Double take on dual scan: don't sacrifice your pocketbook to get color in your notebook - evaluations of seven color notebooks - includes related article on buying a Pentium-based system - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1995 by Ed Peratore

MOST OF US DON'T DRINK PERRIER-JOUET EVERY NIGHT.

We don't buy the latest Cartier watch every year. And we can't yet afford an active-matrix color notebook.

As with champagne and watches, though, there are plenty of reasonably priced alternatives to today's high-cost color portable computers. Dual-scan passive-matrix color notebooks cost approximately $1,000 less than similarly equipped active-matrix systems. Although they're still more expensive than monochrome notebooks, dual-scan machines remain the bargain route to portable color. With fewer manufacturers offering monochrome these days, dual scan is also emerging as the new low end.

Besides their price, dual-scan machines have the added advantage of besting their active-matrix cousins in battery life. Depending on the manufacturer, model, and battery type, you'll get 30 to 90 minutes more productivity per charge with a dual scan. But dual scan lags behind active matrix in screen brightness and resolution. Try to view a dual scan from the side and images fade noticeably. That's fine if you're worried about your airline neighbor reading off your screen. But if you regularly make presentations to small groups or require graphics applications, you probably need the crisp display of active matrix in spite of its exorbitant price.

If crunching spreadsheets and typing letters form the bulk of your workday, however, or if you present to larger groups using an external display, dual scan doesn't present a noticeable difference. With the latest notebook features bundled into dual-scan machines, you've less reason than ever to view them as a compromise.

Uniform Demands The systems in this roundup have heeded the call of customer demands. Although no unit weighs more than seven pounds, manufacturers still need to work on lowering their AC adapters' weight. Each system comes with a bevy of power-management options to extend battery life. Clip-on trackballs are mercifully a thing of the past.

The TrackPoint II, which began as a cool curiosity on the IBM ThinkPad, is gaining ground as the pointing device of choice--you'll find adaptations of it on the AST and WinBook notebooks.

Also gone is the inability to simultaneously display on the LCD and an external monitor. Except for Gateway, every manufacturer includes 1MB of video RAM and local-bus graphics--a necessity for speedy work in Windows. Every system includes at least two Type II PCMCIA slots for fax/modern-size devices. Together the slots can double to hold a single Type III card for PCMCIA hard drives. Each system also provides software that makes a PCMCIA slot plug-andplay capable. And all--from Zenith's 24MB limit to NEC's 40MB--offer user-upgradable RAM.

For this notebook review, we required a 75MHz 486DX4 processor, 8MB of RAM, dual-scan passivematrix display, and hard disk in the ballpark of 340MB. Combined with the other features, manufacturers came up with some winning products.

How We Tested The common way to test how quickly computers run applications is to perform macros that pace a product through a variety of everyday tasks. This time we took a different approach. We still swapped data between applications using the Microsoft Office suite, spell checked, virus scanned a floppy disk, searched/replaced, graphed data, and printed. But rather than automated application tests, we ran the tasks manually to determine how these systems' widely varying keyboard layouts and integrated pointing devices will fare on the road,

Other tests included worst-case challenges. A battery rundown test busied the display, hard disk, and floppy drive without any power management enabled. Another measured video performance by displaying a variety of graphics in sequence and then calculating the display time.

Although power-management settings and your own work patterns render battery life a highly individual measurement, our own scoring revealed a gulf of one and a half hours between the extremes of the units we tested. On the video tests, video RAM and local-bus graphics made the biggest difference whereas built-in Windows hardware accelerators provided an additional benefit. And in the applications test, the myriad routine tasks we performed helped uncover potential annoyances for people--the overall slowness of the WinBook XP, the difficulty in using the NEC Versa M/75D's front-edge trackball, and the level of wrist comfort (or lack thereof) on all the systems.

Of the pack, the AST Ascentia 900N CS 10 and Dell's Latitude XP 475C earned the highest marks for overall usability. For mobile presenters needing audio and video, the NEC Versa M/75D may prove most worthy despite its 8.1-pound traveling weight; other systems with audio features are the IPC, WinBook, and Zenith Data Systems models. And for best price, the choices are IPC and WinBook--two systems that, with Gateway's ColorBook, don't warrant their systems beyond a year.

AST Ascentia 900N CS10 Rating: *** 1/2

One of the best all-around notebooks in this roundup, AST's Ascentia 900N packs great performance at a reasonable price. It boasted the best ranking on our application test and came the closest to Dell's Latitude XP on the battery rundown test. Throw in an array of bundled software and you've got a strong selection.