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Techradar |
- Buying Guide: 10 best photo printers: which is right for you?
- TechRadar Choice: 10 best 37-inch LCD TVs in the world today
- Review: StarTech 2.5" SATA HD rack
- Review: CyberPower Game Cube
- In Depth: Does Kinect herald the demise of the keyboard?
- Review: The PCO Group Evolution 3D
- In Depth: 6 of the best Mac Twitter clients
| Buying Guide: 10 best photo printers: which is right for you? Posted: 31 Oct 2010 05:00 AM PDT  It always pays to look good on paper but, when it comes to the best printers, it also pays to choose wisely. Some models are aimed at hard-nosed business printing, based on a four-ink system for generating polished documents, spreadsheets and the like, quite often with fax facilities on the side, or at least on top, as part of the current vogue for the best all-in-one printers that feature a built-in scanner. Others of our best printers are more arty, with six inks under the bonnet to extend the colour space for photo printing, but these often lack a pigment-based black ink, so mono text output can look a little greyish and feint. Then there are those that follow Canon's lead, initiated a few years ago, and serve up five inks which include both pigment-based and dye-based black inks, geared towards a perfect compromise between document and photo output. Whichever suits your needs most ideally, here are some of the best printers on the market - all in price order. 1. Lexmark Interpret S405 - £67
Amazingly inexpensive for an all-in-one business inkjet printer, the Interpret S405 builds on Lexmark's new Vizix four-ink print system with individually replaceable cartridges, and adds a colour scanner and fax machine, complete with 35-sheet ADF (Auto Document Feeder) to make light of photocopying and faxing multi-page documents. Better still, it includes a full range of USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity and the only thing that's really lacking is a colour LCD screen for previewing photos. Even so, it's the best multifunction printer if you're on a really tight budget. Read our Lexmark Interpret S405 review 2. Canon PIXMA iP4850 - £73
This is the brand new update to the Canon PIXMA iP4700, which in our view was the best inkjet printer on the market if you didn't want an all-in-one model with a built-in scanner. Identical in size and weight to the iP4700, the iP4850 still gives you auto-duplex, dual paper input trays and immaculate document and photo quality output from Canon's five-ink ChromaLife100+ system. The main differences are revised ink cartridges that have slightly higher capacities, and a new Full HD Movie Print feature which is compatible with Canon cameras. Read our Canon PIXMA iP4700 review 3. Canon PIXMA MG5150 - £77
Occupying the middle ground in Canon's new 'MG' series of all-in-one printers, there's lots to like here, including dual input trays and a wide range of standalone printing functions, including the ability to enhance photos from memory cards or print PDF documents direct from a USB flash drive. It has the same range of inks as the new iP4850 and MG6150 but it's rather slower than both of these models and, unlike the latter, there's no Wi-Fi connectivity. Even so, it's still one of the best printers available at the price. Read our Canon PIXMA MG5150 review 4. Epson Stylus Photo P50 - £78
As a bare-bones model without any all-in-one aspirations, the P50 is nevertheless one of the best photo printers on the market for digital camera enthusiasts on a tight budget. Based on Epson's latest Claria dye-based inks, it adds light cyan and light magenta to the standard CMYK range, to give an enhanced six-ink colour space for highly accurate colour rendition, along with excellent vibrancy and contrast. As with all Epson inkjet printers, the ink cartridges are individually replaceable to drive down running costs. Read our Epson Stylus Photo P50 review 5. Epson Stylus Office BX305FW - £79
Complete with standalone photocopying and fax facilities fed by a 30sheet ADF (Auto Document Feeder), the main claim to fame of this business-oriented four-ink multifunction printer is that it runs on Epson's resin-based DURABrite inks, the bonus being that prints are highly smudge-resistant even before they hit the output tray. Wi-Fi connectivity is another plus point at the price, although there's no auto-duplex facility nor any card reader slots or a USB socket for printing direct from memory cards or a USB flash drive. Read our Epson Stylus Office BX305FW review 6. HP Photosmart Premium C309G - £80
Taking a leaf out of Canon's book, the HP Premium features a five-ink system that combines dye-based and pigment-based black inks for convincing document and photo output alike, although photo prints are a little lacking in vibrancy compared with equivalent Canon printers. The HP is well connected too, with USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi, and its multifunction facilities are simple to use thanks to a novel 8.9cm touchscreen that works a treat. The only really noticeable omissions are that there's no CompactFlash card reader slot and you can't print direct onto CDs or DVDs. Read our HP Photosmart Premium C309G review 7. Lexmark Interact S605 - £100
This feature-packed four-ink multifunction printer was one of the first Lexmark models to boast individually replaceable ink cartridges. Further attractions include fast print speeds, Wi-Fi connectivity and auto-duplex for double-sided printing. The S605 also features a class-leading 10.9cm colour touchscreen to make the most of direct printing facilities, which include a wide range of downloadable mini-apps. Photo quality is pretty good for a four-ink printer and rather better than with Lexmark's previous six-ink printers, although the single input tray means repeated swapping between plain and photo paper. Read our Lexmark Interact S605 review 8. HP Photosmart Plus eAll-in-One - £103
Typical of HP's recent shift from tri-colour cartridges, this new four-ink printer has individually replaceable ink cartridges, along with the same 8.9cm touchscreen and Wi-Fi connectivity featured on the Photosmart Premium. It also adds HP's new ePrint system, which is great for remote printing via the internet, enabling you to send emails direct to the printer itself, with Word files, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, photos and other attachments, which it'll print out automatically. Unlike the Photosmart Premium, there's no auto-duplex facility but there's a great range of downloadable printing apps. Read our HP Photosmart Plus eAll-in-One review 9. Canon PIXMA MG6150 - £145
Following in the much vaunted footsteps of the PIXMA MP640, this new version of Canon's premium Wi-Fi multifunction printer has a similarly impressive turn of speed and offers all of the same up-market features, like auto-duplex, direct printing onto CDs or DVDs and dual input trays, while also adding Canon's new HD Movie Print facility. The most notable addition, as also featured on the older MP990 printer, is that Canon's usual range of five ink cartridges is supplemented by an extra grey ink cartridge, for refined black & white photo printing. Read our Canon PIXMA MP640 review 10. Epson Stylus Photo PX720WD - £149
Almost identical to the Wi-Fi-enabled, six-ink multifunction Epson PX710W photo printer that we reviewed a while ago, this revamped model is physically slightly deeper and boasts a few upgrades, most notably auto-duplex printing that was entirely lacking on the original model. The PX720WD also adds refined control in direct printing functions, via its new Smart-Navigation Touch-Panel. Mono text is reasonably crisp for a printer with a completely dye-based ink range and photo print speeds and quality are identical to the PX710WD. Read our Epson Stylus Photo PX710W review 
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| TechRadar Choice: 10 best 37-inch LCD TVs in the world today Posted: 31 Oct 2010 04:18 AM PDT  Our constantly updated list of all the best 37-inch TVs in the world Which is the best 37-inch TV?Making the decision to upgrade from a bulky old 28-inch CRT TV is almost too easy, but heading straight for a 42-inch plasma can seem a little daunting. And thus the 37-inch size has become one of the UK's most popular shapes; a lot more impressive than a 32-incher, yet not big enough to entirely dominate a living room. It's also often the maximum size for those of us who are forced, simply by the shape of our living room, to shove a TV in the corner. It's a size division that's as competitive as any, with the big brands weighing in with both LCD and plasma TV models. Despite its direct forerunners being some of the best-reviewed (and best-selling) TVs around, Panasonic's TX-P37X20 is the only plasma left in this category. The options explained Surrounded by LCD TVs not just from Panasonic, but from other huge brands like Sony, LG and Toshiba, the 37-inch size has become a battleground dominated by aggressively low pricing. A buyer's market, the 37-inch size is also home to some wonderful innovations. Here you'll find some sets properly exploiting a Full HD resolution, and TVs with built-in Freesat tuners, others with online dimensions, 100Hz scanning and even - in the case of Loewe's Connect - a luxury wireless TV that can stream music and video from a PC or Mac, before pumping out incredible sound. Loewe is hardly typical of this cut-price - and sparsely populated - genre, but it shows just what can be done at this modest measurement.
Sony KDL-37EX503 - £720Freeview HD and media streaming grace this brilliant TV At last, we have a 37-inch TV that carries a Freeview HD tuner that doesn't cost the earth. To celebrate the ground-breaking nature of the Bravia KDL-37EX503, Sony has departed from its usual aesthetic by adding a comely strip of brushed aluminium to the bottom edge. The set's rear is attractive, too, thanks to the inclusion of four HDMIs, a USB for playing MP3, JPEG, and AVC/AVCHD/DivX/MPEG4 video files, and an Ethernet port. As well as enabling you to stream from DLNA PCs, the Ethernet connects to Sony's new Bravia Internet Video platform. Black level response is among the deepest we've seen on a non-LED LCD TV, colours are natural and exceptionally subtly blended while the set's various processing systems do well at cancelling out LCD's inherent motion blur problems - so HD and SD pictures look enjoyably detailed. Read: full Sony KDL-37EX503 review
Toshiba 37RV753Feature-packed 37in set with Freeview HD and Resolution+ upscaling Get ready for about as much telly as you're likely to see for half a grand. Toshiba's 37RV753 is yet another set from this manufacturer to feature an impressive set of features for an almost puzzlingly low price. Pictures are bright and punch and lend themselves well to blockbusting movies or animation, with the only downside a clumsy user interface. Read: full Toshiba 37RV753 full review
Philips 37PFL9604 - £1,000Solid aluminium set to stun With its £1,000 price tag, this is easily one of the costliest TVs for its size, but it's also blatantly superior. The 37PFL9604 sets about the seemingly Herculean task of justifying its price right away, having an extremely eye-catching design and an Ambilight system that sees coloured light sympathetic to the colour content of the picture spilling from the TV's left and right sides. In full swing, this Philips' high-definition pictures are jaw dropping. Fine detailing is peerless; colours are among the boldest and most accurate we've seen; motion handling is amazingly fluid and crisp and black levels are exceptionally profound by LCD's standards. Perhaps even more exceptional, though, is the standard-definition performance. The amount of sharpness and detail the Perfect Pixel HD engine adds to a humble DVD or Freeview broadcast has to be seen to be believed - but there's no Freeview HD tuner. Read: full Philips 37PFL9604 review
LG 37LH7000Bluetooth and value-busting good looks Comfortably one of the prettiest TVs around, with subtle red highlights, see-through bottom edge and high-gloss finish, it sports a USB slot and Bluetooth for wireless compatibility with phones and headphones. The 37LH7000's 100Hz engine works nicely too, making motion look strikingly fluid and sharp. And so long as you only set TruMotion to Low, you get the motion benefits without suffering many of the flickering, shimmering processing artefacts witnessed using higher TruMotion settings. Pictures are frequently quite spectacular, with exceptionally vivid colours, fluid and sharp images, and decent black levels. The only thing that's run-of-the-mill is its speakers. Read: full LG 37LH7000 review
Panasonic TX-L37D25One of the best-equipped sets for free HD is a top-notch performer Despite its run-of-the-mill price, this 37-incher from Panaosnic is a high-end TV - it's so good that it makes everything else seem rather ordinary. Laying down a marker for spec and performance that many of its rivals will struggle to match, the D25 adopts Edge LED backlighting and delivers both Freesat HD and Freeview HD tuners. Easily one of the best displays in its class and comprehensively well featured. Read: full Panasonic TX-L37D25 review
Panasonic TX-P37X20 - £450Panasonic's budget plamsa TV offers a lot of bang for your buck The TX-P37X20 is at the bottom of Panasonic's new plasma TV pile. As such, it's rather low on features and cutting-edge technology. But we're confident it will find an audience. Fashionistas won't like it much, mind you, for the standard black finish, unimaginative sculpting and chunky size is bland in the extreme. Its connectivity is mostly entirely standard, too, with highlights of three HDMIs and an SD/SDXC card slot capable of handling AVCHD video files or JPEG photographs. The P37X20 boasts sharp hi-def, but isn't Full HD - though without any of the blur that's common LCD screens, you'll arguably see a more consistently detailed picture on this plasma from its built-in Freeview HD tuner. The set's viewing angle, too, is vastly superior to the angles supported by most liquid crystal sets. Given the right HD material, though, it's worth an audition Read: full Panasonic TX-P37X20 review
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Review: StarTech 2.5" SATA HD rack
Posted: 31 Oct 2010 03:30 AM PDT
This is where reviewing things in PCFormat can get a mite tricky. How does one review a 2.5" hard drive bracket?
Well, to be honest it's my fault for thinking that StarTech's hot-swappable, rear-mounted hard-drive rack sounded interesting. And, to be honest, it kind of is interesting. But I'm still not entirely sure that it's that useful.
If it was only a tenner, or if it came in a pack of two to allow seamless drive switching between two machines then I could get behind its rather niche usage model. But as it is, it's kind of only really relevant for someone regularly testing different laptop hard drives.
In that situation it's incredibly useful. You mount the rack in a spare expansion slot on the rear of your case, hook up the SATA info and power leads, and you can drop in 2.5-inch drives on the fly.
It could be handy for smaller chassis with fewer hard-drive mounts inside, and for those SSDs that come without mounting brackets to slot them into 3.5- inch bays.
I've tested it with a couple of different SSDs and it didn't once have a problem with any of the extended casings around the SSD SATA points.
In terms of security, you could secure your machine by having your boot drive in the bay at the back and remove it whenever you're not at your rig. Handy for the LAN party then.
It's a well-made, smartly designed, and simple piece of tech. It's reassuringly solid, the drives fit snugly and it just works.
There's really not a lot else you could ask of the StarTech bracket, apart from maybe a wee price cut. But then products in niche markets are always a little bit pricey…
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Posted: 31 Oct 2010 03:00 AM PDT
Your average PC is a fairly uniform size. The familiar ATX chassis will take up the same sort of footprint next to, under, or on top of your desk, and is quite capable of blocking out the sun if you put it anywhere near a window.
Why can't we squeeze a normal gaming rig into a smaller chassis when all those consoley things can get away with something only a little bigger than your TV digibox?
Well, you can. Small form factor PCs have been around for years, with the smallest generally used for media-based machines with only a light gaming bent. For an actual gaming machine you'll need to look at the like of Shuttle's range of rigs. But they're still pretty chunky.
CyberPower has picked up Silverstone's lovely little SG-07B case and dropped all the features of a top-notch gaming PC in it. What enables this tiny chassis to accommodate a full rig?
First, you can fit a standard ATX power supply underneath the storage and optical drives. Second, the space allocated to the graphics card allows any dual-slot GPU to be fitted. Even the elongated HD5970 would fit. Third, mini-ITX motherboards are now so feature-rich that you're sacrificing very little in order to slim down.
The Gigabyte H55-based board is absolutely tiny, and yet still has a PCIe X16 slot, support for dual-channel DDR3 RAM up to 1600MHz and USB 3.0 ports thrown in for good measure.
It's not a bad little overclocker either. The Core i5-760 CPU hums away inside at a thoroughly commendable 3.6GHz. We've seen 4GHz+ from this chip on full rigs, but cooling has to be an issue with a machine this small.
Speaking of which, the liquid-based CPU cooler does a good job of keeping things chilled, and the design of the chassis tries to maximise airflow around the graphics card too.
Benchmarks
Well-chosen GPU
In terms of performance, the quality components chosen for the rig make it a bit of a go-er. The GTX 460 is well-documented in these hallowed pages as the mid-range card de jour, and that quad-core i5-760 is going to do the business games-wise too.
The Game Cube absolutely creams all the other rigs we've seen at this price. It even comes close to beating the £1,500 AdvanceTec ATFX Khaos. That only just keeps its nose ahead thanks to the Bloomfield i7 CPU.
There are few niggles with this machine. Obviously, it's not built for the upgrader. The brilliant design of the chassis means that everything has its place, and you'll be hard pressed to even get at the components, let alone remove and replace them with upgrades.
It also gets a little loud once you start gaming on it, although the distraction isn't too bad – it's nothing compared with the noise emitted from the Xbox 360's DVD drive, for instance.
Upgrade/noise issues notwithstanding, CyberPower's Game Cube is brilliantly specced for the price, and is one hell of a performer. Once AMD pulls its finger out we can expect an even cheaper hexcore version too. The Game Cube then is truly a miniature marvel.
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In Depth: Does Kinect herald the demise of the keyboard?
Posted: 31 Oct 2010 03:00 AM PDT
Do you know TED? Not the guy called Edward who lives next door, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference.
It's a series of lectures for invited politicians, academics and commercial developers to tell the world about their best ideas, then cruelly limits their talks to 18 minutes so they don't get boring.
Attendance at the events is both exclusive and expensive, costing over $5,000 a ticket. The TED website is more democratic and puts up videos of the best of these intellectual elevator pitches under the banner: 'Ideas worth spreading'.
Subjects cover everything from tackling global poverty to nanotech to Wikileaks.org. If you're at all interested in what the PC of the future might look like, the conference has also featured talks about micro-projection, virtual keyboards and changing trends in Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
It's particularly well worth digging out information about two talks that showcased at this summer's TED Global conference in Oxford.
First up, Microsoft's Peter Molyneux took to the stage to demonstrate his forthcoming Xbox 360 game: Milo. Milo is a small boy who is significant in two ways. Firstly, he's the latest iteration of the learning AI technology that has been central to Molyneux' work since Black & White. Milo can be taught to clean up his room or crush snails, depending on your proclivity.
It's a two way interaction though: he feeds back his thoughts about such actions to you with the kind of emotional depth that makes Kevin Spacey's robot Gertie from the film Moon seem callous and cold hearted. Milo learns from the movements and gestures picked up by Kinect, Microsoft's 3D sensor array that's coming to the Xbox on 4 November.
KINECT: Kinect needs to have sophisticated detection technology to accurately pick up your stupid dance moves
Kinect was first announced under the codename Project Natal just over a year ago, in June 2009. Kinect can track body movements from roundhouse kicks down to facial expressions and turn them into a control system for the games console.
In many TED Global reports, though, Molyneux' talk was eclipsed the next day by Tan Le. Tan is the head of San Francisco's Emotiv Systems, and her showpiece was a wireless headset called EPOC.
It turns the electrical traces of thought processes into input commands for a PC. Mind control and gesture-based interfaces? The desktop PC was going to have a tough time fighting off the torrent of new touchscreen tablets. Can it possibly remain relevant?
For a couple of days, journalists were shown around labs full of 3D printers and machines with ten giant steel fingers that could put a keyboard through a lifetime of torture in just a few weeks. The tour was rounded off with a demonstration of a holographic-type transparent display, hooked up to a webcam which followed a user's hand gestures to move windows around, shamelessly aping the computers in Minority Report.
It was a charmingly Heath Robinson device, complete with bare wires and Meccano-type struts, which wowed the crowd with its unexpected sophistication. Unfortunately, given the amount of work that had gone into this prototype and the creator's obvious pride, it wasn't destined to become Project Natal.
Natal will be launched on 10 November as Kinect, and is built using licensed technology from the Israeli company, PrimeSense.
Kinect for Windows
Microsoft isn't talking about Kinect for Windows yet – and indeed turned down a request to be interviewed for this feature about plans for desktop interaction in general. It's safe to conjecture that it wants to promote Kinect on the console for now.
There's a good chance that something similar will be available for the PC before long, though. As well as the inevitable clones which will spring up, Microsoft doesn't have complete control of Kinect.
PrimeSense is actively seeking ways to get its technology into other devices, and company VP Adi Berenson confirmed to Engadget.com that it has at least one set-top media player in the works, which was described as an 'HTPC', or Home Theatre PC.
That suggests some sort of x86-compatibility. This HTPC is likely to be a sealed unit, but PrimeSense's NITE software, which provides the gesture reading magic, runs on Windows and Linux. Even if there's no official Windows product for a while, it shouldn't be long before there are unofficial drivers for USB variants that are available.
With a Kinect-type device for the PC, it's entirely feasible that you could sit in front of a screen and wave your fingers into space to make letters appear, move a window or switch to the rocket launcher. If that's possible now, in five years time it'll be everywhere, right?
Multitouch
After all, look at how quickly multi-touch mousepads and phone screens have become ubiquitous after the launch of the iPhone; the human race must be crying out for an alternative to the keyboard and mouse.
Not according to those in the know. "As a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher I tend to have a sort of love-hate relationship with the mouse," says Professor Scott Hudson of the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
"The fact of the matter is that the mouse is an extremely good input device for what it does. If you are editing a document, working with a spreadsheet, or clicking on links on the web, you probably want to use a mouse for that because it does a really good job. In fact, you can show scientifically that for simple pointing tasks you are probably not going to get a whole lot better than a mouse in terms of basic performance."
The path of progress
Academics in the field of HCI can be a surprisingly conservative bunch, but the history of the field teaches caution. Gadgets such as the iPhone or Kinect don't spring fully formed from nowhere and push back the boundaries of what's possible overnight. It took over two decades for multi-touch tablets and screens to move beyond proof of concept and specialist use into mass production and consumer electronics.
For anyone who's not an HCI Researcher, the job title may suggest a working day that involves breakfast with HAL, a pair of augmented reality glasses and a some 'blue sky thinking' about anti-gravity operator chairs. This impression is probably due to the fact that the only time HCI hits the headlines is when something out of the ordinary is shown off or talked about in an academic journal.
Most of the challenges in HCI are far more prosaic. Inspired by Kinect, the iPad, EPOC, et al, I went in search of holograms and USB spinal taps, and found instead the unsung heroes who use eye-tracking technology to illustrate bad web design and make the internet a slightly less annoying place. You're far more likely to find people working on very practical projects than chasing supercool sci-fi dreams.
At City University's Interaction Lab in London, for example, projects include studying how people operate simple 3D games and hacking Wii-motes to turn a desk into a cheap collaborative touchscreen.
One input idea which has taken a long time to gestate is voice recognition. There are some devices, notably the iPhone and certain in-car sat navs, which have a reasonably usable voice control system, but City's Interaction Lab Manager, Raj Arvan explains why it's failed to take off on the desktop:
"Voice recognition applications are becoming more accustomed to picking up natural language and the way people speak, but they are limited culturally," he says. "That needs to be accounted for. You need to have the same level of language sophistication wherever a system is going to be deployed."
There's also no reason for a new technique to supplant an old one that works well. The purpose of design is not to replace something that's already working well," says Raj Arvan, "The keyboard and mouse do a good job.
"You could use voice recognition to augment them in small ways, say commands for printing or opening an email client, but they'd be supplementary to the core functions. That's how it starts off, then if in the future the next generation becomes more comfortable using dictation then they'll use it to write whole documents."
MS COURIER: Microsoft canned its two screen tablet, but Toshiba's Libretto is still due this year
This is good news for us, because it means that the home computer as we know it isn't going anywhere for a while. Next time you're wowed by a demonstration of augmented reality overlays or thought-sensitive controllers, watch Keiichi Matsudafor's excellent short film 'Augmented (hyper) Reality: Domestic Robocop' for a seminal lesson in why we should be wary of embracing new interfaces too quickly for our own good.
"I think in five years that Microsoft Windows will look, well… like Windows," says Carnegie Mellon's Hudson. "The graphical user interface that Windows embodies does a very good job at what it does and I don't see it going away any time soon or necessarily turning into anything else. But I think that's not the interesting question. The interesting question is what else will we see along side [Windows]?"
Get your supplements
This sentiment is echoed in the corporate strategies of Microsoft, Intel and Apple. It's best summed up by Microsoft's 'Three screens and the cloud' picture of harmony between the telephone, the PC system and the telly that CEO Steve Ballmer spoke about at the 2009 Consumer Electronic Show.
In the first half of the decade, everyone was competing to produce the single 'hub' device for the digital home. As a result there was a lot of pressure for the PC to evolve into a single 'convergence' unit with all manner of crap attached to it. Now there's an understanding that people don't want to replace the PC with one single device, but supplement it with other specialised boxes in the home.
C-SLATE: Work continues at Microsoft on the C-Slate, a display-based input pad
One of Intel's Consumer Experience Architects, Brian David Johnson, describes this using the image of watching TV while looking up information about the show on a laptop and at the same time tweeting about it through their phone. Each device has a specialism that doesn't necessarily need to be supplanted.
"People are very comfortable moving through their lives looking at different screens," he says, "It's not about the mobile phone killing the internet or the internet killing television and the PC going away … We need to understand that consumers' lives touch multiple products at any one time."
Hudson thinks this process of device proliferation, rather than convergence, has only just begun: "If I were to take a guess," he says, "I'd say that we will see an explosion of very small, inexpensive, and highly specialised devices. You can now buy for less than $1 a single chip with a computer in it that's much more powerful than the computer that was used in the lunar module and landed men on the Moon. There is a lot of potential in these devices that we haven't seen exploited yet."
The problem with trying to replace the keyboard and mouse combination is that clever new peripherals that may actually be better often have too steep a learning curve or are simply impracticable to use.
Russel Beale is a Senior Lecturer in HCI and leads the Advanced Interaction Lab at the University of Birmingham. He co-authored one of the seminal textbooks on HCI, called simply Human Computer Interaction.
"Where you're using movement and facial recognition to control what's happening in the game. It's a much more natural experience and a really involving one," he says. "But these these have to be appropriate. You wouldn't want to compose a letter in a word processor by scowling, grimacing and jumping around the room. It's horses for courses, there's a time and a place for a keyboard and mouse and typing stuff and a time and a place for waving imaginary lightsabers around a room."
At the same time, if the iPhone and iPad have any lessons for interface designers, it's that people don't mind sacrificing capabilities for ease of use. "When people's experiences are intuitive and natural," Beale continues, "Then they'll put a bit of effort in to learn how to get the most out of [the device]. Desktop computers are the other way round, you have to put a lot of effort in to discover how powerful they really are."
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the PC is how slowly multi-touch screens have taken off. There are a few laptops and displays available but other than French RTS RUSE, not many applications to use them with.
R.U.S.E: R.U.S.E. supports multi-touch interfaces, but also works just fine with a mouse and keyboard
"I don't think multi-touch has come of age yet," Beale says, "Yes, you can use two fingers to scroll or zoom and shrink things on a screen, but if you look at devices, such as Microsoft's Surface, they don't actually do that much more than other devices."
Touching base
There are two problems which haven't been comfortably conquered with desktop touchscreens yet. Hands obscuring the view is a common complaint with iPhone gaming which carries over, and reaching out to a screen in front of you is uncomfortable after just a few seconds.
"Sometimes there are great ideas that wait for the technology to catch up, and other times there are cool technologies that wait for the ideas."
He continues: "I think multi-touch will come much more of age in gaming spaces and so on when you decouple the device from the computer a bit further and allow people to have a much more expressive way of interacting with the systems that they want to. In gaming, it's all about getting people drawn into the game and living the experience. Anything that you put in the way which makes it hard to use is going to be a barrier to that experience."
Beale points out though that you can often use the drawbacks of a system to your advantage. "If you're designing a public information system in a busy place, you put it vertically because you don't want one person to stand in front of it for half an hour."
Beyond motion sensing
Predicting the future is a dangerous occupation, but it's safe to say that the PC keyboard and mouse combo is going to be with us for some time yet.
Just in case you've picked up the idea that the future isn't going to be quite as exciting as you thought, though, I asked Professor Hudson if Kinect's controllerless motion sensing could possibly be topped by anything else.
"There are many, many things beyond full-body sensing," he says. "As a researcher I tend to think of them in terms of questions that I want to answer. Just a few of the interesting ones might be: Can we interact directly with the brain? Can we make a cell phone that understands enough about its surroundings and what its owner is doing to not ring during a meeting or at the movie theatre?
OCZ NIA: Thought control on the PC is nothing new, but how many people actually bought OCZ's NIA?
"Given that every second looking away from the road puts us in danger, how can we create interfaces that work well in the car? Devices are getting smaller and smaller, but our fingers are not. How can we effectively interact with really small mobile devices? Are there ways to make interfaces that can automatically sense motor control difficulties like tremor or spasticity and compensate for it? Can we make input devices that move, change form, or otherwise allow us to make use of our sense of touch during interaction? These are all things I've worked on at least a little in the last few years."
Maybe it's worth chasing that job in HCI after all.
10 crazy controllers
New ways to interact with your PC may be few and far between today, but that's because of the explosion of failed designs that's happened in the past. Here's 10 of our favourites that never quite captured the public imagination.
1. Spacetech Orb 360
Like the Dual Strike, only less cumbersome in its foolishness, the ball on the left was supposed to be more accurate than a mouse for FPS games. Right…
2. PCGamerBike
This dislikes fat gamers. Pedals replace forward and back game controls, keeping you fit while you play. Unless you're playing Starcraft II that is.
3. AlphaGrip AG-5
Nothing comes close to the AlphaGrip AG-5 in terms of buttons. It had 42 in an array of D-pad like layouts, most of which were on the base.
4. Zalman FPSGun
A very accurate peripheral for FPSes that looks like a gun. Or it would be, if you could turn your brain on its side to transpose lateral hand movement to the vertical plane.
5. Sidewinder Dual Strike
So nearly the Wii wand of its day, but it failed design test #1: Don't make life harder for users. The ball-socketed left handle controlled the camera in shooters.
6. Novint Falcon
I played with a Novint Falcon on a stand at CES 2006. And I quite liked it. Based on a surgical robot controller it had promise, but it just didn't catch on.
7. Strategic Commander
Microsoft has made some of the best controllers for PC gaming – and some of the worst. This mouse didn't move, making precision controlling nigh on impossible.
8. Sandio Game O'
Proof that too much of a good thing is too much: adding D-pads and rockers to give three dimensional cursor control just proved too confusing when in game.
9. The Claw
In fairness, we could have picked any of the many attempts to create a small left-handed keyboard with a pared down set of buttons from Belkin's Nostromo to Saitek's GM2.
10. Logitech Cyberman
You don't make the mouse better by fixing it in place - it just doesn't work. This, however, didn't stop Logitech from trying with this awful, flawed controller.
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Review: The PCO Group Evolution 3D
Posted: 31 Oct 2010 02:30 AM PDT
The £1,000 price point is rapidly becoming the sweet spot for decent machines. With prices on key components dropping, and brand new parts arriving offering impressive performance for relatively inexpensive prices, the power available at this sweet spot just keeps growing and growing.
To the point where here we have a new machine, the Evolution 3D, from first-time PCFormat rig-builders the PCO Group, that's a quicker games machine than any other PC we've seen available at this price.
The key to the Evolution 3D's performance is a combination of an overclocked Intel Core i5 and a pair of Nvidia's latest GPU, the GTS 450. We checked out the GTS 450 last month, and a decent little card it turned out to be.
The first we saw was an overclocked version from Asus, and while it gave decent performance figures, it was still rather too close to the 768MB GTX 460 in terms of price. It also struggled to maintain a clear lead over its real competition, the HD 5770 from AMD.
A month later though, and thanks to price wars between AMD and Nvidia, and across the different distributors, you can now pick up a bog-standard GTS 450 for well under a ton. That's a proper Fermi GPU at a quite simply astonishing price – especially considering that this now puts it up against the HD 5750 in terms of price, and way ahead in terms of performance.
While that's great news for the gamer on a budget, it's also great news for anyone out there with an SLI-certified motherboard. And thanks to more and more mainstream mobos shipping with that functionality, that's a great deal of us.
You see, when you pair up two of these wee fellas in SLI they demonstrate exactly why multi-GPU machines are becoming more popular. SLI – and AMD's answer, CrossFire – now offer the sort of returns that we'd always hoped for. Check out our in-depth multi-GPU feature and you'll see what we mean.
In terms of decent PCs, that means we can now get the sort of performance out of a £1,000 rig that we'd have previously had to splash out maybe twice as much to get. Dual GPU machines are now where the smart money goes.
Everyone loves twins
Even just six months ago we'd have always said to just buy the fastest single graphics card your wallet could stretch to. The spectre of multi-GPU driver failures and the diminishing returns you used to get from adding a second, third or even fourth card meant that it was just not worth paying the extra pennies for the hassle it would give you.
Now, with two GTS 450s costing less than the price of an overclocked GTX 460 – and consistently out performing it by a long way while it's about it – it makes absolute sense to go for two. Not only have you got two GPUs working away on your game's frame rates, but you've also got double the single card's memory capacity. And when you're talking about big-screen gaming, or the drains memory-intensive effects such as anti-aliasing have on a system, that makes a hell of a difference.
The GTS 450 has been kitted out with a full 1GB of GDDR5, and when you've got the graphics pipes fed with a beefy 2GB of graphics memory you're laughing. So, on to the numbers then – and they make impressive reading.
The benchmarks
You wouldn't normally expect a £1,000 rig to be a decent accompaniment to a big-screen monitor, but the Evolution 3D's performance at the eye-popping 2,560 x 1,600 resolution is damned impressive. That's the 2GB of GDDR5 going to work right there.
In both DiRT 2 and Far Cry 2 the Evolution 3D was hitting 56 and 61fps respectively at the full 30-inch panel resolution. That's getting on for the sort of performance we've been used to from the full-fat Fermi card – the GTX 480 – and even then in overclocked trim.
Looking at the seriously GPU-stressing Just Cause 2, the 26fps score at 2,560 x 1,600 is likewise impressive. When you look at the system raper that is Metro 2033 though, you're starting to see the GF 106 GPU's limits when all the bells and whistles are switched into the 'on' mode. Still, the equally tessellation-heavy program, Heaven 2.1 Benchmark, came back with a score that's almost on a par with the GTX 460 in SLI confi guration.
All told that puts the twin GTS 450 setup ahead of almost every single GPU configuration out there, up to the GTX 480. That means that every other Fermi card must bow to this bargain setup, and AMD must be in one hell of a hurry to get its new lineup of graphics cards out of the stable door as soon as possible, because all of its GPUs are left in the dust by this pairing of two sub-£100 cards.
That's the graphics taken care of, but the new Core i5 760 is a welcome addition to the mix too. We already know how well this beauty overclocks in a decent P55 board, and the PCO Group has them running at 4GHz.
Cooked chips
Unfortunately though, our review unit turned out to be a little flaky at this clockspeed, only giving reliable results once the BCLK had been scaled back a couple of notches to 3.8GHz. That's not a massive issue though, as it's still faster than the CPU in the wee CyberPower Game Cube. And the PCO Group will guarantee the stability of your overclock too with a full 48-hour burn-in period carried out on every machine prior to shipping.
Unfortunately our review machine had a PSU failure during testing, and the time taken to fit and test the replacement meant there wasn't time for our rig's traditional burn-in. The PCO Group offers a free three-year collect and return warranty on its machines so in the event of an overclock not being stable you won't be out of pocket, and the maximum you'll be without your rig would be three working days.
We dropped in one of our own i5 760s, and with the BIOS settings PCO Group's tech team gave us we hit 4GHz without a problem, so it was definitely the CPU itself that was the problem and not the setup.
And with the new Corsair H70 closed-loop liquid cooler taken care of it, it's certainly not the heat stopping the previous CPU hitting the 4GHz mark. With that 1GHz+ boost in its stock clock frequencies, the i5 760 manages to provide impressive benchmark figures.
Looking at the Cinebench 11.5 index score, it's only just short of a standard Core i7 960 running at 3.2GHz, and that's a quad-core CPU with Intel's HyperThreading tech offering eight threads of processing power against the Core i5's four threads.
The other components propping up the Evolution 3D have obviously been picked with care too, hitting an almost perfect balance of power and affordability with a hint of future-proofing added for good measure.
The Asus P7P55D EVO motherboard was the obvious choice. Hitting a decent price with an SLI-certified mobo isn't easy, and this board is one of the few around for less than £150. Unfortunately, the price compromise has meant that there's neither of the new I/O interfaces available on this board, so there's no USB 3.0 or SATA 6Gbp/s.
Asus is prepping a new revision with both new I/O, smartly titled the P7P55D-E Deluxe, which is due to come in slightly cheaper. So if you definitely want both then it might be worth waiting before placing your order. That said though, add-on boards with SATA 6Gbp/s and USB 3.0 ports are not that expensive and don't offer any significant drop in performance over motherboard-based chips.
The future-proofing comes in the shape of the 850W Corsair PSU. That's more than enough to power this setup, and offers an upgrade path going forward. As you can see from our review of the 1200W model, the Corsair supplies are quality bits of kit.
Compact and bijou
My only real concern with the component spec of the Evolution 3D is the relative paucity of storage space. At 500GB it's not a great deal of capacity, especially once you start reinstalling your Steam back-catalogue, but it's not terrible.
Still, in a £1,000 rig these days you would expect that with terabyte drives being relatively inexpensive, that's the minimum.
I'm also not a massive fan of the Asus Vento chassis. I find the plastic tool-less design inside a little flimsy, and the clips holding down the PCI cards are not as solid as I'd like. But if the choice was ours and if we were trying to keep the spec to £1,000 we'd be sacrificing the chassis and the storage too. Hell, we'd build it in a shoe box if it meant we could keep this processor and SLI pairing.
This month we've got two machines around the £1,000 sweet spot: this SLI marvel and the teeny-tiny GTX 460 Game Cube from CyberPower. Both offer great performance in two different fields, and both would be a sound investment.
The Evolution 3D just has the edge in terms of performance. The twin GTS 450s have completely won us over in SLI trim, offering performance equivalent to the best Nvidia can offer for a long way short of the cost.
Aesthetically, it's not my bag, but my PC is always out of sight under the desk anyway. It's what goes on onscreen that counts for me, and the speed at which this rig flies has got us hooked. This is the fastest machine we've ever seen for £1,000. If that's your budget, this is your spec.
Related Links
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In Depth: 6 of the best Mac Twitter clients
Posted: 31 Oct 2010 01:00 AM PDT
A big advantage of Twitter is that while you can use the website, there are also dozens of Twitter clients that provide a streamlined way to use the service. Here we've rounded up six of the most popular.
While we conclude which of them is, in our opinion, the best available, if you disagree, all you need to do to switch clients is launch a different application and add your login details.
Twitter clients
Echofon - Free with ads/$20
Kiwi - Free (two accounts)/$10
Nambu - Free
TweetDeck - Free
Tweetie - Free
Twitterrific - Free with ads/$15
Test one - General use
Is the app usable and are important features available?
TweetDeck's Adobe AIR cross-platform origins result in a non-Mac-like and fiddly but powerful client, which enables you to define columns of varying content types.
Conversely, Twitterrific is Mac-like but basic – it resembles a palette and only enables access to one account at a time, and so it's best suited to sporadic use.
Nambu looks good in screen grabs, but we found its icon-heavy interface overwhelming and a little buggy. The other apps are broadly similar and usable. Switching between accounts is simple, and shortcuts enable fast access to important commands.
Visually, Kiwi edges it due to theme support, but Echofon's minimalism and myriad keyboard shortcuts are welcome, even if its occasional lack of refresh on account switching and single post-window aren't; by contrast, Kiwi and Tweetie offer independent windows for posting.
Elsewhere, Kiwi gains points for rule definition capabilities and displaying images inline.
Test results
Test two - Posting tweets
How easy is it to post tweets and attachments?
Our requirements: posting to any signed-in account; a live character count; dragging images from Finder for upload; optional shortening of links. Twitterrific mostly failed, offering no assistance regarding images and links.
Nambu also fell short – images can be added but not dragged from Finder. Kiwi disappointed a little. Link shrinking is slow, and we found Kiwi sometimes posted to an account other than that selected in its post window.
Echofon impressed though. Images are shown as thumbs, which can be previewed via Quick Look, and you can post screen grabs or iTunes songs.
Tweetie's post window is similar, and can be accessed via a system-wide hotkey. But TweetDeck is posting champion: you can post to multiple accounts at once, and the app has geo-location support and tweet scheduling. It's complex, though.
Also, TweetDeck and Echofon don't have separate post windows, so no working on multiple tweets.
Test results
Test three - Having chats
How about threaded conversations and direct messages?
People use Twitter for quick-fire conversation, both in public and in private via direct messages (which can be sent to anyone following you).
Twitterrific does neither (unlike the iOS version), but the other apps all enable you to view public conversation threads.
In TweetDeck you can display them in a separate column; Nambu expands them beneath a tweet, Echofon shows them in its drawer (in a rather fetching iChat-style) when you click on a conversation icon, and both Tweetie and Kiwi show a conversation when you double-click on a relevant message.
On balance, Echofon's approach is simplest and clearest, even if chats look nicest in Kiwi. Surprisingly, all but one client lists your direct messages linearly in reverse-chronological order.
Tweetie is the odd one out, enabling you to access them by contact, which is much clearer, although Nambu at least enables you to view sent and received direct messages separately.
Test results
Test four - Doing searches
Is searching tweets simple and can searches be saved?
All the apps on test, excepting Twitterrific and TweetDeck, enable you to use a search field to find related tweets, which are then displayed in the main timeline window. Terms you want to track can also be saved, although methods vary.
With TweetDeck, this is the only means of making a search, and each becomes a separate column – great for tracking, but annoying for one-off searches. The other apps all enable you to flag any search made as a favourite that you can return to later; and, aside from in Echofon, new results are highlighted when your feed is refreshed.
There are differences in search setups, though, and we found Nambu's icons awkward, but Tweetie's interface was very clear. Kiwi takes a different approach, enabling you to add searches as separately defined 'accounts'. This provides you with more scope for complex searches, at the expense of cluttering the account-switching menu if you've many searches stored.
Test results
The winner / Echofon
None of the apps here is poor, but three quickly fall out of favour. Twitterrific is too basic and fiddly, and TweetDeck and Nambu are too complex for their own good (although TweetDeck's worth considering if you need to track, manage and post to a large number of accounts simultaneously).
Of the others, we like Tweetie a lot – its message threading is great – but it lacks support for some recent Twitter features. Its developer now works for Twitter, and a revamped version is likely imminent.
Today, though, the title fight is between Echofon and Kiwi. Despite its small post area and occasional refresh issues on switching accounts, Echofon edges it, but if the minimal interface isn't for you, Kiwi and Tweetie are worthy alternatives.
Final results
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