Eric Grevstad

Weird captions on the box of the Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W: “The essentials of imaging … essential as the sun for life … essential as the food for life … essential as the air for life … essential as the water for life.” Note to package designer: Dude, chill out. It’s just a printer. That said, […]

There’s a place for flashy style, and there’s a place for good plain value. The Gateway 450XL notebook uses Intel’s new Centrino bundle of Pentium M processor, chipset, and 802.11b wireless networking adapter, just like the Sony Vaio Z1A we tested a week ago. The Sony is a sleek, slimline conversation piece, while the Gateway, […]

It’s appropriate that ScanSoft, the office software company best known for its OmniPage optical character recognition program, should be the vendor to pick up the pioneering Dragon NaturallySpeaking when its previous seller self-destructed a couple of years ago. Just as a printed page imported into your word processor via OCR usually arrives with a few […]

At least twice a year, a hit movie or TV show turns some actor or actress into an “overnight star” — usually, it turns out, after the performer has been working hard for a decade or more. And at least twice a year, some big tech company like Microsoft or IBM “discovers” the small-to-medium business […]

When you hear the phrase, “Curves that captivate,” you probably don’t think immediately of a notebook PC. But that’s what Sony Electronics’ Web site promises for the new Vaio Z series portables — Sony’s first built around Intel’s new Centrino bundle of a battery-thrifty chipset, Pro/Wireless 2100 WiFi (11Mbps 802.11b) wireless network adapter, and Pentium […]

Where’s that memo from the Cleveland office about the Endicott proposal? Saying, “I know it’s here somewhere,” was lame enough when “here” meant a messy desk and maybe a filing cabinet. Now that “here” is a PC with an 80GB or 120GB hard disk hiding dozens of folders, thousands of files, and tens of thousands […]

In 1973’s Live and Let Die, James Bond brews his visiting boss a cup of coffee. M looks suspiciously at 007’s whirring, whooshing espresso machine and asks, “Is that all it does?” Before long, we’ll be saying the same thing about printers that merely print, as multifunction printer/scanner/copier peripherals push into even the bargain sector […]

For anyone familiar with Photoshop, it was a bit of a surprise to see Adobe Systems refer to Adobe Acrobat as “the company’s cornerstone software application” in its press statements. But in truth, not even the publishing and graphics industry’s de-facto-standard image editor can come close to the ubiquity — over half a billion copies […]

If longing looks, comments, and inquiries from fellow workers walking past the Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk are any indication, Samsung has a winner in its new SyncMaster 192N. It’s not as if our neighbors have never seen LCD monitors before, even big 19-inch diagonal ones — as prices move down, flat panels have moved […]

Modern sports cars no longer have the gearshift pedals and hand throttle of a Model T, but your PC still has the keyboard layout of an antique mechanical typewriter. And by the way, your mouse is too far away. No, this review isn’t going to proselytize you about the more efficient Dvorak keyboard layout. The […]

In a recent survey, we noted that last year’s freefall in PC prices had slowed or even, in the case of some under-$1,000 models, reversed. Here’s more evidence: Last weekend, while we were testing the Sony Electronics Vaio RS100 desktop that had just reached us after some delay with the evaluation loan request, the $800 […]

There’s no question that today’s color inkjet printers are cheap (at least to purchase, though replacement ink cartridges remain shockingly expensive), or that they produce great-looking pages. Increasingly, however, the question is: Why would a family put just a printer next to the home PC, when a multifunction inkjet can give them a handy home-office […]