Digital Imagination
In your story on digital imaging ("Image Conscious," March 27) you overlooked another way to get photographic images into a PC. Kodak will scan negatives onto a CD for about $1.50 a pop. The resolution is 768 x 512 pixels, not the biggest, but a lot more than what you can fit on 3.5 floppies. File size is about 1.1 megabytes per shot. More important, I think CD-ROMs will be much more stable over time than magnetic media such as floppy disks.
Charly Quandt, Annandale

I purchased an inexpensive digital camera (a sub-$200 Vivicam), but I was very disappointed in the color balance, and it couldn't get enough light for indoor snapshots. So I returned it. I am now using my video camcorder to feed images into a Snappy 3.0 video grabber. Camcorders provide good color balance and resolution and work well in limited light; Snappy, in turn, does a pretty good job of letting one select a video image, crop it, tune it up, and save it. I was very impressed. At under $100, Snappy might be a good answer for many of your readers.
Gary Comfort, Reston

We reviewed an earlier version of Play Inc.'s Snappy in another life (our January 1996 issue). Note that the Snappy's image quality is limited by its video input. For more info: http://www.play.com.

Scan a little higher
I enjoyed your coverage of printers and scanners in the March 27 pullout edition of Fast Forward; as a recent purchaser of those two devices, I'd like to bring up a couple of things. I was puzzled not to see any mention of the Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart scanner in the piece, given that you did include its counterpart PhotoSmart printer. I purchased this scanner, along with a Canon 7000 printer; for the money, it delivers tremendous resolution. You wrote that high resolution scanning takes forever, but the H-P PhotoSmart processes full-resolution 2400-dpi slides or negatives in about 10 seconds. Secondly, you were mentioning that manipulating high-res images involves waiting a lot, but even given the fact that my Gateway has a 233 Mhz processor, I don't understand why your test machine would be that slow.
Claus L. Harding, Washington

We chose not to review H-P's PhotoSmart scanner due to its $400 street price, more than twice the cost of any other scanner we evaluated. But for heavy-duty use, the speed advantages of more expensive hardware could well be worth the extra bucks. Our test computer was reviewer Brian Mooar's own 150-MHz PC, which sits roughly in the middle of the current range of machines in use. We try to avoid testing products only on the latest hardware, since most people don't own that, no matter how many disco ads Intel runs.

Can you back that up?
Both authors of your piece on backing up data ("Baby's Got Backup," March 27) appear to have a bad case of Zip Fever in recommending Iomega's Zip drive for use as a backup device. A much better drive is available for the $150 cost of the Zip, SyQuest's EZFlyer 230. It's twice as fast as the Zip and offers more than twice the storage; its 230-megabyte cartridges cost $20 to $25 each, a better value than Zip disks. I have used this drive extensively for the past six months on my Macintosh and have never regretted its purchase. I cannot understand the reason for this recommendation. Perhaps the writers focused on the ease of sharing Zip disks with other users, but I feel that makes a weak justification.
Richard K. Brown, Potomac

True, several of SyQuest's drives (for instance, the SparQ drive we reviewed Feb. 27) outrank Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives in terms of dollars per megabyte. However, as Mr. Brown noted, we feel the ready availability of Zip drives on other people's computers is hard to ignore – just take your backup disk over to a friend's house. Also, SyQuest's installation procedures have never been the friendliest on its Windows products.