The most recent articles from What PC?

The most recent articles from What PC?http://www.whatpc.co.uk/The most recent articles from What PC? (Generated on Thursday 8 January 2009 at 07:54:41)VNU Business Publications LTD, London UKCopyright © 1994-2009 VNU Business Publications LTD, London UKhttp://www.whatpc.co.uk/2009-01-08T07:54:41.674Z

The most recent articles from What PC?http://www.whatpc.co.uk/images/rss/wpc_logo.gifhttp://www.whatpc.co.uk/Xerox WorkCentre M950http://www.whatpc.co.uk/whatpc/hardware/2132740/xerox-workcentre-m950Dominic Bucknall, <a href="http://www.whatpc.co.uk/">What PC?</a>, Tuesday 24 July 2001 at 23:00:00The name behind the photocopying revolution offers home users and businesses a printer, fax, photocopier and scanner in a single box.<content page="1"><html><body>The Xerox WorkCentre M950 is one of those products it would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago. But now this seemingly implausible trick has been refined to the point where it's cheap enough and good enough to bring these once specialist-only capabilities to anyone with some space and a few hundred pounds to spare.What makes multi-function devices like the WorkCentre possible is the fact that you really only need two core components in the box to make everything work. The printing side of things - including photocopier output and hard copy of incoming faxes - is dealt with via an inkjet printer, which is a well-developed and consequently affordable technology.Likewise, the electric eye at the heart of the scanner works equally well as the business end of a photocopier or the bit of a fax which reads your document into the machine ready for transmission.This is what the WorkCentre actually is: a flatbed scanner/photocopier/fax-scanner sitting on top of an inkjet printer. The top flips up to reveal a glass platen familiar to anyone who's ever used a conventional photocopier, while the inkjet below is straightforward, even if you haven't seen one before.It feeds on separate ink cartridges, one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which is important for two reasons. First, inkjets that lack a true black have to fake it by mixing the CMY inks and the result is always muddy and unsatisfactory, not to mention a wasteful way of printing a black text page. Second, the combination cartridges used by some inkjets are rendered useless as soon as any one colour runs out.Setting the WorkCentre up requires connecting it to your PC, either via the normal parallel cable, or by a USB cable. You then install a CD which gives you fax and photo editing applications plus an OCR (optical character reader) facility, which will try to convert scans or faxes into actual text that can be edited with a word processor or email application.You can use the supplied software to make scans and then send them to different applications; for example, for editing or sending to others as attachments to an email, so you don't need to buy anything extra to make use of all the WorkCentre's features. However, you cannot send or receive faxes unless your PC has a modem.Once you've got it going, the WorkCentre is relatively easy to use. It copies at the touch of a button on its own control panel, so you don't have to have your PC on to use this function, and scanning a document or fax is as simple as making a photocopy except that it's best controlled from the software on your PC.The quality of the scans we made was surprisingly good for a multi-function device, and we were able to make scans of photographs that, when printed on glossy paper, came out looking reasonably decent next to the originals. This requires a respectable print engine, and the Xerox inkjet did a good job, handling business graphics well and producing crisp, clean text which could almost have come from a laser printer.Print speeds were reasonable, with text-only pages at high-quality resolution emerging at 3.6 pages per minute, and a photo-quality colour page complete in five minutes. This makes the Xerox a bit average for text, but quite respectable with demanding photo-quality work.The CMY cartridges cost £8.80 each, while the standard black is £15.50. Based on Xerox's own figures for cartridge life at the standard five per cent cover per page, the WorkCentre will cost 2.5p per page for colour and 3.9p per page for black text, which drops to 3p a page if you opt for the £21.14 high-capacity black cartridge. These costs aren't the lowest around, but the quality and reasonable speed on offer make an argument for swallowing the higher consumables cost.SPECIFICATIONS:<ul><li>1200 x 1200dpi resolution colour thermal inkjet printer</li><li>Separate colour and black ink cartridges</li><li>600 x 600dpi resolution flatbed scanner (30-bit colour, 10-bit greyscale, TWAIN compliant)</li><li>Colour photocopying up to legal size</li><li>Faxing via host PC</li><li>150-sheet main feed tray</li><li>20-page document feeder for copier</li><li>Parallel and USB connections</li><li>Includes Xerox ControlCentre 2.0 management software, TextBridge Pro 9.0 OCR software and MGI Photosuite picture editing package.</li></ul>Minimum requirements: Pentium 133Mhz host PC with 32Mb Ram, 40Mb free hard disk space and parallel or USB (Windows 98/2000 only) port.Contact: Xerox 0800 787787 <a href="http://www.xerox.com">www.xerox.com</a></body></html></content>http://www.whatpc.co.uk/whatpc/hardware/2132740/xerox-workcentre-m950Dominic Bucknall, <a href="http://www.whatpc.co.uk/">What PC?</a>, Tuesday 24 July 2001 at 23:00:00The name behind the photocopying revolution offers home users and businesses a printer, fax, photocopier and scanner in a single box.<content page="1"><html><body>The Xerox WorkCentre M950 is one of those products it would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago. But now this seemingly implausible trick has been refined to the point where it's cheap enough and good enough to bring these once specialist-only capabilities to anyone with some space and a few hundred pounds to spare.What makes multi-function devices like the WorkCentre possible is the fact that you really only need two core components in the box to make everything work. The printing side of things - including photocopier output and hard copy of incoming faxes - is dealt with via an inkjet printer, which is a well-developed and consequently affordable technology.Likewise, the electric eye at the heart of the scanner works equally well as the business end of a photocopier or the bit of a fax which reads your document into the machine ready for transmission.This is what the WorkCentre actually is: a flatbed scanner/photocopier/fax-scanner sitting on top of an inkjet printer. The top flips up to reveal a glass platen familiar to anyone who's ever used a conventional photocopier, while the inkjet below is straightforward, even if you haven't seen one before.It feeds on separate ink cartridges, one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which is important for two reasons. First, inkjets that lack a true black have to fake it by mixing the CMY inks and the result is always muddy and unsatisfactory, not to mention a wasteful way of printing a black text page. Second, the combination cartridges used by some inkjets are rendered useless as soon as any one colour runs out.Setting the WorkCentre up requires connecting it to your PC, either via the normal parallel cable, or by a USB cable. You then install a CD which gives you fax and photo editing applications plus an OCR (optical character reader) facility, which will try to convert scans or faxes into actual text that can be edited with a word processor or email application.You can use the supplied software to make scans and then send them to different applications; for example, for editing or sending to others as attachments to an email, so you don't need to buy anything extra to make use of all the WorkCentre's features. However, you cannot send or receive faxes unless your PC has a modem.Once you've got it going, the WorkCentre is relatively easy to use. It copies at the touch of a button on its own control panel, so you don't have to have your PC on to use this function, and scanning a document or fax is as simple as making a photocopy except that it's best controlled from the software on your PC.The quality of the scans we made was surprisingly good for a multi-function device, and we were able to make scans of photographs that, when printed on glossy paper, came out looking reasonably decent next to the originals. This requires a respectable print engine, and the Xerox inkjet did a good job, handling business graphics well and producing crisp, clean text which could almost have come from a laser printer.Print speeds were reasonable, with text-only pages at high-quality resolution emerging at 3.6 pages per minute, and a photo-quality colour page complete in five minutes. This makes the Xerox a bit average for text, but quite respectable with demanding photo-quality work.The CMY cartridges cost £8.80 each, while the standard black is £15.50. Based on Xerox's own figures for cartridge life at the standard five per cent cover per page, the WorkCentre will cost 2.5p per page for colour and 3.9p per page for black text, which drops to 3p a page if you opt for the £21.14 high-capacity black cartridge. These costs aren't the lowest around, but the quality and reasonable speed on offer make an argument for swallowing the higher consumables cost.SPECIFICATIONS:<ul><li>1200 x 1200dpi resolution colour thermal inkjet printer</li><li>Separate colour and black ink cartridges</li><li>600 x 600dpi resolution flatbed scanner (30-bit colour, 10-bit greyscale, TWAIN compliant)</li><li>Colour photocopying up to legal size</li><li>Faxing via host PC</li><li>150-sheet main feed tray</li><li>20-page document feeder for copier</li><li>Parallel and USB connections</li><li>Includes Xerox ControlCentre 2.0 management software, TextBridge Pro 9.0 OCR software and MGI Photosuite picture editing package.</li></ul>Minimum requirements: Pentium 133Mhz host PC with 32Mb Ram, 40Mb free hard disk space and parallel or USB (Windows 98/2000 only) port.Contact: Xerox 0800 787787 <a href="http://www.xerox.com">www.xerox.com</a></body></html></content>VNU Business Publications LTD, London UKCopyright © 1994-2009 VNU Business Publications LTD, London UKDominic Bucknall2001-07-24T23:00:00.000ZHardware Reviewsperipheral-devicesSony UP-DP10http://www.whatpc.co.uk/whatpc/hardware/2132712/sony-dp10Julian Prokaza, <a href="http://www.whatpc.co.uk/">What PC?</a>, Tuesday 12 September 2000 at 23:00:00Glossy photo-printing from a printer that uses dye-sublimation and solid-ink technology is now available at an affordable price.<content page="1"><html><body>If you want to print glossy photos from your digital camera but don't want to stump up £799 for the Epson Stylus Photo 2000P (or simply don't want Super A3 prints), don't despair. The Sony UP-DP10 costs half the price and yet offers the same, if not better, print quality. The downside is that you can only print your photos at photo size - around 6x4in.For something that produces such small prints, the UP-DP10 is surprisingly large but it can be stood on its side to reduce its desktop footprint.Paper is loaded into a feeder at the front and the print ribbon goes in a slot on the top. The UP-DP10 has a ribbon because it is a dye-sublimation printer and it works by melting solid ink on to the page to form an image. It's not a particularly cheap way to print but it does produce smoothly shaded images that are light-fast and, if you select the appropriate option, glossy.Installing the UP-DP10 is easy enough, thanks to the USB connection, but the software CDRom doesn't auto run. As the manual makes no mention of the bundled software, you'll need to figure out where it is and install it yourself, although Sony says it is going to include additional instructions.If you're happy to resize images to fit the paper, you can print from any application. The bundled software will handle this for you, as well as catering for lots of other image-editing tasks. Prints take a couple of minutes to make and cost about 62p each.Contact Sony 08705 424424, www.sony-cp.com</body></html></content>http://www.whatpc.co.uk/whatpc/hardware/2132712/sony-dp10Julian Prokaza, <a href="http://www.whatpc.co.uk/">What PC?</a>, Tuesday 12 September 2000 at 23:00:00Glossy photo-printing from a printer that uses dye-sublimation and solid-ink technology is now available at an affordable price.<content page="1"><html><body>If you want to print glossy photos from your digital camera but don't want to stump up £799 for the Epson Stylus Photo 2000P (or simply don't want Super A3 prints), don't despair. The Sony UP-DP10 costs half the price and yet offers the same, if not better, print quality. The downside is that you can only print your photos at photo size - around 6x4in.For something that produces such small prints, the UP-DP10 is surprisingly large but it can be stood on its side to reduce its desktop footprint.Paper is loaded into a feeder at the front and the print ribbon goes in a slot on the top. The UP-DP10 has a ribbon because it is a dye-sublimation printer and it works by melting solid ink on to the page to form an image. It's not a particularly cheap way to print but it does produce smoothly shaded images that are light-fast and, if you select the appropriate option, glossy.Installing the UP-DP10 is easy enough, thanks to the USB connection, but the software CDRom doesn't auto run. As the manual makes no mention of the bundled software, you'll need to figure out where it is and install it yourself, although Sony says it is going to include additional instructions.If you're happy to resize images to fit the paper, you can print from any application. The bundled software will handle this for you, as well as catering for lots of other image-editing tasks. Prints take a couple of minutes to make and cost about 62p each.Contact Sony 08705 424424, www.sony-cp.com</body></html></content>VNU Business Publications LTD, London UKCopyright © 1994-2009 VNU Business Publications LTD, London UKJulian Prokaza2000-09-12T23:00:00.000ZHardware Reviewsperipheral-devices