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Macworld Article Page 3 |
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The
Nextstation Color Steve Jobs could have expected demands for color when he first announced the Next system; after all, he'd already been through it once with the Macintosh. This time, however, it didn't take over three years for color to appear, and Next avoided some of the trade-offs and headaches that have plagued the history of Macintosh color, such as CLUTs (color look-up tables), palettes, and sluggish performance. The Nextstation Color system looks identical to the Nextstation, and its basic components are the same. However, the Nextstation MegaPixel Color Display is a 16-inch Trinitron RGB monitor that offers the standard Next features (1120 by 832 resolution, 68Hz refresh rate, 92 dpi), while the built-in video supports 16 bits per pixel at that resolution. Unlike the standard Mac 8-bit color video, the Nextstation Color doesn't use CLUTs. Instead, a given pixel uses four bits each for the red, green, blue, and alpha channels, yielding 4096 simultaneous colors on the screen and 16 levels of transparency. System support for color includes automatic translation of images of any bit-depth, and built-in software routines using the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) algorithms for compression and decompression of color images. |
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You can
buy the Nextstation Color without the Next MegaPixel Display, provided you
have a monitor of your own with the proper scan frequency (68Hz).
The Nextstation Color comes with a small device called the Sound Box,
which converts the video signal to a standard RGB/sync output, so you can
connect the Nextstation Color to the monitor of your choice. The
Nextstation Color also supports the other features of the MegaPixel
displays; keyboard input, built-in microphone and speaker, microphone and
headphone jacks, and dual line-outs. At $2995 the Next color monitor
is competitively priced (as large monitors go) and provides a sharp image. While the Nextstation Color and Mac IIci are competitively priced, the Nextstation Color still has a decided performance advantage, along with better color, a larger display area (almost three times bigger) a DSP chip, sound input, built-in Ethernet, and bundled software. On the other hand, the IIci's 80MB hard drive offers a lot more free space (over 70MB) than the Nextstation Color's 105MB hard drive does (about 30MB). The Nextstation Color's 105MB hard drive really isn't sufficient; you'll probably want to buy a third-party external hard drive, or plunk down another $2000 to get the Next 340MB hard drive instead. Still, the Nextstation Color provides high-quality color and solid performance at a competitive price. |
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