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| Click photo to see images of all the Editor's Choice 2007 products. |
We wonder why more photographers don't use tablet PCs for at least some of their image-editing tasks. The touch-sensitive screen on these models allows you to work directly on an image with a supplied stylus -- sort of like a graphics tablet but without the disconnect between eye and hand. This ability seems as valuable an asset at home as on the road, where models such as Toshiba's newest Portege also function as a full-blown laptop.
We spent quite a bit of time with the fully-loaded, 4.4-pound M400, which is the first such model with a dual processor, a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo. It performed flawlessly, both as a standard laptop and in tablet mode, for which you rotate the screen 180 degrees and fold it down against the keyboard. The computer has a dedicated 5-in-1 card reader that accepts Secure Digital, Memory Stick, and xD-Picture formats, but we transferred our photographs using a CompactFlash adapter in its PC Card slot. (One FireWire and any of three USB 2.0 ports can also be used.) The 12.1-inch, XGA-resolution "active matrix" screen is very smooth, the pen responsive and precise. The screen has a pretty narrow viewing angle, so you have to work on pictures at 90 degrees to the screen to get a true sense of what you're doing.
The M400's "Double Layer DVD Super MultiDrive" is swappable, but you probably won't take advantage of that because it makes fast work of every optical reading and writing task you can think of. We'd suggest more RAM than the one gigabyte we got (it takes up to 4GB), and we've heard some complaints about how the M400 performs with Windows XP. With Vista, which came with the machine, everything worked fine. About $1,600.
American PHOTO Editor's Choice 2007
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