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REVIEWS
HEAD
GRUNDIG PA3 Tower Hi-Fi System £1099.99 (£998.99 with black
finish)
INTRO
Prepare for a shock. Safe, sensible Auntie Grundig lifts her
skirts to reveal something quite outrageous...
COPY
The Germans were clearly wise to ban imports of British beef,
but it looks as though it came too late for the poor souls working in Grundig’s
design studio. Before tragedy struck they seem to have been working on a
monolithic, one-piece hi-fi system. It appears to have started out as an
attempt to create an audio system with full-bodied stereo soundfield, but without
using outboard speakers. Who can say what they’ve finished up with? The only
explanation we can think of is that senior management, discovering what had
been going on, decided to brazen it out, slap on a hefty price ticket, and pass
it off as an avant-garde design exercise.
The bizarre mixture of style motifs conjures up a variety of
strange images, including the fins on a 50’s Caddilac, Flash Gordon’s rocket and
Grace Jones in a space suite... Inside the box there’s a fairly sensible
assortment of mini hi-fi components, like a 7-disc CD autochanger, AM/FM tuner
with 59 station presets and RDS channel display, plus a single auto-reverse
cassette deck. The bottom half of the tower is taken up with a meaty sub-woofer.
The main drive units and angled tweeters are mounted in what Grundig call an
acoustic tube, that slots into a recess on the back of the tower. The whole
caboodle is controlled from a wacky round remote that has to be used two-handed.
Now there’s an innovation.
The first thing you hear when you switch it on -- on our
sample at least -- was an annoying mains-hum. The CD autochanger does a fair
job of drowning it out, that’s if you can figure out the controls. Don’t loose
the instruction manual or you’re sunk! The other two source components work
reasonably well too, but everything hinges on those speakers. Bass performance
is most impressive, and the overall tone is pleasantly mellow but the
soundfield is quite diffuse and it tends to lack clear focus.
VERDICT
Well, it is different, and after all, beauty is in the eye
of the beholder. If it was left up to the ear of the beholder then we’d have to
say £1100 is rather a lot to pay for a middle of the road hi-fi system but then
we’d guess audio performance will be a secondary consideration for anyone
buying a PA3
Features: 7-disc CD autochanger, auto-reverse cassette deck,
AM/FM RDS tuner with 59 station memory,
125 disc title memory, 70 track memory, Dolby B NR, music search, CD copy
facility, extended bass, 3 sound
presets (Jazz, disco, vocal)
Sockets: stereo line in/out (phono), AM/FM antennas,
headphone (minijack)
Dimensions: 650 x 1200 x 465mm
Grundig International Ltd, telephone (01788) 577155
VALUE FOR MONEY 70%
COMPETITORS
You must be joking... but how about:
Sony SA-VA55
Akura Coke Can
HEAD
Casio QV-10BC, £800
INTRO
Still photography moves into the digital age with this cute
little silicon-chip snapper from Casio
COPY
Still video cameras have been around for more than a decade
but they’ve had little impact on the photographic market, and then only in
specialist applications. They include news gathering, commercial and industrial
imaging, where the facility to download images into computers, or squirt
pictures down telephone lines, is considered useful. The Casio QV10 is also
very clearly aimed at PC owners -- there’s a lot more of them about these days
-- and with the growing popularity of the Internet and desktop publishing, they’re
hoping it will find a ready market as a
low-cost image capture device.
The QV10 is quite unlike other still video cameras. It’s no
larger than a compact 35mm film camera, and it’s the first one to have a
built-in LCD screen. This acts as a viewfinder, and can be used for replaying recorded
images on the spot. They can be displayed singly or in groups of 4 or 9
miniature sub-screens. It has just one output, intended for a Windows PC or
Apple Mac via the PC’s serial interface. Casio are hinting at future model with
a PAL video output, that can be connected to an ordinary TV, but that’s still
some way off. The camera uses JPEG compression to store up to 96 images on a 16
megabyte flash RAM.
It’s exceptionally easy to use, just frame the shot and press the shutter button. The camera
module is mounted on a swivel, that can be turned to face the user; the image
is automatically inverted. Exposure is fully automatic -- it also has a manual
override, to make the picture lighter or darker -- and a macro setting,
for extreme close-ups. The camera comes
with QV Link software (for PC and Mac) plus interface cables, allowing images
to be transferred to a PC’s hard disc as Bitmap or Tiff files. They can be
shown on the screen, incorporated into documents, Internet Web pages or
manipulated using software applications. Colours are fairly lifelike but the
picture is quite grainy, compared with photographic film.
VERDICT
The QV10 is not meant as an alternative to conventional
still cameras, it’s a specialist computer peripheral for capturing images, that
can be processed by computer, in that context it works very well. Photographic
film will be around for a while yet, but this neat little digital camera provides
an intriguing glimpse of things to come.
Features: 16Mb storage for up to 96 images or ‘pages’,
multiple display formats, F2/f= 5.2mm lens, 1/5th inch CCD (250k pixels),
aperture priority auto exposure, manual override (-2EV to +2EV), auto shutter
(1/8th to 1/4000th second), auto white balance, 10-second self-timer, 45mm LCD
screen, powered by 4 x AA cells (120 min battery life), supplied with QV Link
software (PC and Mac), serial interface cable and soft carry case
Sockets: DC
in, digital data output (minijack)
Dimensions: 130
x 66 x 40mm
Casio UK, telephone 0181-450 9131
VALUE FOR MONEY 85%
COMPETITORS
Canon PowerShot 600, £800, not tested
Chinon ES1000, US$ 500, not tested (not yet available in the
UK)
Kodak DC 40, £1000, not tested
HEAD
Goldstar GPi 1200 Cdi Player, £1300
INTRO
CD-i takes to the streets again, this time with Goldstar’s
portable laptop player
COPY
The prolonged and somewhat uneasy genesis of DVD has tended
to overshadow the steady development of CDi (CD interactive) as a convenient, low-cost disc-based medium
for moving video and sound. Although CDi will have difficulty competing with
DVD as a carrier for feature-length movies, it has found a useful niche as a training
and presentation tool, which is precisely
the application Philips targeted last year with their CDi-370 laptop player.
Now Goldstar have weighed in with the GPi-1200 portable CDi player. It has all
of the facilities of it’s grown-up cousins, including full-motion video
playback, CD quality audio plus a set of interactive controls.
The key to its portability is a fold-up 5.5-inch LCD colour screen
and re-chargeable battery pack. It can be used anywhere, though it also has
video (composite and S-Video) and audio outputs, for connection to both PAL and
NTSC televisions or monitors. The player can handle a variety of other formats
besides CD-i, including CD-DA, CD+Graphics, Photo CD, CD-i Digital Video and
Video CD, moreover it supports standard CD-i pointing devices, keyboards and it
can be connected to a PC via a serial interface port. The controls are grouped
together on top of the disc cover; in addition to the normal transport keys
there’s a simple cursor control and two function buttons.
In spite of the limited resolution and viewing angle of the
LCD screen the picture is surprisingly good, it’s particularly effective with coloured
graphics, and the screen is large enough to be seen by two or three people at
once. Moving video is fairly smooth, rapid movement or complex shapes throws up
a few digital artefacts and these tend to be exaggerated by the LCD, but on a
normal TV screen picture quality is comparable with a mains-powered deck. The built-in
stereo speakers are rather tinny, and not terribly loud, but they’re fine for speech.
To hear it properly the sound needs to be piped through a TV or hi-fi system.
VERDICT
Although it’s possible to watch a Video CD movie on the
small screen it’s not very satisfactory. CD-i games fare a little better,
though the on-board cursor control is not very responsive. The product is
geared towards CD-i training and marketing material, and there it succeeds
brilliantly, mainly by virtue of its portability and flexibility.
Features: supported formats include CD-i, CD-DA, Photo CD,
CD-i Digital Video, CD+ Graphics, Video CD, 5.6-inch TFT colour LCD screen,
PAL/NTSC video, 2MB system RAM, nickel metal hydride battery (approx. 1.5 hour
running time), built-in
stereo speakers, supplied with power supply/ charger, AV cables.
Sockets: composite video and stereo audio output (phono),
S-Video out (mini DIN), ports 1 & 2 (8-pin mini DIN), headphone (minijack),
DC power in & AV in (mini DIN)
Dimensions: 190
x 172 x 70mm
LG Electronics UK Ltd., telephone (01753) 500400
VALUE FOR MONEY 80%
COMPETITORS
Philips Cdi-370, £1250, not tested
Philips CDi-210DVC, £350, HE7 80%
Philips Cdi-470, £400, not tested
---end---
Ó
R. Maybury 1996, 0204
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