5-Megapixel Cameras Come Into Focus
For this month's revieews of systems and peripherals, click the links below.
- Office PCs
- Notebook PCs
- Home PCs
- Printers
- 19-Inch Monitors
- Graphics Boards
- CD-RW Drives
- Digital Cameras
This month's Top 10 Digital Cameras features three new models with 5-megapixel resolution--the highest available so far in a consumer camera. The prices are also high--from $999 for the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F707 to $1999 for the semi-pro Olympus E-20N. Though all three offer extensive imaging controls, they come in wildly different shapes and sizes--and any serious digital photographer should find that one of the three fills the bill. For printing photos, try the Canon S750 Color Bubble Jet. Our new Best Buy ink jet printer produced beautiful color images and churned out text pages faster than any other printer on the chart.
Freelance writers Dan Littman, Joel Strauch, and Carla Thornton, and PC World editors Richard Baguley, Tracey Capen, Seán Captain, Lisa Cekan, Rebecca Freed, Heather Morra, Kalpana Narayanamurthi, Melissa J. Perenson, and Alan Stafford contributed to this month's Top 100 section. Ulrike Diehlmann, Robert James, Elliott Kirschling, Jeff Kuta, Tony K. Leung, and Thomas Luong of the PC World Test Center performed testing on the products reviewed here, with support from Julio Giannobile and Julian Weatherby.
Top 10 Digital Cameras
Sony's funky Cyber-shot DSC-F707 (left) captures beautiful
images. The hefty Olympus E-20N's through-the-lens viewing lets you shoot with
speed and accuracy.
Top 10 Printers
Canon's S750 Color Bubble Jet Printer is the most expensive
model on our chart, but clean, speedy text printing and beautiful glossy photos
earn it a Best Buy.
Top 10 Monitors
Bright, lifelike colors and sharp text help the NEC
MultiSync FE950+ land in the upper half of our 19-inch CRT monitors chart.
Top 15 Office PCs
With an LCD monitor and impressive speed from a 1.3-GHz
Celeron processor, the Gateway 300X wins the Best Buy title for value office
PCs.
Your Guide to the Top 100
Each month we test a large number of PCs, printers, monitors, and other products. Only the best products land on the charts, which are refreshed monthly.
System configurations are shown as tested. The overall rating for each product is calculated on a 100-point scale and reflects results from our hands-on evaluations and performance tests. A 90-point score is exceptional, while one in the 70s is above average.
The PC WorldBench 4 score is a measure of how fast a PC can run a mix of common business applications as compared with our baseline machine, a Gateway Select 1200 with a 1.2-GHz Athlon processor, 128MB of PC133 SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive. For example, a PC that scores 120 is 20 percent faster than the baseline system. The policies score is based on vendor support policies (not shown on charts).