, I had difficulty adjusting the screen to accurately represent the monochrome capture of Nikon's CoolScan 5000ED film scanner I reviewed in my last column, or Epson's R2400 printer I reviewed in the column previous to that. In these cases, the screen was always brighter than the real image, no matter how much I fiddled with it.
Nevertheless, the L2065 is a great deal. Most graphics pros I talk to are in love with their Apple Cinema Displays, which are indeed gorgeous. However, the L2065 has better price than the comparable Apple model ($600 compared to $800), more resolution (1600 x 1200 vs. 1680 x 1050), more brightness (300 nits vs. 250 nits), more contrast (800:1 vs. 400:1), and faster response (8ms vs. 14ms).
Not too long ago, the Eizo Nanao and Sony 1600 x1200 tubes I used to recommend cost two thousand bucks. Now you can buy three L2065s for less, and with the right graphics card setup, you can have a 4800 x 1200 desktop that displays images that are sharper and brighter than any CRT ever made.
Physically moving massive amounts of data from place to place on CDs and DVDs is a pain. For example, the 12GB of space a single hour of DV video takes up requires a good long while to burn to multiple discs. Retrieving the data's slow too, and keeping track of ever-growing disc libraries is a major hassle.
Seagate's new $220 120 GB portable drive puts this problem to rest. Mobile users will appreciate its paperback book size, its rugged aluminum alloy construction, and its 5000 Gs of nonoperating shock resistance. It's also very quiet and runs cool.
The drive has a hefty 8MB cache and operates at 5400 RPM, fast enough to play back DV video. This device can store huge amounts of music and photographs. I copied every digital photograph I've ever taken onto it and didn't even fill it half way up.
The unit pulls power from a USB Y-cable that has a second connector for data, so there's no power lump to hump around. It's hot-swappable and works on both Macs and PCs. However if you're going to use it with both OSs, you should reformat the drive for the Mac OS and use third party software to read the Mac files on the PC side.
If you're a mobile power user, this drive is indispensable. The new 120GB version I tested is hard to find on store shelves, but its virtually identical 100GB predecessor is easy to lay hands on. There's no moss growing under Seagate's feet: their web site's already promoting a 160GB version. Strongly Recommended.
All that said, hard drives can fail, so there's still a place in the world for removable media when it comes to archiving data. CDs and DVDs are most folks' storage medium of choice these days, but there's a catch. According to many studies, the information stored on the average CD or DVD is likely to become corrupted in as little as five years.
Clearly not a good thing for your business records, your family photos, or anything else you care about. Recently, a couple disc manufacturers have started producing discs they claim will last a century or more. One promising candidate comes from Delkin Devices, Inc.
Delkin's eFilm Archival Gold DVD-R uses 24 karat gold in the reflective layer of the disc to resist the damaging oxidation effects of temperature and humidity. Discs turn out to be easily stressed by ultraviolet light, heat, and moisture. Writing on discs with felt pens takes its toll as well. The eFilm Gold DVD-Rs have been tested for these factors in environmental chambers according to the ISO 18927-2002 longevity guidelines.
There's always the question of whether the hardware to read CDs and DVDs will exist a hundred years down the line. Probably not. It's amazing how quickly film slide projectors have disappeared. The 100MB Zip drive readers that were standard just a few years ago are scarce as hens' teeth today, let alone the once-popular Mass Micro cartridge system that preceded them.
However, CDs and DVDs are the most widely disseminated digital storage medium on the planet today, so the chances of being able to transfer your data to another medium a few years down the line are pretty good, assuming your discs are still readable. Do accelerated aging tests work as accurate failure predictors? Who knows, but why take chances with data you really care about with garden variety discs that are guaranteed to fail?
I, for one, am more than willing to pop for two to three bucks per disc to ensure my critical data will still be around tens, or maybe even hundreds of years from now, even if the discs are merely an interim medium on the way to something else. Maybe someday our high tech tools will be as capable of preserving information as the mud bricks the Sumerians baked in the sun thousands of years ago.