Crawford's Corner

Citation

Crawford, W. (1999), "Crawford's Corner", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916fab.001

Crawford's Corner

Perspective

Bugged by the Millennium

Mondak, Tuesdak, Wednesdak, Thursdak, Fridak, Saturdak, Sundak. Januark, Februark, Mak, Julk. If you haven't seen the memo yet (perhaps a dozen times or more), you surely will: it's the report of a consultant told to handle the "Y-to-K" problem. Meanwhile, we find more and more businesses and government agencies who tell us they're certain they'll be OK on 1 January 2000--and the howls of consulting companies that it can't be true.

The cries of alarm increasingly have overtones of self-interest. The people saying that nobody's nearly ready for Y2K are those who will be happy to help solve the problems, at urgently high rates. They've built business models on milking government and industry for a cool trillion dollars, and woe be anyone who stands in the way of their fear mongering.

Am I saying there won't be problems on 1 January 2000 (or the first working day after that)? Not at all. I suspect that the middle ground is right: you should be as prepared for the turn of the year as you would be for a stormy weekend. That is, you should have enough water, canned food, candles, and batteries to make it through a rough weekend if need be--just as every sane Californian does in any case.

I fully expect our microwaves and the TV set to work exactly the same on 1/1/2000 as they do on 12/31/1999--and I'm betting the power grid, banking system, and phone system will be fine as well. I would have no qualms about flying on 1/1/2000 within the United States, Japan, Australia/New Zealand, or Western Europe, and I don't believe the economies of developed countries will collapse.

This perspective was triggered by two items, not otherwise related in any way. First, Jake Kirchner's half-page essay in the 9 March 1999 PC Magazine is entitled "Y2K without fear," and includes a couple of odd comments in an otherwise sensible discussion. He believes that "the worst Y2K damage has already occurred: Because of uncertainty and outrageous fear mongering, there is in our society a pervasive fear of the future." A bit later he says, "When we should be looking for reasons to be hopeful about reaching a significant milestone in the history of humankind, we're consumed with anxiety." The second item was a 1982 book of futurism, which included a discussion of millennialism.

Significant Milestone?

My first question is, "What significant milestone in the history of humankind?" What's significant about 1/1/2000 in terms of the history of humankind--except, possibly, the fact that we've made it this far without global nuclear warfare? Realistically, 1/1/2000 is just another New Year's Day as far as human history is concerned. Ideally, we should be treating it as such. I doubt that the average person has "a pervasive fear of the future"--most of us really aren't planning to move into caves come mid-December or sock away huge amounts of cash. At least I hope we're not. I fully agree with Kirchner's last line: "Above all, you don't need to be afraid." Lack of fear is a bit different than celebrating some nonexistent milestone.

Then there's millennialism, which has nothing to do with embedded chips or six-digit date functions. Here, I wonder whether the technological Y2K problem hasn't served as a form of preventive medicine. People are mildly concerned about some glitches on the first couple of days of the new year. That may be healthier than being troubled by the impending end of the world, or the lesser millennialist catastrophes and cataclysms that we could expect this year.

Which attitude would you prefer among your technologically semiliterate acquaintances? Some concern that their VCR won't tape the Rose Parade properly (which is a reasonable concern, actually) or that there will be a few power outages--or belief that there will be mobs in the streets or heavenly cataclysms? Personally, I'll take the minor technological concerns, even if I believe they're overblown.

DVD Watch

Are we there yet? That depends on which "there" you mean. Are DVD players flying off store shelves? Nope. Is DVD a significant medium yet? Yes, I believe it is. Some personal observations on the state of DVD in March 1999.

DVD-TV Software

The news is almost entirely good. Every major Hollywood studio now releases "open DVD" (as opposed to "closed" Divx), most are now releasing DVD and VHS on the same day, and there are already more than 3,000 DVD releases. My local Tower Records has two aisles within the record section devoted to DVDs, in addition to a substantial rental DVD section in the video store.

The discounters have arrived--Madacy of Canada has scores of old movies on DVD at $7.99 a pop--and both rental and sale prices are reasonable. Tower is renting DVD for $2 as a way of fighting Divx. My neighborhood video rental store has had a few DVD rentals for a couple of months, and just expanded to two shelving sections with probably three hundred or more DVDs. Blockbuster appears to have more than a thousand DVDs available. This is, in most respects, better availability than laserdisc ever achieved--and most DVDs offer substantial benefits over VHS (in addition to greater clarity and lifespan). As far as I can tell, almost every store that sells (or rents) significant ranges of videocassettes also sells (or rents) DVDs.

DVD-ROM Software

It's just starting, but at least it is starting. I found half a dozen DVD-ROMs at CompUSA in late February 1999, including at least one that isn't just a CD-ROM with fancier video. So far, no discounted DVD-ROMs.

DVD Players

Players are in almost every store that handles VHS, and at prices under the usual "impulse point" (I've seen them as low as $250). They're selling, but not in the huge quantities that would make public library DVD collections near-term necessities. I suspect Divx continues to confound the issue (although Circuit City seems to make the Divx ads smaller each week). Beyond that, it's still true that most people don't seem to care about pictures better than VHS.

DVD-ROM Drives

This may be the discouraging area, and it's only discouraging in comparative terms. Some pundits claimed that it would be hard to buy a multimedia PC without a DVD-ROM drive in 1999. Gateway, for one, made DVD-ROM nearly standard on all but its cheapest home PCs in late 1998. On that basis, you could expect as many as 30 to 40 million installed DVD-ROM drives by the end of this year. Since (almost) every DVD-ROM drive will play DVD movies (more sharply than on a TV set, for that matter), this would mean a huge market, if a slightly strange one.

Unfortunately, DVD-ROM drives are less common as "standard" items now than they were a few months ago. There's enormous competitive pressure to sell PCs at absurdly low prices, while component costs aren't going down that rapidly (and in some cases are going up). As a result, the companies who've traditionally produced the most full-featured PCs (e.g., Dell, Gateway, and Micron) are "defeaturing" their standard models to bring them in at lower cost. Oh, DVD-ROM drives are still cheap upgrades, but a lot of people won't bother.

Personal Experience

I paid the $80 for a DVD-ROM upgrade in my new PC. The DVD-ROM drive (a Toshiba 4.8x model) works great as a fast CD-ROM drive; so far, I haven't tried the single DVD-ROM that came with it (Zork Grand Inquisitor: I will, but I'm not a gamer).

But I did try out a DVD video: Contact. On my glorious Trinitron 18"-viewable display (at 800x600 16-bit color, the limit for the software decoder), it was pretty good in its 16x9 letterboxed form--but, during the day, not spectacular. Even though the viewing angle (and effective "screen size") from an 18" display viewed at arm's length is actually larger than a 32" TV viewed from six feet away, it wasn't as dramatic.

At least it wasn't until I showed a little of it to my wife that evening, and turned the room lights off. At that point, I became a believer. One of these weekends, we'll rent a DVD player and try a couple of discs on the big screen. I suspect we'll buy a DVD player sometime within the next year.

Time for DVD?

If your Friends of the Library want to start putting together a DVD collection, and you're in an area where a lot of your patrons are likely to have fairly new PCs...well, maybe it's not too early to consider it. Otherwise, you can wait a while--but I believe that, by late 1999, DVD will be a well-established set of media. Which, as previously discussed ad nauseam hereabouts, is good for libraries. DVDs work better than videocassettes for libraries, for the same reasons that audio CDs work better than vinyl LPs.

Product Watch

Windows CE Pro

Jupiter: that's the code name for Microsoft Windows CE Handheld PC Professional Edition, a bloated name for a slimmed-down operating system. "Handheld" may not be true: most Jupiter systems weigh between two and three pounds and measure around 7x10 inches. They are $900-$1,000 systems with no CD, diskette, or hard disk, but with color displays and almost-adequate keyboards.

Some of them are included in a review article noted in this issue's "Review Watch" ("State-of-the-art lightweight portables"), but some critical notes didn't appear in the article. Instead, they appeared in PCMagazine's little "Inside PC Labs" feature for 9 February 1999. After reading that tiny little feature, I didn't much care about the actual reviews: it's pretty clear that these devices are fairly specialized toys.

For example, they come with special versions of Microsoft's primary applications: Pocket Excel, Pocket Word, Pocket PowerPoint. The applications run from the 12-24MB of ROM in the systems; your files fit in the 16-32MB RAM. You can convert your PowerPoint presentation to Pocket PowerPoint--but you'd better be happy with the presentation, because the Pocket version will only edit the title page. You can download Excel to Pocket Excel--but a 700KB file with two sheets "expanded to 1.2MB when converted to Pocket Excel and took several hours to open under CE." That isn't a misprint: hours, not minutes.

If all you need a notebook computer for are e-mail and a little light memo writing, one of these devices might do the job. Otherwise, pay a little more for a real notebook computer.

The Flat-Screen Follies

Did you run out and buy an LCD display in December 1998 or January 1999--particularly a true digital display with digital graphics adaptor? Congratulations: your timing may have been perfect. Prices for large LCD displays jumped sharply in late winter and are likely to stay up for quite some time. There's more demand than capacity; makers still get much worse yield on desktop-size screens than on smaller notebook screens; and they cut prices so much last fall that they weren't making any money.

My wife and I both looked long and hard at Gateway's 15" (viewable) digital LCD panel when I was selecting a new PC. She loved it, but couldn't quite see the $610 increment over their regular 16"-viewable CRT. I took one look at Gateway's 18"-viewable Trinitron CRT (a $260 increment) and the much-smaller LCD didn't stand a chance--particularly since, when I went back to buy the system, the LCD was now a $910 increment. (That's increment, not price: it's probably a $1,300 display at this point.) I'm writing this in front of that Trinitron--and it's easily the best display I've ever used. If money was no object, I could probably buy an even-better 18" LCD display--for right around $3,200 (before the price increase), or a cool 66% more than I paid for my entire system. No thanks.

The 23 March 1999 PC Magazine includes a First Look at Compaq's $3,200 18.1" LCD. Native resolution is 1280x1024. As with any LCD screen, there's some distortion if you use a lower resolution--the more so because 1280x1024 is 5:4 rather than the standard 4:3 of VGA, SVGA, and XVGA. Compaq's LCD stretches lower resolutions to fit, slightly distorting the picture. Since many CD-ROMs and most DVDs won't run at more than 800x600, that may be a problem. Unfortunately, PC Magazine's Alfred Poor falls into the usual hype. He claims that the Compaq's 18.1" viewable diagonal measure makes it "roughly equivalent" to a 21" CRT. Well, yes, if you believe that an 18" CRT is "roughly equivalent" to a 20" CRT. My current display measures 17.9" diagonally for the live picture (omitting black borders). I'd expect a 21" display to have at least 19.8" viewable, which would mean 20% more picture area than the Compaq.

I can tell you from personal experience that the 26% additional screen area I get on my new display (over my old one and its twin at work) is a dramatic difference. Compaq's $3,200 screen should be compared to 18"-viewable CRTs, not 20"-viewables--and the Compaq is more than four times as expensive as Sony's magnificant 18"-viewable CRT.

We're still a few years away from LCDs making more sense than CRTs for most applications. Flat screens will probably take over eventually; I wouldn't bet that those flat screens will be LCDs or that "eventually" will be within the next five years (although both might be true).

PC Values: April 1999

April's standard configuration includes 64MB SDRAM, 24x or faster CD-ROM, AGP (128-bit) accelerator with 8MB SGRAM, V.90 modem, a 13.5-13.9" viewable display (usually called 15"), and wavetable sound with stereo speakers.

• •

  Top, Budget: Gateway Essential 400c: Celeron-400, 8.4GB HD. Pluses: 15.9" display, Altec Lansing speakers. Extras: Corel WordPerfect Suite 8. $1,299, VR 7.94 (+12% since 1/99, +25% since 10/98) Best value among top systems.

• •

  Top, Midrange: Compaq Prosignia Desktop 330: Pentium II-400, 16.8GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 15.7" display, 16MB display RAM, DVD-ROM. Extras: MS Office 97 SBE. $2,069, VR 6.97 (+3% since 1/99, +23% since 10/98).

• •

  Top, Power: Micron Millennia Max 500(B): Pentium III-500, 20GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, DVD-ROM, 15.9" display with 16MB SGRAM, Advent speakers with subwoofer. Extras: MS Office 97 SBE, Zip drive. $2,499, VR 6.67 (no change since 1/99, +23% since 10/98).

• •

  Other, Budget: Microworkz The Workz: AMD K62-350, 8.4GB HD. Minuses: may not be wavetable sound. $850, VR 10.31 (+53% since 1/99, +52% since 10/98). Best value in April systems.

• •

  Other, Midrange: Quantex QP6/500 Best Buy: Pentium III-500, 13GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, DVD-ROM, 18.1" display, Altec-Lansing speakers. Extras: Corel WordPerfect Office Suite and other software. $1,999, VR 7.39 (+8% since 1/99, +15% since 10/98).

• •

  Other, Power: Quantex QP6/500 SM-4x SE: Pentium II-500, 20GB HD. Similar to Midrange system, but with 32MB SGRAM, MS Office 97 SBE, Altec-Lansing speakers with subwoofer, Ethernet port, Zip drive. $2,699, VR 6.71 (+15% since 1/99, +14% since 10/98).

Press Watch

Poor, A. (1999), "Back it up--with tape," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 5, p. 53.

It's just a half-page first look at Sony's new $180 SuperStation tape drive, which has enormous capacity (up to 10GB per tape) albeit tape's typical slow performance (at least in its external form). The SuperStation looks to be a well-priced unit for those who really want to back up all of today's large hard disks. That isn't why I mention it here. That reason comes in the first paragraph.

"Most removable disks can't cut it; you need more than 60 Zip disks to back up one 6GB disk." No you don't, and Alfred Poor knows better. Later in the review he notes that "Tapes are rated based on their estimated capacities using compression, assuming a 2:1 compression ratio." In other words, the maximum raw capacity of a SuperStation tape isn't 10GB: it's 5GB.

Guess what? You can compress data to a Zip cartridge just as effectively as you can to a tape drive. It's likely to be exactly the same process. I know that the Backup applet in Windows 98 (a version of Seagate's Backup software, which comes with the Sony drive) automatically compresses during backup to any device, unless I tell it not to. The compression ratio seems to average roughly 2:1. Surprise, surprise!

You should be able to back up a 6GB hard disk to roughly 30 original Zip disks, or 12 of the new 250MB disks. That's still more hassle than a single tape cartridge, but at least it's an accurate comparison.

Data compression works for any storage device. I see no reason why you couldn't back up roughly 1.3GB to a CD-RW disc. With CD-RW prices dropping as low as $3.33 each in three-packs, they're even cheaper than tape, although still not as capacious. There's nothing magical about tape that allows it to compress data where other media can't.

Dvorak, J. (1999), "MP3 spells disaster," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 5, p. 87.

Here's one to look back at in 2001. This column begins with the following flat statement: "The MP3 format and the trading of music on the Internet will destroy the music industry within the next two years." No qualifications, no ellipses: that's the Future According to Dvorak.

Maybe I should leave it at that. Send yourself a reminder to check back here in March 2001 (two years from the column's appearance). See whether all the record stores have become Starbucks, whether Sony Music, EMI, and all the others have gone bankrupt, and whether every CD site on the World Wide Web is nothing more than an MP3 distributor working directly with artists. If I was acquainted with Dvorak, I'd love to make a large bet on this particular prediction. Say, for example: I'll pay him one percent of my adjusted gross income for 2001 if he'll pay me one percent of the gross revenue of "the music industry" (excluding MP3 downloads) in 2001. He can't lose: he says there won't be a music industry in 2001!

We should be used to projections like this one. The death-of-print cadre seems to keep making such projections, although the dates keep moving back. Why should music be any different?

Then again, Dvorak is one of those who believes that MP3 offers "CD-quality audio" at moderate compression ratios: none of those "near-" qualifiers for his tin ear. He complains that CDs shouldn't cost more than cassettes, "a linear medium with moving parts." He's right: CDs shouldn't cost more than cassettes--but I have yet to see a working CD that didn't involve movement.

Mostly, though, Dvorak sees this new distribution medium, which has real potential for independent bands and specialized music, and says of music industry executives: "In short, they're toast." Sure they are, John. (In a wonderfully hypocritical closing paragraph, he says, "I sure don't condone illegal activity" after celebrating precisely that. Never mind.)

"The ultimate upgrade guide," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 5, p. 100-188.

If you have a PC that's more than a year old, you may find this multipart article worth reading and maybe saving. It covers almost every aspect of a PC, showing when upgrades make sense and which upgrades work the best. There's far too much involved here to summarize, but this is an example of PC Magazine at its best: nearly a book's worth of well-researched information for the price of a magazine. And, to be sure, you get John Dvorak's silliness (above) and a whole lot more.

Review Watch

Desktop Computers

Metz, C. (1999), "Pentium III hits 500," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 6, pp. 100-37.

The first seven Pentium III PCs, clocked at 500MHz and with potentially better performance for some tasks. These are all strong systems from significant vendors, and you might find enough in the reviews to question their Editors' Choice (Compaq's $2,990 Desktop Prosignia 330). They give honorable mentions to Dell's $2,657 Dimension XPS T500 and Micron's $2,899 Millennia MAX 500. Gateway's $2,974 G6-500 was fastest on both primary benchmarks, had the best ease of use, and offered the highest performance and features score--but there was a problem with the BIOS as shipped (affecting Internet settings and readily resolved). Then again, scores were very close in general, and these are all well-equipped systems. Do you get a significant edge over a typical Pentium II-450 or even a Celeron-400? Probably not, for most software and in most systems, but you always pay some premium for the bleeding edge.

Plain, S. (1999), "DVD desktop deals," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 182-206.

Eight PCs equipped with DVD-ROMs and priced at $1,500 or less. The systems had to have at least 33MHz Celerons, 64MB SDRAM, 8GB hard disk, and 16" display. Computer Shopper doesn't name "winners" but provides quite detailed descriptions of each tested unit, including name brands such as Dell and Micron and such lesser lights as Aberdeen and Zenon.

The ABS system offered the best overall performance; MidWest Micro's system uniquely included a high-capacity removable drive; and Quantex' computer was particularly well rounded. The primary news may be that you can get a decently equipped, high-performance computer for less than $1,500--but you may need to add a fair amount to that.

Modems

Brown, B. (1999), "Cards for all connections," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 203-18.

This roundup covers one of the cleverest ideas for road warriors: PC Cards that combine Ethernet (and Fast Ethernet) and V.90 modem connections and support. One card connects you to the LAN at work and to the Internet on the road. They're not cheap--$280 to $370--but they seem enormously sensible. Detailed individual reviews cover seven cards, which fall into two categories: 16-bit cards using the standard PC Card interface and 32-bit cards using the newer CardBus interface. CardBus only matters for Fast (100MHz) Ethernet, but then it matters a lot: average throughput for the CardBus cards was five times higher than for 16-bit cards. Unfortunately, CardBus assigns the modem to COM5, and some software (AOL 4.0, for example) doesn't support COM5. Applications following Microsoft's Telephony API (TAPI) won't have problems.

If you need a 16-bit card, the Editors' Choice is 3Com's Megahertz 10/100 LAN +56K Modem PC Card ($330). The Editors' Choice for CardBus cards goes to Ositech's $370 Jack of Spades CardBus 10/100 + 56K Modem with DPI PC Card. An honorable mention goes to Xircom's $350 RealPort CardBus Ethernet 10/100 + Modem 56: it manages to integrate standard ports directly into the edge of a Type III PC Card rather than relying on special adapters.

Printers

Carlson, K. (1999), "Ultrafast color printers," PC/Computing, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 175-80.

This test includes eight color laser printers, throwing in one thermal printer for comparison. It's an interesting (if brief) comparative review, including photographic print samples, and these pricey color lasers may make sense for some users. Still, the "Best" award goes to an $8,500 Lexmark color printer, where the price is justified because of its "low cost per page." The article goes so far as to claim that a $9,000 color laser is cost-effective compared to a $300 color inkjet because consumables cost so much for the inkjet.

Unfortunately, the comparison is phony. They claim 40 cents per page for the inkjet ink in a normal color graphics page as compared to six cents for the Lexmark. Even at that, and granting the 2,400 color pages per year they regard as typical, it would take almost a decade to pay off the price difference. But today's best inkjet printers don't cost anywhere near 40 cents per page for consumables, unless you're printing full-page photographs. Ziff's responsible computer magazine, PC Magazine, listed color page costs in its last roundup as anywhere from five to nine cents for HP DeskJets and about nine cents for Epson printers. Assuming nine cents, the annual savings is all of $72, meaning that it will take more than a century to amortize the more expensive printer.

There are good reasons for some people to prefer color lasers to inkjet printers. Long-term savings is not one of them.

Scanners

McClelland, D. (1999), "A scanner for all reasons," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 162-80.

If you've followed recent scanner reviews, there's nothing startling here. Good scanners have become quite inexpensive, but newer technologies (specifically, contact image sensor [CIS] rather than charge-coupled device sensors [CCD]) don't always work out very well. USB is coming on strong. The very cheapest scanners rarely offer the best value, but you don't have to pay very much. If you have any plausible reason to want a scanner and at least $150 or so, there's no good reason not to buy one.

Unfortunately, although McClelland tested 19 scanners, you don't get individual writeups on all 19--or even on the "top ten" that get summarized in a table. This is a chronic and serious weakness in PC World roundups, a key reason they're not fully competitive with PC Magazine. That said, it's an interesting review, with three "best buys" scattered among the top ten (at positions 1, 5, and 9, which makes it more confusing). The "best buy" for small offices and home offices is Epson's $299 Perfection 636, which is also the top-rated scanner based on their weighted score. The "best buy" for home use is the fifth-rated $149 Plustek OpticPro 9636T. Corporate best buy is the ninth-rated $699 Agfa DuoScan T1200.

Because there are simplistic comparison charts and no individual writeups, it's hard to figure this all out. HP's ScanJet 6200C scans the fastest; they assert that its scanned image "looks washed out" compared to Umax' Astra 2400S (with the same specs), but a direct comparison shows that the ScanJet scan is much closer to the original than the Umax. In general, the Best Buy picks and ratings in general seem arbitrary. Read the article for McClelland's comments, but don't take the results too seriously.

CD-ROM Watch

An Atlas Update

I love CD-ROM atlases, and have reviewed half a dozen or more of them. They almost always have loads of "CD-ROMness": while they never offer the rapid overviews of good print atlases, they offer extras that wouldn't work in print. The single CD-ROM newly reviewed here is no exception--and if I'd reviewed it a couple of years ago, I would have been blown away.

The bar keeps moving up. Mindscape originated the genre more than a decade ago, but Mindscape hasn't updated their world and U.S. atlases since 1995--and those versions had such confused and unstable interfaces that the superb underlying data was hard to get at. The Learning Company now has Mindscape's atlases in its stable, along with the fine 1997 Compton's Interactive and the lesser 1998 Compton's 3D. There are other competitors, to be sure--but the company that's made competition difficult is in Redmond. The 1997 Encarta Atlas was flawed in several respects, but offered the most sophisticated interface and deepest visual and cultural information of any atlas on the market--although it almost entirely lacked statistical comparisons and went overboard in providing every possible city name, including cities that no longer existed. The 1998 Encarta Virtual Globe had fewer flaws than the 1997 atlas and added first-rate statistical comparison capabilities: it became the atlas to beat.

I didn't get around to reviewing this new competitor for several months. It's from one of my favorite CD-ROM publishers and it makes big claims, including a sheet that challenges Encarta Virtual Globe head-on. Here's the review, followed by some invidious comparisons, because they're needed and because the publisher explicitly invites them.

I always look forward to reviewing DK products, and I'm rarely disappointed. As with Dorling Kindersley's books, DK Multimedia CD-ROMs are almost always beautiful and interesting. Most often, they're also fascinating and unique.

While Eyewitness World Atlas is certainly beautiful, it's also a bit of a disappointment. Not that it's a bad product: the "very good" rating is deserved, and this is a substantially better atlas than DK's earlier Cartopedia. But it's nowhere near as good as it could be, and it's not (in my opinion) the best CD-ROM atlas on the market. Without competitors (and without its stability problems), it might rank Excellent; in a competitive field, it does not.

Eyewitness World Atlas Home Screen

Eyewitness World Atlas

***: Very Good [84]

Windows 95/98: ISBN 0-7894-3264-1

$29.95

DK Multimedia, 1-888-DIAL-DKP

http://www.dk.com

Eyewitness World Atlas page for Barbados

Installation supports AutoPlay and is reasonably polite, but uses 41MB. That may be trivial on today's 10GB disks, but it's still more than twice the disk space of any other atlas I've tried, and makes this a tough product to recommend for older Windows 95 systems. Startup also supports AutoPlay but runs Setup each time, unfortunately.

My new computer has an 18"-viewable display that I normally run at 1280 X 1024 X16-bit color. Just for fun, I started Eyewitness World Atlas at that resolution to see what would happen. I was startled to find that it filled the screen. I shouldn't have been: it was a trick. Windows 98 allows an application to modify screen resolution on the fly: when Eyewitness World Atlas exited, my display was running at 800 X 600. The program requires 800 X 600 and at least 16-bit color, and takes advantage of 24-bit color if available. I switched to 24-bit 800 X 600 for most testing.

This is a dramatic product, starting with a moving 3D globe and moving from there to country screens, statistical maps, or statistical lists. You can also switch to 2D maps or a trio of global views.

Each country has an individual map with commentary and a range of information screens, which can provide up to 125 different data fields. Most countries have one or two photographs, and there are some 26 video clips as well as eight 3D "flights." In all, the atlas includes 400 different maps, 40,000 "data fields" (according to the press information), 250 photos, and half a million words of text. Roughly three-quarters of the interface is used for live data, with narrow left and bottom strips for interface control.

Where this atlas is good, it is spectacular. The videos offer the highest visual quality I've ever seen in an atlas, and the photographs are also beautiful. Both are larger than usual for CD-ROM products. (There's also a DVD-ROM version with full-screen MPEG2 videos: I haven't seen that one, although I'd love to.) Presentation is always crisp, with serif text, clean layouts, and a choice of graph types for graphed data (e.g., major exporting and importing partners for a country can appear as a pie chart or a bar chart). Most information is current and it's possible to see sources for information within country screens.

What's not to love? Partly the accompanying claims (which a regular buyer would never see) and partly some difficulties and instability. I'm less forgiving of instability on my brand-new Celeron-400 system than I might have been on the older Pentium 166: this system hasn't been "messed with" for years, and there's no reason that programs should crash. But crash it did, on two different occasions.

I found navigation somewhat clumsy, surprising for a DK product. You never get totally lost, but this atlas has a less lucid set of controls than key competitors. Once you're in a country view, you're there, and about the only easy way out is to call up the index.

The maps are the prettiest I've seen in a CD-ROM atlas, but they're also limited. As far as I can tell, you're either at globe level, country level, or maximum zoom: there are no middle grounds. That's unfortunate, even though the zoomed maps scroll automatically as you near borders of the screen.

Then there are the elements that aren't here, or are relatively light. While the 250 photos are beautifully presented, that's not very many photos for the entire world. Key competitors have many more photos. The DK atlas absolutely requires a sound card--but other than narrated videos and a few background noises, it doesn't use sound. There are no anthems, no spoken phrases in local languages, no examples of ethnic music: nothing.

This is a fine atlas, with a fair amount of well-organized information on each country, good search capabilities, decent statistical provisions (statistics can be listed in alphabetic order by country, ascending order, or descending order), and (of course) loads of links to the World Wide Web. The box claims that it's "the most visually stunning and information-rich reference atlas." Visually stunning, yes. Information-rich? Maybe, but not "the most" as far as I can tell. It's worth $30, but I wouldn't choose it as my only CD-ROM atlas.

Invidious Comparisons

The back of DK's color press sheet for Eyewitness World Atlas says, "Which Multimedia Atlas Should You Carry?" and offers a table comparing the DK product to Encarta Virtual Globe and 3D Atlas. It's not clear whether the "3D Atlas" listed is the original ABC product or the repackaged and improved Compton's Deluxe 3D Atlas, but never mind that. For my own purposes, I added a fourth column for the 1997 Compton's.

Compton's1997 Atlas Page for Barbados

The lines of the table cover recency of data, individual maps, narrated videos, narrated 3-D flights, photos, data fields per country, ease of use, enhanced DVD-ROM availability, full-screen videos, and street price. Let's look at a few of those comparisons and then add a few lines that DK chooses to ignore.

DK claims 1998 for their data and 1996 for the other atlases. Most of the statistics I checked in the DK atlas were 1996 figures, and it's essentially impossible to include 1998 data in a 1998 publication. So "1998" must mean cartographic rather than statistical information. (DK's statistical information was generally at least as current as its competitors, sometimes more so.)

Individual maps? Yes, DK has "separated" maps for each country. Encarta doesn't: its maps are always offered in context. I'm not entirely sure that you would ever understand, say, Costa Rica better by seeing its map with just other country names around it; I might suggest quite the opposite. Compton's 1997 atlas does have individual country maps.

Things get tricky on the next line. DK claims 26 narrated videos to Encarta's 14 and 3D Atlas's 24. Except that there are 29 video clips on Encarta--and, while the DK videos are visually magnificent, I found most of them somewhat lacking in significance. (Compton's 1997 has 101 video clips.)

"Narrated 3-D flights" is accurate as it stands. DK has eight. Encarta is listed as "0"--and, indeed, the seven 3-D flights in Encarta aren't narrated, even though they are generated-data, user-controllable flythroughs, unlike the canned videos in DK. (It's hard to narrate a flight when the user can vary the angle, speed, and height of flight.)

The "photos" line is just plain strange. It says that DK has 250, Encarta 300, and 3D Atlas six. In fact, Encarta has thousands of photographs, all with substantial annotations. Microsoft claims 5,000; I was able to count more than 700 just for countries beginning with A, B, and C. Compton's 1997 includes 1,550 photos.

"Data fields per country"? DK claims 125 for their atlas, 25 for Encarta, and none for the 3D Atlas. That may be true, in terms of data specifically presented within country views in statistical terms. But Encarta offers 154 different statistical comparisons, Compton's version of the 3D Atlas offers more than 400, and Compton's 1997 offers 234. Only Encarta offers detailed commentary on each statistical category along with full source information.

"Ease of use" is a judgement call, and DK just says "Yes" for theirs and question marks for the others. I find Encarta clearer and easier to navigate than DK, but DK works better than the 3D Atlas. (Compton's 1997 is clear but a bit ugly by today's standards, and I wouldn't call it easier than DK.) I can't question the two DVD-related lines, but they don't relate to the $29.95 "street price" line (where DK does have an edge over the pricier Encarta): the DVD-ROM version is $40, still a bargain. The real bargain, if you don't mind the aging interface and strict 640x480 screen, is Compton's 1997, typically available as a $10 jewel box these days.

Encarta Virtual Globe page for Barbados at 800x600

There are a few other lines not in this table: "Music of the country," "In-depth cultural essays," "Flexible multilevel zooms," "Selectable details on maps," "Thematic articles on the environment, weather, etc." and "Densely interlinked information."

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  Music of the country: Encarta has 300 such clips, all identified, all coupled to pictures. Compton's 1997 has more than 700 sound files (anthems and local music) in addition to more than 1,000 phrases pronounced in various languages and regional accents. DK has none.

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  In-depth cultural essays: Encarta includes the full set of Culturgrams, and that may be all I need to say--except that Encarta enriches Culturgrams through its heavy use of in-text links and sidebar links. In just the first paragraph of "The People" section of Costa Rica's "Society" section (what Encarta calls its modified Culturgrams), there are sidebar links to two topical essays (Human Migration, Population Growth) and a map link to a population statistical map. The three-sentence paragraph contains links (either hyperlinks or glossary pop-ups) for "indigenous" and "South America" --and many more links within the eight printed pages. (Eight more printed pages discuss the country's factual aspects: location, topography, statistics.) Compton's 1997 provides detailed factual commentary, running to ten pages of much smaller type and including many more factual items than Encarta; Compton's 1998 limits its Costa Rica profile to a scant two pages with two dozen facts and a few hundred well-chosen words. By comparison, DK's discussion of Costa Rica includes about as much text as Compton's 1998 (much less than the other two), but more statistical information within the country profile than Encarta or Compton's 1998 (but not Compton's 1997, which is comparable to DK). To learn about the country and its people, Encarta is the clear leader.

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  Multilevel zooms and selectable details: DK offers two levels of a country map: little and moderately big. Period. No choices as to what detail is included. That's not surprising, since these appear to be maps stored as bit-mapped images. Encarta stores a cartographic database and builds its maps on the fly, offering many levels of zoom and startlingly more detail than any other atlas (CD-ROM or, I suspect, printed). At highest zoom level for Costa Rica, for example, an area roughly 25 miles on a side can fill 80% of a 1280x1024 screen: that's a lot of detail. As with Compton's 1997 (which also offers multilevel zoom, but with far less attractive maps and eventual pixelization), you can choose what detail to include in a map and choose among several styles of maps. Encarta, in particular, offers much greater mapping variety than DK, although none of the maps are as pretty as those in the DK atlas.

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  Thematic articles (and videos): Encarta includes more than 60 thematic articles about the world and its regions; some of those articles include photos and videos. None of the other atlases have thematic articles, but each Compton's atlas includes a substantial number of well-done thematic videos about weather and the environment. DK has neither.

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  Interlinked information: Here again, Encarta is the champion. Whenever appropriate, statistics for one country have a sidebar offering statistical maps or tables so that you can see how the country compares to others. As already noted, links are also available within text whenever appropriate, and a combination of standard Windows menus and an ever-present toolbar assure that you're never lost.

Preparing this review has been a somewhat paradoxical experience. I'm always delighted to see someone give serious competition to Microsoft, and I normally love DK products. In this case, I found myself turning more and more to Encarta Virtual Globe--and wanting to see what the 1999 version is like. You can blame DK for that, in part: they chose to draw up the faulty comparative table.

Encarta Virtual Globe, small portion of Culturgram for Barbados

As I was writing this, I went back to each of the four atlases to study Costa Rica and, where feasible, print out the information. (We're visiting Costa Rica later this year: my choices are rarely arbitrary.) DK gives me enough information to be worthwhile, but with no easy way to print it all out--and with some correct but misleading information because context was lacking. There was one good photograph.

Compton's 1997 was ugly by comparison but gave me much more detail in its maps, and made it easy to print out detailed (if generally older) information and commentary about the country. I found seven fine photographs, heard the anthem and one piece of local music, and could get the Latin American Spanish pronunciation of a fair number of common phrases.

Compton's 1998 provided a two-page commentary on Costa Rica with only two dozen figures (mostly from 1993-1995 sources, fully credited), but also provided eight excellent pictures, although no music or sounds.

Encarta Virtual Globe showed me far more detailed maps than any other atlas, 16 printable pages of expert commentary, 15 fine photographs (with a full paragraph of commentary on each), one accompanied by local music, and 23 photographs of local animal life (with a paragraph of commentary on each), eight of them with animal sounds. Yes, the statistics were older than DK (and fully sourced), but with Encarta Virtual Globe I felt as though I really understood something about Costa Rica and its people.

Final score: Eyewitness World Atlas is a fine product, well worth the money, and the handsomest product on the market. If you're interested in countries and their people, or you want detailed cartographic information, Encarta Virtual Globe is a better atlas and a better value, even at a higher price. And, when you can get it for $10 and don't need the most recent statistics, Compton's Interactive World Atlas 1997 Edition is a great value and a fine product--but it's the 640 x 480 ugly duckling of this group.

The Details

Crawford's Corner is written by Walt Crawford, an information architect at The Research Libraries Group, Inc. Opinions herein do not reflect those of RLG or MCB University Press. Comments should be sent to wcc@notes.rlg.org. CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs for review should be sent to Walt Crawford, 1631 Columbia Drive, Mountain View, CA 94040-3638; Windows 98/95 only.