Technical Review.

Welcome to Starbuck's electronics' review!  

As the very first article that I'm adding to this page I think it appropriate to do a general opinion article on the differences between the Imation LS-120 drive and the Iomega Zip 100 drive. Why should you choose one over the other?  Is it worth buying? What will they cost me? and how easy are they to install?

I also had the opportunity to look at ELSA's new 3D stereo glasses.  Is it any better than some of the other 3D stuff on the market?  Maybe...

 webmaster@starbuck.virtualave.net

Imation LS-120 vs Iomega Zip: which to buy?

This is the first article I'm adding to the Technical Review pages.  This may seem like old hat technology to some, now that Iomega is introducing there Zip 250 drives, but for the purposes of this article, we're only gonna worry about they're popular 100MB version drive.

LS-120 (internal shown)

Imation's LS-120 is listed by the manufacturer as "the only high-capacity, removable data storage solution that saves up to 120MB per diskette AND accepts normal 1.44MB floppies".  The manufacturer is not wrong on this one.  Put another way, if you have one of the newer motherboards in your computer, you can use the LS-120 drive as you primary floppy and do away with your old 1.44MB drive.  This is a good thing... it means if you're building a computer, you can buy this drive (internal MSRP $188.89) and not need any other floppy drives.  You get to use your old 1.44 disks, as well as the 120MB flopoptical disks.  This frees up a 3.5" drive bay for something important like an additional hard drive or a tape backup drive. 

The only drawback is the cost.  Is it worth almost double the price compared to the Zip drive?  Well, yes and no.  You do get an additional 20MB of space... and you can save about $35 on the cost of a floppy drive, which closes the gap a bit.  

Installation is a breeze.  Attach the drive to an IDE port (or, it comes with a cable if you don't have one), and run the software. You should be up and running in about 20 minutes.

The biggest problem is universality. The LS-120 hasn't been adopted as a standard by except the motherboard manufacturers.  This isn't a major drawback, but it can be darn inconvenient.

Suggested Price $192      Media: $9-15 depending on brand

For more information visit their website at: www.imation.com

VERSUS

Zip (external shown)

The venerated Iomega Zip drive was the first of the flopoptical drives...and because of that, it has managed to become the ipso facto drive of this type. 

It has become so common place, in fact, that many software programs have written in utilities specifically for it (ie: Symantec Norton Utilities, etc).

That's the good news: they're old enough that the kinks have been worked out. Unfortunately the Zip drives do not read standard 1.44 floppy disks.  This is a huge disadvantage in a small case where space is at a premium, since you now have to have both drives installed, like it or not.

The drive is simple to install, much like the LS-120, it installs to an IDE port, and comes with a cable. Again, this should take about 20 minutes to install and get running.

Suggested Price $99.95      Media: $11

For more information visit their website at: www.iomega.com

ELSA's 3D Revelator

First up, lets take a look at ELSA's 3D glasses, which they're calling the 3D Revelator.

This is one incredible product.  It has only one drawback: it can only be used with an ELSA video card.

Unlike traditional 3D which splits the color spectrum between red and green (you've seen those glasses), this actually talks with your computer and splits the refresh rate between your left and right eye.  Because of this, ELSA recommends a minimum refresh of 100 Hz on the monitor, thus you get about 50 Hz per eye.  

AND this works with any 3D application... well, almost.  There's a problem with working with flight simulators because of the way they use the x and y axis, but any other 3D game works great.  I saw this demonstrated with Tomb Raiders 3, and if you thought Lara Croft looked good before, you should see her with these things on.

There was, however some flicker with one of the demo programs. This can be a bad thing, because a couple of minutes of this is enough to give you a headache.  This only happened with one program, and ELSA said they would be checking to see what the programmers did to the game/demo, and correct it in a later copy of their software.

The glasses come in an IR (infrared) version and a cabled version.  The length on the cabled version is 3 meters.  The cabled glasses are a little bit lighter to wear than the IR version, since it requires 2 CR2032 batteries and the receiver.  Both fit somewhat comfortably over glasses.

The glasses come shipped with selected ELSA's Erazor II, Erazor III, and Winner II cards, or will soon be purchased separately.

For more information visit their website at: www.elsa.com/AMERICA