IN THIS ISSUE
- Tassimo Hot Beverage System
- Brother P-Touch QL-550 Label Printer
- Canon Rebel XTi / 400D Digital Camera
- Keilwerth Shadow SX90R Alto Saxophone
- Highgear Altitech 2 Digital Compass
- Panasonic SDR-S150 Digital Camcorder
- SuperSpeed 8.0 RAM Disk Plus
- Sharp LC26SH20U Flat Screen Televsion
- DVD: The Abduction of Figaro
- DVD: The Reduced Shakespeare Company
- DVD: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Tassimo Hot Beverage System
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The technology of coffee is second only to that of manned space flight – considering that it’s just water poured through ground-up beans, it’s remarkable how complex the process of brewing the stuff can get.
Tassimo is the third pod coffee maker we’ve bought. Its predecessors were cast into the back of a cupboard for the lack of a reliable pod supply in the case of the Black and Decker system, and due to profound and apparently unstoppable water leaks for the Melitta machine. Thus far, Tassimo seems to be made of sterner stuff.
Unlike conventional coffee makers, Tassimo makes one cup of brew at a time. It can only be fueled with its proprietary coffee disks, plastic and foil containers in which lurk enough ground coffee for a single serving. The machine heats water from its plastic reservoir and pours it though whichever disk has been installed in it.
The coffee that streams from the Tassimo machine tastes better than coffee from conventional coffee makers because it’s made fresh, rather than being allowed to ferment in a vat for several hours, and because you can’t buy Tassimo disks with cheap, nasty coffee in them. Perhaps in keeping with its affectations of luxury and elegance, Tassimo’s coffee disks are only available from manufactures the likes of Maxwell House and Gevalia.
Tassimo’s coffee disks cost somewhat more than conventional loose coffee maker coffee, but Tassimo embodies a hidden economy. Running for a minute or two, rather than keeping a pot of coffee hot for hours, what it spends on its coffee disks it more than saves in electricity.
The Tassimo machine is well built – almost entirely of plastic, of course, but nicely-made plastic none the less. It has a disturbingly loud pump – considerably more so than the other coffee pod systems we’ve used – which arguably constitutes its only failing. This having been said, the pump runs for about thirty seconds per cup, and it’s not likely to actually damage your hearing.
In addition to brewing coffee, Tassimo can make tea, hot chocolate and ostensibly trendy specialty brews like cappuccino. The latter requires that one change disks part way through the cycle – one disk for espresso coffee, and one for sterilized milk. The resulting cappuccino, easily the equal of commercial brews at five dollars a cup, is arguably worth the effort.
The only caution in adopting a Tassimo machine is to ensure that your local supermarket actually stocks Tassimo coffee disks prior to doing so. Having to mail-order coffee is a bit extreme, and it’s worth keeping in mind that only Tassimo’s disks will work in this machine.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Brother P-Touch QL-550 Label Printer
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Typewriters are quaint, irritating anachronisms of another age that should have been recycled a long time ago. We only have the one, and for the most part, it's used to address envelopes. This is, to be sure, mildly preposterous – having word-processed letters and outputted them with a high-speed laser printer, their authors have to walk down the hall to where the typewriter lives amidst its dust and ignominy, and peck out an address.
There are a number of ways to work around the issue of typewriters in this capacity – window envelopes, laser printer compatible envelopes and so on – but few of them actually turn out to be practical. We’ve tried them all, and the typewriter remains.
The Brother QL-550 label printer hasn’t quite put our typewriter out to grass, but this is largely because not everyone here has one yet. Clever, quick and adaptable, it will generate instant address labels for anything that needs to be mailed, stored, filed, labeled, indexed, titled or identified, all with a minimum of fuss and typing.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the QL-550 printer is that there’s almost nothing to say about it. Remove it from its box, plug it into a wall socket, connect it to a USB port, drop in a roll of labels and load its software – most of which will probably take about as long to perform as it took to read this sentence – and it’s good to go. Careful users of technology may want a few additional minutes to make sure they haven’t missed anything, as it seems too easy to be true.
The P-Touch software that accompanies the QL-550 is intuitive and easy to use. It allows for whatever label designs you can come up with, including as much text and as many graphics as good taste and available space allows. It will store frequently-used labels for later printing.
In addition to its stand-alone labeling application, the QL-550’s software suite can optionally install hooks to allow you to print labels from within Microsoft Word and Excel.
The QL-550 prints on proprietary rolls of thermal paper. Thermal printing – the same technology that’s used by most retail cash registers to print receipts – isn’t quite as nice to look at as laser print or even inkjet printing, but it’s quick, embodies no warm-up time and has no ink to dry up or run out. It’s more than adequate for printing text labels.
The QL-550’s software will accept graphics – a thermal print engine arguably gets stretched to the limit of its abilities in rendering halftones. The promotional copy for the QL-550 suggests that it be used to print identification badges, among other things. It can certainly do this, but pictures therein will look a bit coarse.
We did persuade the QL-550 to print some pretty respectable graphics by converting them to monochrome dithered images with Graphic Workshop Professional prior to letting the P-Touch software go at them – that’s a bit of shameless self promotion, I know.
The label paper for the QL-550 is slightly pricey, although it’s less so than it first seems, in that it doesn’t entail the use of any ink or toner.
Unlike most contemporary printers, the QL-550 does not have a standby mode – you’ll need to turn it on before you print to it, and remember to turn it off when it’s not in use.
As handy little boxes go, the QL-550 is easily worth the desk space it occupies. It saves a considerable amount of re-keying, and if you buy enough of them, you can probably ditch your last remaining typewriter, as we hope to do any day now.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Canon Rebel XTi / 400D Digital Camera
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We have a fair number of digital cameras in house – you’d probably expect that. None the less, the Rebel XTi remains a house favorite. Cool, flexible and capable of using our disturbingly large collection of Canon EF lenses – some of which date back twenty years or more – this is a camera to engender considerable squabbling over.
The Rebel XTi has a lot in common with Canon’s EOS 35-millimeter film cameras from back in the twentieth century. It’s a true single-lens reflex camera, allowing its users to see through the same lens as it uses to take pictures. Its interchangeable lenses can permit its view to be anything from a wide-angle fisheye to a telephoto lens capable of making paparazzi blush. We even tried it with a Meade astronomical telescope, a toy we use as the long lens of the gods.
Behaving like a traditional high-end film camera, the Rebel XTi had a learning curve of less than a minute. Its controls are intuitive, and everything behaved exactly as you’d expect. Having had the foresight to charge its battery prior to the formal unboxing, it was snapping away immediately.
The Rebel XTi is extremely small and light compared to its 35-millimeter ancestors, and even compared to earlier Canon digital SLR cameras. It has a generous preview screen across its back, and a bright, well-laid out viewfinder. It offers multiple focus zones, and a truly demonic focusing system that just can’t be fooled by anything.
This includes Morgan the newf. Morgan – a black dog who likes to sleep on a black carpet – has successfully foxed the automatic focusing systems of every digital camera pointed at him. The Rebel XTi was the first to defeat Morgan, an impressive accomplishment.
The Rebel XTi is built around a ten-megapixel image sensor. At this resolution, skin tones appear a lot more lifelike, losing entirely the tendency to make human subjects look like they’ve spent the afternoon on deck without any sunblock. One catch to sensors of this size, however, is that a grain of dust is typically larger than one of the sensor’s pixels – dust on your image sensor will leave visible defects in your photographs. This issue is exacerbated in a single-lens reflex camera, in that the sensor is exposed to air when you change its lens. The Rebel XTi includes an automatic cleaning mode that vibrates the sensor every time the camera is switched off, dislodging any dust that’s settled on it.
The Rebel XTi offers a selection of general and specific shooting modes. Select the green rectangle fully-automatic mode and the camera takes its best guess at selecting appropriate shutter speed and aperture settings based in what it sees through its lens. It guesses well surprisingly often, and this option is all you’ll ever need for taking pictures at family gatherings, snapping pictures of your unwanted junk for e-Bay or amateur camera-safaris into the wilds of cottage country.
Several fully automatic specialized modes are also available – the Rebel XTi can be configured to shoot portraits, landscapes, sporting events, night scenes and so on.
Finally, it offers more traditional options for aperture and shutter speed preference, and for fully manual settings if you really know what you’re doing.
Users with highly specific requirements – or an inability to refrain from playing with menus – can configure the Rebel XTi to behave as if it were a film camera using specific types of film, too. I’m guessing that only photographers with f-stop charts tattooed on their inner eyelids will actually want to do this.
The Rebel XTi includes a printer interface, allowing it to send its pictures to a suitable PictBridge printer without the requirement of a computer in the middle. We tried it with a Canon Selphy dye-sublimation printer – the results were breathtaking.
The Rebel XTi stores its pictures on Compact Flash memory cards. You can download pictures to a PC through its USB interface, but for a few dollars more, you can get a memory card reader for your computer and just copy files from its card to your hard drive.
The top of the Rebel XTi’s viewfinder housing hides a flash that will pop up automatically when its required. It also supports a hot shoe for a more sophisticated flash – while this looks like a traditional flash shoe, it has a decided preference for Canon’s newer Speedlite flashes. The Rebel XTi does excellent work with a Speedlite attached – we were never able to get it to take proper flash pictures with a non-Canon flash.
It would be hard to find anything resembling a shortcoming in the Rebel XTi – it clearly reflects a long line of ancestors, and a great deal of innovation. Its access to hundreds of Canon and aftermarket autofocus lenses is a worthwhile feature. This includes Canon’s latest generation of image-stabilized lenses, which use internal gyroscopic stabilization to fiddle the lens elements and compensate for camera shake. The lens included with the Rebel XTi doesn’t include this feature, but Canon’s image stabilized lenses are not unreasonably priced.
As serious digital photography goes, the Rebel XTi would be hard to compete with. Considering its price – well under a thousand dollars – it’s as close to perfect as anything with batteries could hope to be.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Keilwerth Shadow SX90R Alto Saxophone
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In reviewing this horn, I sincerely regret that we didn’t build a graphic with six stars when the Storm Gods page was designed. Immensely cool to look at and inspiring to play, the Shadow is a bit like buying talent.
Keilwerth’s saxophones are always a treat – even their EX series semiprofessional horns are remarkable for their textured, resonant sound. The Shadow is all that and more – it projects a dark, complex performance, and it’s amazingly quick and responsive. Made of nickel silver rather than brass, it weighs considerably less than a conventional alto, and it lacks the harsh edge of silver-plated instruments.
The rolled tone holes of the SX90R make its mechanism almost silent.
There are a lot of well-made professional saxophones about, but increasingly, most of them project an unadventurous, commercial sound that seems to cry out for a wedding reception to play at. The Shadow has a unique, textured presence that distinguishes it from other horns. Even before you begin to explore its subtleties, it sets itself apart from lesser instruments.
One of the remarkable aspects of all Keilwerth’s horns, and the Shadow in particular, are their range of sound. Equipped with a metal mouthpiece and jazz reeds, the Shadow can project a knife-like edge and really howl. When I played it with a Selmer hard rubber mouthpiece and Vandoren blue box reeds, it became dark and brooding, a horn with infinite character.
I prefer dark, brooding saxes.
The workmanship of the Shadow is impressive, with gorgeous engraving and a craftsman-like fit for every rod and key. It comes with a solid vinyl-covered case inside a fabric cover – this is somewhat more important than it seems, as the slightly unconventional proportions of Keilwerth’s horns means they won’t fit in all aftermarket cases.
It also comes with a really bad plastic mouthpiece. As a rule, most professional horns come with cheap mouthpieces, or in a few cases, no mouthpiece at all, probably under the assumption that anyone who buys a sax like this one will have a favorite mouthpiece, and won’t care what else was in the case when it arrived. It’s worth keeping this in mind, because the mouthpiece that comes with the Shadow hardly begins to do it justice.
…oh yes, and it includes a finger chart, just in case you buy this horn and haven’t gotten around to learning to play saxophone yet. I assume this is one of those product liability issues, or something to keep the lawyers happy.
The SX90R Shadow is easily the nicest alto saxophone I’ve ever played, and I won’t be surprised if it remains so. It’s also the coolest-looking horn I own. The price is a little beastly, but given the choice between this sax and extra groceries for the next year, I’d forego a few meals in a heartbeat.
Honorable mention for this one goes to Musician’s Friend, my favorite on-line music shop, which price-matched the Shadow just like they said they would, and shipped it within a day of my ordering it. As a rule, I wouldn’t buy serious instruments on line, but one of the other remarkable aspects of Keilwerth’s professional horns is that they’re all pretty much identical. You don’t have to drive around looking for one with a good sound.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Highgear Altitech 2 Digital Compass
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Originally bought to assist in aligning our satellite Internet uplinks, the Altitech 2 proved to know more tricks than a liberal in an election year. All things considered, its tricks are better, and a lot less likely to get it indicted for corruption.
The Altitech 2 looks like a digital watch on steroids. In keeping with its rugged nature, it has a carabineer clip rather than a strap. Playing with its buttons will reveal that it’s an altimeter, barometer, digital compass, thermometer, watch and a stopwatch. I don’t think it knows how to make tea, but you can never be sure any more.
The various functions of the Altitech 2 are well implemented, and clearly based on state-of-the-art hardware. This having been said, all its features are accessed through four buttons and a small LCD screen. It has a notable learning curve, and not everything it does will prove quite as useful as you might imagine.
The altimeter function of the Altitech 2 is arguably most complex performance. It’s a real barometric altimeter, just like the ones installed in light aircraft. A barometric altimeter actually works out changes in altitude based on changes in barometric pressure. If you know your altitude at the beginning of a journey – or the prior to take-off, in the case of an airplane – the altimeter will be able to determine your subsequent altitude by working out how much the barometric pressure has changed.
The altimeter in the Altitech 2 has a range of -2,305 to 30,045 feet – it’s easy to tell when you’re getting anywhere near the extremes of its operation, as you’ll be dead.
The catch in using the Altitech 2 as an altimeter is that it needs to be calibrated to the current altitude each time its used. If you’re planning a hike into the mountains and you know the absolute altitude of where you start from, it will tell you how high you are whenever you’re curious. If you fail to set it up before you leave, however, it will just provide changes in your relative altitude, which can be a bit nasty.
The accuracy of the Altitech 2’s altimeter was impressive.
The barometer function of the Altitech 2 was also extremely precise, and it even attempts to predict the weather based on its findings. It almost always wrong in this respect, but no more so than any other technology attempting to do so. I can’t help feeling that reducing the hardware required to generate inaccurate weather forecasts to something that will clip to your jacket is an improvement.
The digital compass provided by the Altitech 2 – our ostensible reason for buying it – is another of its superb bits of technology, with a tiny catch. Unlike traditional mechanical compasses, which locate north by looking for the earth’s north magnetic pole, the compass in the Altitech 2 appears to measure changes in the planet’s flux density. Flux gate compasses are inherently more accurate and are less likely to encounter interference from nearby magnets. The Altitech 2’s compass can be digitally adjusted to allow for local magnetic declination, the difference between true geographical north and magnetic north. It does, however, have to be calibrated before it’s will enjoy its full measure of accuracy, a procedure that involves its owner standing outside and turning in circles while the compass looks for true north. Try not to do this when anyone else is watching.
The stopwatch in the Altitech 2 can do split and lap modes, best and average times and it will run for up to 24 hours. I’ve yet to meet anyone who could do the sorts of things stopwatches are called upon to time for anything like 24 hours.
The case of the Altitech 2 is metal, rather than plastic, and can survive a considerable measure of abuse without even getting scratched. Ours certainly has. The display has a soft blue backlight which is bright enough to read the digits by, but not bright enough to destroy its user’s night vision.
The only catch inherent in all the functionality of the Altitech 2 is that it has a substantial learning curve. That it comes with two paper manuals and a DVD should probably serve as a warning as to how much effort will be required to truly master it. Running all those toys with four buttons just has to call for some reading.
The Altitech 2 makes navigating across unfamiliar terrain a bit easier, and it’s well worth what it costs in this capacity. It’s second to none at aligning a satellite Internet uplink, too – although I got the sense that it feels a bit put out by such work, and would rather go hiking.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Panasonic SDR-S150 Digital Camcorder
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Video tapes are so twentieth century. They’re heir to data loss, they’re noisy, they break, they don’t work well in extreme environments, they’re bulky and they’re annoyingly linear. They make an interesting noise when you step on one, but so do cats.
The Panasonic SDR-S150 camcorder doesn’t use videotape. Bypassing the whole mini-DVD and micro-hard drive circus, it stores its video on SD memory cards. As a result, it’s tiny, quiet, rugged and cool as hell.
About the size of an adult’s palm, the SDR-S150 will fit into an adult’s jacket pocket. It has almost no warm up time. Its view screen flips out of one side of its case and it’s ready to record.
The SDR-S150 is all the best bits of all the best camcorders in one box. It uses a three-color image sensor system not dissimilar to the ones in Panasonic’s professional broadcast video cameras, although this one doesn’t require a camera person with padded shoulders to drag it around. Most consumer camcorders use single-chip image sensors. The SDR-S150 has markedly better color and video performance as a result of its more sophisticated sensor.
The Leica Dicomar lens in the SDR-S150 qualifies as very nice optics. It provides a ten-times optical zoom at f 3.0. It includes an automatic lens cover that withdraws itself when the camera is switched on, and returns to cover the lens when it’s powered down.
The controls of the SDR-S150, such as they are, fall naturally beneath one’s fingers – but it requires very few of them. Aside from powering the camera up, fiddling the zoom and pressing the record button, there’s not a lot to adjust.
You can configure the SDR-S150 through its extensive on-screen menus to address issues like video resolution, white balance and such. The menu interface is decidedly intuitive, and requires little recourse to the camera’s manual.
In fact, the SDR-S150 offers a rich selection of manual controls to allow it to cope with unusual situations. You’re unlikely to need them, and perhaps even more unlikely to remember how to work them by the time circumstances crop up that demand them, but they’re available for the adventurous.
The SDR-S150 can also take still images – it even includes a pop-up flash for still photography in low light, and PictBridge interface for printing. At three megapixels, however, it’s a poor substitute for even a modest dedicated still digital camera.
The audio quality of the SDR-S150 is surprisingly good. It has a top-mounted stereo microphone, but perhaps more to the point, it doesn’t have a noisy tape- or disc-drive for its microphone to pick up.
Unlike tape-based camcorders, the SDR-S150 will let you play your individual video clips in any order you choose. Switched to its clearly misnamed VCR mode, it displays a matrix of thumbnails on its view screen, which can be selected through a rear-mounted four-way selector button. You can also delete unwanted clips in any order.
The SDR-S150 stores its video as MPEG-2 files. You can configure it for several levels of compression, trading video quality for recording time.
The SDR-S150 can accept up to four-gigabyte SD memory cards, but these as still fairly scarce and expensive as of this writing. Two-gigabyte SD cards, by comparison, are cheap and hard to avoid. Depending on the degree of MPEG compression you select, the SDR-S150 can store between 25 minutes and one hour and forty minutes of video on a two-gigabyte SD card. A fully charged battery will run it for about an hour and half.
It’s worth keeping mind that you can probably store enough two-gigabyte SD cards to shoot an entire feature film in a space smaller than a single video tape.
One thing worth noting about the two-gigabyte SD card that ships with the SDR-S150 is that there really is one in the box. SD cards are about the size of a postage stamp, and most devices that include them place them conspicuously in the center of the packing foam, or somewhere else you can’t miss them. The one that came with our SDR-S150 was a tiny blue card in a blue anti-static bag taped to the underside of the box cover which is, perhaps not surprisingly, blue. It took a lot longer to find the SD card than it did to otherwise get the camera up and running.
The SDR-S150 is unquestionably the slickest compact camcorder at any price, and at well under a thousand dollars on the street as I write this, its price is pretty reasonable. It completely nukes the issues that have leeched themselves onto the sides of lesser camcorders – size, weight, complexity, fragile media, noise and bad video are all history while peering at its view screen. It makes shooting video fun, which is really what these things are supposed to do.
The ability to instantly erase your really embarrassing clips is a bonus.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
SuperSpeed 8.0 RAM Disk Plus
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If you’re reasonably new to Windows, you’ll probably have no idea what a RAM disk is, or why you’d want one. The RAM disk driver, once a standard component of Windows, disappeared from Windows XP and hasn’t been heard from since.
In fact, RAM disks are extremely useful. A RAM disk borrows some system memory and creates a synthetic hard drive with it, which appears as a drive letter on your system just like a real hard drive. It works like a real hard drive, too, except that everything stored on it vanishes as soon as your computer is powered down.
A RAM disk is a very handy place to store transitory files, especially on a network. There’s no need to clean them up, as they blow themselves away at the end of the day.
The SuperSpeed RAM disk is one of several third-party replacement RAM disk systems for Windows XP. It’s very much the RAM disk we would have written, had we not been able to buy one – with one catch. It’s a substantial catch, however.
We’ve been using the SuperSpeed RAM disk for almost a year as of this writing, and it’s proven to be remarkably stable. System software should be eminently forgettable, and this product is as forgettable as one could ask. It does what it says on the box, with no user interaction.
Unlike the original Microsoft RAM disk from earlier versions of Windows, the SuperSpeed RAM disk can have its size adjusted without rebooting Windows. This is slick, although we’ve never had recourse to do so. It can create multiple RAM disks with multiple drive letters, which might be handy for networks accessed by lots of users with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Again, we’ve never used it. Finally, it can be configured to write its RAM disk contents to a temporary hard drive file and restore them when its host system boots up – an interesting option, but it would largely defeat the purpose of a RAM disk for our application.
The catch in the SuperSpeed RAM disk is its over-paranoid licensing procedure. It’s activated with a complex numerical key – much like Alchemy Mindworks’ applications – but this key appears to include a reference to the physical location of the installed software on its host system. If you have to reinstall Windows, and hence the Superspeed RAM disk, you’ll need a new key.
We’ve done so once, and the support staff at Superspeed provided us with a new key at no cost, reasonably quickly. None the less, had we been aware of this issue when we were initially looking at the Superspeed product, we would have looked elsewhere. Reinstalling Windows and rebuilding a large system is sufficiently complex without having to chase new registration keys, rather than just recovering them from a local record – this is a hoop no one should have to jump through.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Sharp LC26SH20U Flat Screen Televsion
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Mid-size flat-panel LCD televisions are ubiquitous – we bought this one at a local supermarket. Even the bad ones are good, and the good ones will blow you away.
This is one of the reasonably good ones.
We bought the LC26SH20U television as a display monitor to assist in developing video software, but perhaps predictably, it has seen itself put to additional tasks. It can display off-the-air video, as well as composite, S-VHS and component video from whichever boxes you can find the remote controls for.
It’s probably worth mentioning that we bought this TV at a local supermarket after one of the large electronics retailers up here tried to bait-and-switch us. These things are everywhere, and everyone is trying to sell them for less than everyone else. Shop around.
The LC26SH20U is a very nice TV, and it requires virtually no setup. You’ll need to attach its base if you want to stand it on a table – allen key supplied – and find somewhere to plug it in. Its inputs are arranged along the bottom of its back panel, out of sight but easy to get at.
Desk space being more precious than pearls in house, we bolted the LC26SH20U to a wall. It has mounting bolt holes in its back plate for the purpose. Its various jacks are still accessible after it has been wall-mounted, a decided convenience. A third-party mounting system will be called for in this case – our experiences with these are touched on later in this review.
The remote control for the LC26SH20U is intuitive and unencumbered – it gets a lot done with relatively few buttons. The manual section for the remote is detailed, but largely superfluous – you can figure it out in less time than it takes to read the instructions.
The LCD panel for the LC26SH20U is breathtakingly sharp, and it adds a new dimension to whatever is displayed on it. Even fairly flat content, such as DVDs of broadcast television, seems to acquire a sense of depth. This sudden clarity isn’t without its cost, however – the LC26SH20U’s impeccable resolution shows up the flaws and limitations of early DVDs and bad film transfers much more effectively than a conventional glass television.
If you drive the LC26SH20U through its HDTV component video interface – entailing three video and two audio connections – its color is essentially perfect. While you can adjust it to your taste through the menu interface driven by the set’s remote control, you’re unlikely to want to do so. The color fidelity is nowhere near as good for S-VHS video, which required a considerable degree of adjustment on our set.
The LC26SH20U’s LCD panel does have some speed issues. Viewed from off-center, rapidly moving objects on screen appear to leave visible ghosts behind themselves, producing momentary strange facial expressions and speed blurs at times. The effect isn’t unduly troubling, but it takes some getting used to. It won’t be much of a concern for normal viewing, at normal angles.
With four video inputs – one composite, two S-VHS and one component – the LC26SH20U is adequately supplied with choices, but not generously so. A few more input channels would have been an asset, especially for users with a lot of video toys. The set lacks front-mounted jacks to play portable devices, such as camcorders, through.
You can also connect most video devices to the LC26SH20U through its RF input, of course, but you probably wouldn’t want to admit to doing so.
The slightly slow response time of the LC26SH20U’s panel is arguably its only shortcoming, and it’s hardly a deal-breaker unless you insist on trying to watch it from the side, an unlikely issue. This is one of the nicer HDTV LCD televisions we looked at – it cost somewhat less than the other contenders, while giving up little.
Honorable mention for this one goes to the Omnimount U2, the mounting system we used to attach our LC26SH20U television to its wall. We tried several lesser wall mounting systems, one of which came within a heartbeat of collapsing and dropping the TV. The Omnimount mount cost quite a bit more than the cheap mounts it replaced, but it’s built to last and it was accompanied by exemplary instructions. The U2 mount package included a sheet of numbered screw sets, and an exhaustive list of the televisions they worked with. The lesson in all this is that Home Depot is a great place to buy lumber, and perhaps less so for television mounts that just have to stay up there.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
The Abduction of Figaro
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You’re probably thinking of The Marriage of Figaro, an opera by Mozart. This isn’t Mozart. Performed in 1984 by the Minnesota Opera Company… betcha didn’t know Minnesota had one of those… this impressive mounting of P.D.Q Bach’s opus will leave you humming the tunes and trying to remember the names of all the characters. Especially the pirate… betcha didn’t know Minnesota had one of those, either.
Right… there never actually was a composer named P.D.Q. Bach, but this hasn’t stopped his creator, Peter Schickele, from “discovering” a remarkable canon of his works. This one, complete with pedal-steel guitar, stolen arias, a eunuch, leeches and the title character in a coma throughout the performance, is everything traditional opera wouldn’t dare attempt on a bet. I couldn’t believe it was actually available on DVD… we laughed our asses off all over again.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
The Reduced Shakespeare Company
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The finest comedic work since the last Canadian federal election, we actually bought this CD several years ago and then managed to lose it behind a great many other discs. This is clearly a shame – Shakespeare has never been presented quite like this. Three versatile thespians perform all of Shakespeare’s works – including the sonnets – in about an hour and a half. A few details are omitted. Minor liberties are taken. Serious Shakespearians might take offense at Titus Andronicus being turned into a cooking show. Hamlet done backwards is arguably a bit questionable. The death scene in Romeo and Juliette is… actually, it would be criminal to spoil it.
The only other thing I’ll say about this DVD is that it has an intermission part way through, and it’s a damned fine thing, too, as it will give your face a chance to stop aching. If you only plan to buy one DVD this year, here’s the one.
LINK TO THE FOLLOWING REVIEW
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
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A quirky little British film with bags of promise, Tristram Shandy turned out to be a crushing disappointment. Based on the 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne, it – like the book from which it borrows its title – spans the eternity between the initial birth pangs of its protagonist and his emergence from his mother… with innumerable digressions. In the case of the book, Tristram Shandy digresses upon Locke, Swift, Pope, London society and European politics. As portrayed in the film, he digresses upon the film. After an engaging beginning, in which an adult Tristram Shandy discourses with other actors portraying him at earlier stages of his life and the other characters in the movie, the actors doff costume and engage mobile telephones. The bulk of the film concerns the private life of the principal player and his co-stars. The closing credits are easily its most welcome feature.
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