Pen and PC: Sony's Winning Combo

Mousing and typing are fine for most PC chores, but when it comes to graphics, they're a poor substitute for good old-fashioned drawing and scribbling. But until now, the closest you could get to using a pen on a desktop PC was to use a stylus on a pen tablet--not exactly an intuitive skill.

Sony's new VAIO Slimtop Pen Tablet PCV-LX900 is a full-blown Windows PC that bypasses this cumbersome routine: It allows you to write with a stylus directly onto a sleek touch screen that you can either adjust to lie flat or set upright to use with a conventional keyboard and mouse. This terrific feature should appeal to professional graphic artists and photo editors, and thanks to some ingenious software that comes bundled with the machine, it should be a lot of fun for novices too.

Draw On

The Sony VAIO Slimtop Pen Tablet is not the first computer to feature touch-screen input, but the others were either mobile devices--"tablet PCs" that you have seen most often in the hands of package deliverers--or highly specialized systems that are most often seen in restaurants.

The Slimtop Pen Tablet is definitely not designed for mobile use or niche markets. At first glance it looks like other svelte desktops in Sony's VAIO Slimtop line, with a bright 15-inch LCD monitor and a box slightly larger than a notebook. The box holds the PC's substantial innards: a 1-GHz Pentium III, 128MB of SDRAM, an 8X/4X/32X CD-RW drive, integrated graphics, a V.90 modem, an ethernet interface, Type II PC Card and Sony Memory Stick slots, four USB ports (the monitor has a fifth), two IEEE-1394 (FireWire) ports, and one free PCI slot--but no serial, parallel, or game ports. Oddly, the unit does not come with an AGP slot, which would enable users to upgrade to a high-end graphics card.

Push the 1024-by-768 display back, and its double-hinged stand lets it lie almost horizontally so that you can use the included stylus right on the screen, much the way you would write with pen and paper on your real desktop. You can completely cover the keyboard with the screen, or you can slide it out if intermittent typing is required. Because the touch screen uses electromagnetic technology, it's not prone to recording the inadvertent brush of a knuckle or sleeve. And it looks good even when viewed from an angle.

For professional graphics artists, the ability to work directly on an illustration or photo has obvious benefits. But the Slimtop Pen Tablet targets a wider audience of graphics aficionados. The software bundle includes Adobe Photoshop LE for image editing, GoLive for Web page design, and LiveMotion for Web animation.

For beginners, Sony provides its own new Picture Toy application, which makes simple drawing and image ornamentation a snap. If you don't opt to draw from scratch, you can start with one of your own photos (or choose one from a small library of stock shots), then draw or write on it, or even add a little cartoonlike balloon with your own text.

At $3000, the Slimtop Pen Tablet is not for bargain hunters: The VAIO Slimtop PCV-LX800--similarly configured but with an 800-MHz Pentium III processor and a standard LCD display--runs about $700 cheaper. And given these prices, you wish Sony had included a graphics board with its own memory rather than an integrated chip set that shares system RAM. But for graphics pros and affluent users who've yearned for an easier way to draw electronically, the premium may be well worthwhile.

SUMMARY

VAIO Slimtop Pen Tablet PCV-LX900 Street price: $3000 Sony 888/476-6972 www.sonystyle.com