Reviews

HP is no stranger to the all-in-one market, having churned out a number of multitouch-capable machines under the TouchSmart line. But at $930 (as of 12/23/2009), the HP TouchSmart 300 occupies a somewhat peculiar niche.

At 20 inches, it's a bit small to serve as your primary media center, but it costs more than similarly sized budget all-in-one PCs (20 inches or smaller). It also outperforms them all, scoring 98 on the WorldBench 6 test suite. This places the TouchSmart 300 well ahead of touch-enabled, budget-priced competitors like the 20-inch MSI Wind Top AE2010 (60), and tantalizingly close to pricier rivals like the 24-inch Sony Vaio L117FX/B (105). It also scored slightly higher than its larger sibling, the 23-inch HP TouchSmart 600 (92).

The Canon Pixma MP560 Wireless Photo All-in-One color inkjet multifunction printer is priced to appeal to students and home users ($150 as of November 24, 2009). Compared with the like-priced Epson Stylus NX515 and HP Photosmart Plus, it offers better paper handling and ink costs--but slower performance.

In our tests, the unit's performance was generally middling, but sometimes better. The unit printed plain text at a rate of 6.4 pages per minute; graphics averaged about 2.6 ppm. Its scanning speeds were the fastest among our test group, while its copying speed was average. On plain paper, black text and copies looked just slightly fuzzy, while line art and halftones looked detailed. Flesh tones appeared artificially pink on plain paper but improved on Canon's own photo stock.

The HP Photosmart Plus color inkjet multifunction printer is well priced for student and home users ($150 as of December 9, 2009). It also pumps out great-looking output quickly--something that few other models in its price class can achieve.

HP makes things easy from the get-go. The installation wizard includes a library of animated instructions for setup and basic operation. The control panel features a 2.3-inch color LCD, surrounded by touch-sensitive LED buttons that light only when needed. Menu items include how-to animations, as well as troubleshooting instructions for clearing paper jams, replacing cartridges, and other everyday tasks.

The Epson Artisan 810 color inkjet multifunction printer has speed and versatility to spare. Considering the price ($300 as of November 24, 2009), however, we expected better overall output quality.

Though the Artisan 810's text-printing speed was just average at about 7.3 pages per minute, it finished at or near the top in all of our other print, scan, and copy speed tests. The output quality was less stellar. On Epson's own photo paper, flesh tones looked warm and natural. On plain paper, all photos had a filmy look. Plain text looked fuzzy and dim. Scans and copies were acceptable despite some general fuzziness; a photo enlargement looked murky.

The Dell Inspiron 11z is an attempt to rectify the biggest drawback of current netbooks--low processing power--by using Intel's ultralow-voltage Celeron and Pentium CPUs. The 11z--which starts at $379--is available with either the single-core Celeron 743 or, as with our test unit, the dual-core Pentium SU4100. Both CPUs run at 1.3GHz with an 800MHz bus. Besides two cores, the Pentium SU4100 has 64-bit support. Oh, and it adds $75 to the price.

Choosing 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium--which our test system came with--will cost you $30 more over the default Vista Home Basic operating system. And if you want any color other than "Obsidian Black," that will run you $40 more. Boost the RAM from 2GB to 4GB and choose a larger hard drive, and you can easily turn this under- $400 netbook into a nearly $700 companion device to your main system. In addition to the dual-core CPU, our test system had the 250GB drive upgrade but not the 4GB RAM option, a mix making for a fairly pricey netbook.

If you're looking for pleasing image quality in a Blu-ray player, and you want to spend less than $200, the Insignia NS-WBRDVD ($180, as of December 14, 2009) makes a terrific choice. It can connect to the Internet wirelessly, and it lets you stream movies off Netflix On Demand if you don't want to wait for a disc. It has a few weaknesses, but they're reasonable trade-offs for the price.

Blu-ray Disc images from the NS-WBRDVD generally looked better than those from our reference player, a Sony PlayStation 3. The Insignia provided significantly better detail than the PS3, with pleasing color balance and a good sense of depth. It worked well with several different film styles, from the bright, natural sunlight of Mission: Impossible III (chapter 7) to the animated Cars (chapter 1) to the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck (chapter 1), which looked especially impressive, with good contrast and a firm sense of film grain.

At first glance, the slim Toshiba BDX2000--the company's first Blu-ray Disc player--seems unexceptional, with limited extras and a boxy remote. But when you pop a Blu-ray disc into it and see what the BDX2000 can do, you'll realize what a bargain it is ($200, as of December 14, 2009).

The BDX2000's image quality was fantastic in five of the six Blu-ray titles we tried on it. In chapter 1 of Cars, the color red popped out without looking garish. In a low-contrast, day-for-night scene from The Searchers (chapter 20), John Wayne's suspenders stood out from his shirt with an almost three-dimensional look. And the opening of Good Night and Good Luck demonstrated that the BDX2000 can handle black-and-white beautifully.

The $250 (as of December 14, 2009) Pioneer BDP-320 sends gorgeous pictures to an HDTV, but it lacks the Web streaming multimedia capabilities of even lower priced Blu-ray Disc players such as the LG BD370 and the Panasonic DMP-BD60K.

Pop a Blu-ray disc into the BDP-320 and you'll get muted yet beautiful and natural-looking colors--less saturated than those produced by our reference player, a Sony PlayStation 3, but more pleasing to the eye. Skin tones were realistically balanced throughout, and the opening scene of the black-and-white Good Night and Good Luck movie looked gorgeous.