Calling all home office shoppers

Home Office Computing, July, 1998 by Douglas Gantenbein

$249

* Two years ago the demand for ink-jet printers out-stripped the industry's capacity to make them. But when Hewlett-Packard, Canon, and Epson all ramped up production and Lexmark entered the fray, a surplus resulted. The winner? You. At $249, Epson's Stylus 600 (www.epson.com) is one of many color ink-jets that fall into this price range. It gives you photo-quality color printing as well as excellent 600 dpi black-text printing.

* Capturing images or text has never been easier--or cheaper. Good-quality flatbed scanners used to be exotic gear for the graphics elite. But the highly regarded Astra 1200S (www.umax.com) goes for just $245 and offers 9,600 dpi enhanced resolution, 30-bit color, single-pass scanning, and a full software suite that includes Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Presto! page-managing software with OCR capability.

* Iomega may have become big enough to join Intel and Microsoft in pitching its products on Frasier, but SyQuest's SparQ 1GB drive (www.syquest.com) may just shake up the removable-storage market. It's fast--average seek times compare with those of good hard drives--and holds a ton of data. Best of all, the $199 price tag blows the competition away. Additional 1GB disks are reasonable too: only $99 for three.

* Presentation systems still are beyond the pocketbook of many--$5,000 and up for a light, portable unit. So until those prices come down, PC-to-video adapters will continue to attract road warriors who give presentations to groups. AVerMedia's $229 AverKey 3 Plus (www.aver.com) translates laptop resolution of up to 1,024 by 768 and puts it on a television monitor. It zooms in on key points, sets up quickly, and comes with a wireless remote.

* Too many appointments? Too many contacts? Get a handle on them with 3Com's PalmPilot Personal Edition (www.3com.com). This $199 PDA will let you store up to 2,500 addresses, 2,400 appointments, and 500 memos. (Your first memo: Cut down on appointments.)

$499

* Not long ago, A 17-inch monitor was the height of opulence. Not anymore. Improved circuitry and economics of scale--70 million monitors sold each year--have driven prices down dramatically. Princeton's E072 17-inch display (www.prgr. com), retailing at $480, boasts a compact footprint designed for small desktops and gives you a sharp view of your work with 0.26mm dot pitch and an 85Hz refresh rate at 1,024 by 768 resolution.

* Looking for an all-in-one business software suite? Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition (www.microsoft.com) has nearly everything you need--Word, Excel, Publisher, Outlook, Financial Manager, and the Expedia Streets atlas. Even dedicated Bill Gates bashers will acknowledge that the $449 price ($219 for upgrade) is hard to beat. And if you prefer the bundle in Office 97 Professional Edition--Word, Excel, Publisher, Outlook, Access, and Bookshelf Basics-you can get it for $499.

* Digital photography is fast catching up with film-based imaging in quality and price. If you need to post photos on a Web site or place them in documents, the Olympus D220L (www.olympusamerica.com) stores up to 80 images and has a fast lens for low light. Best of all, this $499 tool looks and handles just like a traditional film-based camera, so you'll hardly know you're in the digital age.