Tak asked me to do the review on the new SAMSUNG SyncMaster 220wm 22inch monitor for our new online review section.  Looks like I get to go first now that it’s running correctly.

The first thing I thought when I picked up the package was man this is light for such a large monitor. I am used to 450 pound CRT’s and this is my first LCD. When I arrived home I opened the box and found out just how big this thing was. I’m telling ya one does not realize how much bigger a 22 inch is from an old 17″ CRT until it is set up and glowing. Set up was easy just connected the included DVI D cable and away we went. After adjusting the resolution to the manufacture suggested 1690×1050 I began to realize just how much Desktop real estate I now owned. I set a few programs up to work in wide screen and began running movies and games to see just how well this preformed. What I found was very good. For most every game the quality was impressive. For movies however there is a bit of a problem. If it’s just a low quality downloaded clip the picture can be a bit fuzzy and pixeled at larger sizes. If you download HD clips the picture is perfect. The price was reasonable at $279.99 from Costco. Now I can already hear a lot of people screaming about why didn’t I buy from Newegg or some other online store and get the same monitor for $239.00 or even less. Two reasons: one I do not like to RMA to Newegg or other online stores it can be a pain. Two, I wanted my monitor now now now now now!!! I did not want to wait 4 5 or 6 days for it. Yes the base price would have been around $239.00 but adding just basic shipping brought it up to $260.00. So for an extra 19 bucks I had it when I wanted it and I supported my local dealer in stead of going out of town for it.  So there ya have it the specs are posted below. Have a good day and I hope to have a new report for you laterAmon

The P6N Diamond motherboard has all the features that most want in an upper-end system.  Socket775, 1333 FSB, DDR-800, Quad 16x PCIe, etc.  It even goes a bit farther, by adding a couple things that most boards lack.

What I found:

Boasting the latest, a 1333MHz FSB is decent in itself, since this is the next generation of systems.  The newer versions of Intel’s Core2 Duo CPUs are the 6×50 series; these have the 1333 FSB capability.

The P6N Diamond uses nVidia’s 680i (C55) Chipset northbridge, which has gotten mixed reviews on the various hardware sites.  I tend to like it for the tweaking power, though I do admit that there are problems with it, depending on the motherboard.  (That’s normal)    Also on the board is nVidia’s nForce 430i (MCP55) chipset southbridge.

I/O includes up to 10 USB 2.0 ports, up to 2 IEEE1394a, floppy, PS2, etc…all the usual stuff.

The usual 4 DDR2 slots give you support for up to 8GB of system memory at up to 800MHz.  The speed ability goes further with tweaking in the BIOS.

There are 6 internal SATA-II and 1 external eSATA ports.  The internal ports are in the standard flat-on-board layout, with port #6 on the board being linked with the eSATA on the back panel.  (A good way to use the #6 port is for a front panel eSATA connection…)  The onboard SATA along with the single PATA port allow use of the nVidia nForce RAID for up to 8 drives.  The board allows for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD.

The P6N Diamond has dual nVidia gigabit LAN onboard.  This is great for multiple networks or internet connection sharing.

The 4 PCIe ports are nice for over-achievers.  I’ve yet to see anyone actually USE all four for graphics setups.  They are clocked in the standard quad PCIe fashion of x16x16x8 or x8+x8+x16+x8 speed.  There are 1 PCIe 1x and 2 PCI slots as well.  To be honest, I’d rather see 1 less PCIe slot and one MORE PCI slot.  I’ve been rather disappointed with the lack of PCIe support in hardware vendors.  There are some, but they are few and far between.

Also on the board is, and this is the best feature, an onboard PCIe version of the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme 8-channel audio.  This is, by far, the best on-board audio I’ve heard yet.  VERY clear and precise sound, especially for gaming and watching movies with surround sound.

Ultimately, the board was simple to install and configure.  I did find that the “tweakability” in the BIOS was about as good as it gets.  It was easy as cake to get up and running with my Core2 Quad 6600.

We’ll have more on this board after it’s been running for a week or so.  See ya then…

So we’ll do it this way.  I’ll let you write a comment here answering MY question, and we’ll go from there.  Give it your best shot.  I might surprise you at how much money you can save on your next computer.

There’s a couple reviews on here to start you off and we’ll have some more coming soon on things like the DLink DNS-323 Network Storage enclosure and the Xerox Phaser 8560 Solid Ink printer.  I’ll also be giving you a rundown on whether or not it’s worth the $$$ to get a quad-core CPU…

Hopefully, if we can kick them in the butt, our other reviewers will be showing off their stuff as well.

Feel free to leave comments on our topics…

TaK

This review is not intended as a tutorial on how to use the program, by any means. There will be a walkthrough of certain screens and options to illustrate certain key points of the software and it’s flexibility in giving you options to choose from.

THE WIZARD: TMPGEnc Plus has, like other software of it’s kind, a wizard that pops up when you open up the program. You can choose from the included templates, Video-CD, Super Video-CD, or DVD. Among these choices include whether you would like to encode in NTSC format (the North American video encoding standard) or PAL (the European video encoding standard). You can also create templates for yourself.

This isn’t recommended for someone who is new to encoding one’s own video, however, there are some templates available on the web that you can use. The templates come in .mcf format. To use them with the Project Wizard, you save them to the templates folder. This done and the next time you open up TMPGEnc Plus you’ll see your template(s) in the “Other” section of the menu.

Screen 2/5: The Project Wizard ask you to choose your input video. Now, this works best if you are using .avi files or .mpg files, especially if you are new to encoding. You can put practically any video file in the video file slot, but if it does not have pre-done & encoded audio, you open up a whole new can of worms that I’m not prepared to get into here. (Again, however, this illustrates just how flexible TMPGEnc Plus is for encoding). The input screen also has “Epert Settings for Source”. These generally should be left alone, as TMPGEnc is very good at deciding the correct settings.

Screen 3/5: This screen allows you to apply some basic filters to your project. You can specify the range of the original file you’d like to encode; you can clip the source to a custom size (this option causes you to lose parts of the screen; kind of like cropping a picture file); you can reduce noise (slows down encoding time); and you can open up the “Other Settings” options.

The Other Settings options include Video Stream tweaking, more filters, arrange method (ie: widescreen vs. full screen, etc), more sound options (the sound in your video is too quiet? boost it here). There are also many more filters and options you can choose in this area of the program. Most of the extra options should be used with caution for the first time users as they can either cause all kinds of seemingly unfixable problems or create much more pleasant to watch and hear video. Usually the former is what happens, though.

Screen 4/5: This is where you choose what resolution you want. If you are going to be encoding your video so that you can play it in a standard home dvd player on a standard home television (not widescreen), your best resolution is 240 x 480. If you’ve got a widescreen digital input (s-video) tv, you’re going to want to use different settings for this, however most people don’t have these items (yet), so 240 x 480 is the best route. You also choose what type of media you’re going to be putting your video on here. Generally, when I’m choosing file size, I select what type of media i’m going to be using, and how much space on said media I want my file to take up. After that is done, or before, you can choose which video and audio bitrates you’d like your video to have.

Screen 5/5: This is the last screen in the Project Wizard. Here you will choose what you want your file to be called, where you will save it, and whether it will be a completely encoded ready to play file, or if you’re going to save your project as separate video and audio streams. The last feature in the wizard is my favourite one, especially since I don’t have a lot of time to sit at the computer these days. You have the option to “Start encoding immediately” or to “Create another project(s) for batch encoding”.

If you have one file to encode, the first option will be perfect. If, however, you are like me and have umpteen files to encode for a project, the second option is a great time saver. As soon as you click “OK”, the software brings you back to the first screen of the Project Wizard. You can set as many files as you want to “batch encode” and once you have the last one ready to go, you switch to the “Start encoding immediately” setting, and click OK for the last time. TMPGEnc Plus will then proceed to encode all of your files in one shot, one after the other. Best of all, it takes relatively little time, once you’re familiar with the Project Wizard layout, to set a number of files to encode, and you don’t need to be present to set the next one up to go.

TMPGEnc plus also has another feature that I use often. They are actually a set of features called MPEG Tools. In this set is something called “Merge & Cut”. This is a great tool for taking several video files you have and cutting clips from them. You can cut a clip from a single file and save it, or you can cut clips from several files and save them together as one big file of clips. There are also some advanced features in the MPEG Tools used for Muxing and De-Muxing (Multiplex and De-multiplex).

All in all, TMPGEnc Plus is an excellent encoding tool. The Project Wizard is easy to use and easy to figure out for even the new user, but the application also has many more levels of usage for the advanced user. It is not a single point and click program by any means, but that doesn’t make it any less simple to use. There just happen to be a few more steps, and with video encoding software, I have found that having a few more steps, and having many more advanced options available not only give you relative ease of use, but a better end product as well.

If you’re new to video encoding, stick with the Project Wizard. If you are an advanced user, have fun with the extra options in this powerful piece of software. Another nice thing about TMPGEnc Plus, is that someone new to encoding can easily figure out what most of the options are for via trial and error, or with simple tutorials (the best of which can be found at VideoHelp.

TMPGEnc Plus is available from Pegasys Inc. for $37.00 USD. There is also a basic version of the encoder available for free (although with not all of the features presented in Plus) at tmpgenc.net. The free version would be a great way to familiarize yourself with TMPGEnc, but I definitely recommend the Plus version. It is relatively inexpensive compared to other software out there in this category, but a whole lot more powerful.

Encoding time for an XVID/DIVX .avi of around the 1 gig size to .mpg is approximately 50 – 80 minutes on my computer. System Specs on system used: Windows XP Pro SP2 on a 2.4GHz Celeron processor, 768MB RAM and onboard Intel Graphics Controller. During an encode, I can run all kinds of other applications. During the course of writing this review, I had TMPGEnc, Opera, TextPad, Firewall, Anti-virus, MS Office, and one game running (for breaks in writing). On systems with much better video cards, but with similar processing power and RAM, your encoding time for the same file could be half the time.

Starting January 6th, first show of 2007, will be 4pm to 6pm AKST, which translates to 5pm to 7pm Pacific, 8pm to 10pm Eastern, and midnight to 1am GMT for those keeping track.

Does that mean we’ll actually have topics and be prepared? Of course not. And in fact, we resolve not to ever be completely prepared, since that takes out all the fun.

I’ve been, for the last few weeks, trying to get a decent blogging app for use on BlogTAK. There are only a few of them to choose from. For this review, I’m using Zoundry 1.0.29 beta. It seems that they’re all still in beta. I’m burned out on betas. Anyways, it seems that the Zoundry app needs a few serious fixes before it’s ready to be brought out on the market…

Zoundry has quite a few nice little features, such as:

• Full WYSIWYG Editing
• Drag and drop images, text, and hyperlinks
• Tagging for Technorati, Flikr, etc
• Spell Checker support
• Full XHTML save and edit
• Image and Pod cast management
• Publishing to a wide range of blog APIs

One of the main features that I really wanted the app to be my best choice for was in-line full justification. (That’s the setting you use to make the text even on both right and left margins to look more like a newsprint article.)

Unfortunately, there are too many quirks in the application when you’re changing the formatting of the text. When I highlighted a block of text and selected to make it larger type, it switched everything to the smallest type, and every attempt to correct it made matters worse. This is happening so much right now that I truly cannot go on using this thing to do this review. Hopefully Zoundry will fix the bugs I just reported, but for now, stay away from this one…

TaK

Yes, I know. We’ve been through this before. Just when everyone was starting to get used to the TechTAK blog using the b2evolution system, we’ve gone and changed it over to WordPress. Believe me folks, if WordPress wasn’t a huge amount of difference, we wouldn’t be making the change.

One of the biggest differences is that I can use any of several PC apps to write my blogs out without having to log into a website. The biggest of these are Zoundry and Microsoft Live Writer. They allow full control of blog entries without having to go through the hassle of logging into the blog web page. If you’re a blogger, I suggest giving them a try. Zoundry seems to have the highest number of supported blog systems. MS Live Writer (Still in beta) seems to have fewer little quirky problems. While they are SMALL quirks, they can still be annoying. I’m using Zoundry for this posting and the Zoundry review, which I’ll be writing next.

Another difference is one that I actually don’t like, and we’ll be changing it ASAP. That is that the blog isn’t hosted on the TechTAK website, it’s hosted on WordPress’ website. While we can GET WordPress for use on our own servers, it is quite a feat to get it installed and running the way we want it, which has been a problem with WP so far.

Another benefit to doing it this way for the time being is that it might help our listeners who want to use a blog but don’t know how to get started. WordPress is pretty much the standard that most other blogging systems are set. If you want to start your own blog, WordPress.com is a great way to get started.

TaK

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