Inside CNET Labs Podcast

Luckily for me, there isn't much in between monitors and displays. Luckily for you (I hope), I'll be answering any and all questions pertaining to computer monitors on Thursday, September 17, from 11 a.m. to noon PDT (2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern). Here is the link in advance.

Show up early or late, whichever floats your boat, and I'll see ya there.

DisplayLink's message: get more done and save on energy, all through the magic of USB.

(Credit: DisplayLink)

According to DisplayLink, a Microsoft Research study says that using two or more displays can increase productivity by as much as 50 percent. The company also notes that University of Utah researchers have shown that users of multiple displays make up to 33 percent fewer mistakes than those working on a single monitor.

Now, in its own study released Wednesday, DisplayLink says that using multiple monitors simultaneously via USB consumes less power than using them via DVI. To plug multiple monitors into one system traditionally requires that you use a discrete graphics card solution with dual DVI ports. Right away that's theoretically more power, since discrete solutions take more energy to run than integrated solutions. With DisplayLink, you'd simply be using the USB port to connect, so there would be no need for a dual DVI card and the integrated graphics would suffice.

At Interop, an IT conference and Exposition in New York this week, DisplayLink is leaning on its study results to push the energy efficiency of using DisplayLink to connect multiple monitors via USB.

In its study, DisplayLink measured the power needed for a desktop PC to run one to four LCD monitors. Two identically configured systems were used--one equipped with DisplayLink-enabled USB-to-DVI adapters and software, and another with dual-DVI discrete graphics cards (the most common type of dedicated multidisplay board). Power consumption was measured at the entry of the computer power supply to gauge total system power usage under different system loads.

The Thecus N3200 features hard drive bays and a little LCD for quick management.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

I recently got a NAS device from Thecus--the N3200--and was very excited getting it out of the box. Among other things, the device looked as if it would be the first network storage device that incorporates a PCI expansion slot.

Unfortunately it isn't. There's indeed a place that reads "expansion slot" on the back of the device that looks like where you would fit a PCI card on a computer, but that's just a placeholder. As it turns out, the N3200 is the first NAS designed with a chassis to house more features than the internal circuit board has to offer. A representative from Thecus assured me that future products that share the same chassis will come with an actual PCI expansion slot.

Other than that rather disconcerting finding, the N3200 seems a nice NAS device that offers three hard drive bays. Each bay can house an SATA hard drive up to 1TB in size. The hard drives then can be set up in RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, or JBOD configuration. The device also has two USB ports and one eSATA port for storage expansion.

The N3200 would be the first SOHO NAS device that has a PCI expansion slot if that slot wasn't just a placeholder.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

Other than regular NAS features including dynamic DNS, FTP server, iTunes server, and so on, it has a few rather unusual features such as ISO Mount, where you can mount up to 200 ISO files and make their contents available to network users. This is a nice way to compact data to conserve storage space. In addition, the USB ports of the device can also be used to host a printer, USB Webcams for surveillance, or a Wireless adapter if you want to put the device in a corner where there's no Ethernet connectivity. This is the second NAS device I've seen that support Webcams, the other was the Synology DS107+, though the Synology only supports IP-base Webcams.

The N3200 is available for about $320 without hard drives, a relatively good price for a product that offers RAID 5.

This is the first storage product we've got from Thecus so check back soon for our in-depth review of the N3200.

We test monitor contrast ratio in a secret, undisclosed location.

(Credit: Eric Franklin/CNET Networks)

Vendors want to sell you stuff! There, it's finally been said. Don't believe me? Well, you wouldn't be the first, but thankfully, I have evidence.

Within the last year I've seen a new spec, called dynamic contrast ratio (DCR), tossed around for computer displays. If you didn't know before, contrast ratio is simply the difference between the darkest blacks and the brightest whites a given display can produce.

Typically, computer displays have a contrast ratio of about 1000:1. However with DCR, you'll see numbers like 4000:1, 10,000:1, and higher. Basically, it's just a way for Company A to proclaim, "Don't buy Company B's monitor because it has a much lower DCR than our monitor." Since more and more vendors have been pushing this, I want to delve further into how they're getting these numbers. I also covered this topic in less detail (but with a sexy voice thrown in) in episode 2 of the Inside CNET Labs podcast.

Before a monitor is released to the public it goes through a bunch of testing in the vendor's own lab. These tests produce the specs that the vendor will then publish with the release. Specs like maximum brightness, pixel pitch, pixel response time, contrast ratio, and dynamic contrast ratio are all determined in the vendor's own lab.

When testing normal contrast ratio, vendors use a device that measures light to determine how much light is emanating from a display while it's showing both a completely black and a completely white screen. They then take each number, do a bit of math, and come up with the contrast ratio.

Our MP3 player testing tool in action

(Credit: Eric Franklin)

So last Friday (7/11, "iPhone day") I'm getting ready to do some performance testing on the iPhone 3G. Well, if by "getting ready" I mean stealing pizza and pop (hey, I'm from Chicago) from the poor saps--I mean fellow CNETers that were in the office since 4 a.m. that day to cover the second coming of the Second Coming. Don't hate. This is how I roll at CNET, and my colleagues respect me for it. I mean, why else would they suggest I do First Look videos like this?

Anyway, my plan was to use the testing tool you see pictured here to test the battery life of the phone while it's first playing audio and then while playing video. This is an in-house developed testing tool that allows for the unattended drain and subsequent recharge of an MP3 player's battery. I need only be present to start the test initially and then again after the recharge (more on this tool in a future post). I figure with the 3G I can get at least one run of each the audio and video drains in over the weekend and since the first-gen iPhone lasted over 25 hours last year with the audio battery drain, I'm thinking I can get the 3G tested within one, maybe two trips to CNET the whole weekend.

Mr. Kent German, however, would see things differently. Kent usually does the talk time tests himself, and at about 3 p.m. that day he says that this test is the highest priority and that it should be done ASAP. Well, my first thought was, "I guess you need to get on that then, huh, Kent?" Alas, after a few seconds of my brain catching up--fueled by Kent's blank stare--I realized he was referring to me. So, there go my plans for a very productive weekend of WoW.

The testing tool I mentioned before is not compatible with our cell phone talk time test, so I'd have to do it manually. This entails taking an MP3 player and connecting it to a laptop or desktop via USB (to keep it powered). I then tape one earbud to the mic on a landline phone and the other earbud to the mic of the iPhone 3G. I call the landline from the iPhone 3G, pick up the receiver on the landline, and the test begins. Thanks to the call duration feature that every cell phone I've ever owned in the past has, it'll be extremely easy to determine the talk time. So I charge the phone, start the test, and head home to sleep off some pizza.

What I didn't realize until Saturday morning (other than the fact that unrefrigerated, leftover pizza keeps horribly) when I came in to recharge the phone after a night of draining the battery, was that the iPhone does not have a call duration feature. Nope, it does not natively record how long individual calls last.

At this point I'm desperately trying to figure out how I can access the duration of the last call, cause I mean, come on, there has to be a way, right? Also, it would suck if the last 12 hours had been a complete waste. Now, I could access the account for the phone at AT&T's Web site, but this phone was activated by Apple, and who knows if they have the login info for the phone. Also, it's Saturday and I'm sure our Apple contact has something better to do than to be checking her e-mail at 7 on a Saturday morning. So I call my girlfirend, who has an iPhone to ask her if I've missed anything. After a few minutes, she figures out that although there is no call duration feature, there is a Usage feature.

In General Settings/Usage you can see how long the phone was in use since its last full charge. Luckily I'd charged it to full the night before, so the usage duration is accurate. So, all I have to do is start charging the battery again, drive home, come back in 3 hours (about how long it takes to charge when plugged into the wall) start the talk time test, come back 5 or 10 hours later (depending on if I was testing with 3G on or off), check the usage duration, start charging the phone again. Wash, rinse, repeat...repeat...repeat. Yeah, this was pretty much my weekend. I ended up visiting CNET a total of six times over Saturday and Sunday. Once each day in the early morning, the afternoon and at night. Yeah, I pretty much became a creepy stalker for this particular iPhone 3G over the weekend.

The Usage feature saved me from at least one wasted night, but I'm still perplexed as to why there is no call duration feature. I'm hoping Apple will implement this soon, as I plan to eventually get an iPhone and I like to know how long my conversations last sometimes.

So, what did I learn during this ordeal?

1. Kent German is cold-blooded.

2. Apple needs to add a call duration feature into the phone if for no other reason than to make the lives of the people that have to test this thing a lot easier.

3. CNET owes me gas money.

4. It would be helpful to plan better for future testing of high-profile products.

5. Free parking in the CNET parking garage on the weekend is win.

Asus announced last week the release of two new monitors featuring DisplayLink technology. DisplayLink allows devices such as monitors and projectors to be connected to PC's solely through USB.

Asus VW223B

(Credit: Asus)

Asus is the latest manufacturer to take advantage of the technology with the announcement of these two new monitors, the VW223B and the VW202B. The VW223B is a 22-inch monitor available now with a native resolution of 1680x1050 and a contrast ratio of 3000:1 (it'll be interesting to see the methodology they used to get that number) and a 5ms response time.

The VW202B is a 20 inch LCD that will ship in July.

The DisplayLink technology also lets you daisy-chain up to seven monitors at once just by plugging them in. Once the monitors are plugged in, the DisplayLink DL-160 chip takes care of the rest the setup--in theory at least. In our experience, we've found that the technology does not always work as smoothly as it should. When we tested the LG Flatron L208 last year, we had a few problems. Check out the Design section of the review for details. Also, look for an upcoming post that goes into more detail on DisplayLink's usability.

OK, I admit it. I want options, even though, most of the time I don't have much use for them. Take pocket-size external hard drives, for example. I want them to be compact, light, pretty, bus-powered, and especially I want them to support USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800. (I would take eSATA, too, though, that wouldn't make sense until it's bus-powered capable). However, the truth is, I've used mostly just the USB 2.0 connection for personal purposes. So today, I decided to find out if FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 are worth it, as far as the throughput is concerned.

In CNET Labs, like most devices, hard drives are tested in the "real world" approach. This means the test might not show the best of what the device can do, but how well it does in a real world situation. This is the reason why, if you have read the recent reviews of pocket-size external hard drives, you will see the margin in throughput between different hard drives or different connections of one hard drive are relatively small. Our 10GB test data consists of hundreds of folders and small files (resembling the content of a typical "My Documents" folder) that create a lot of overhead for the copying process.

I tweaked this test a bit for this experiment by using single 10GB file. We have only two pocket-size drives in CNET Labs that have all three types of connections: the OWC Mercury and the G-Tech G-Drive. I put them through the test and here are the scores (in Mbps):

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

So from the charts, there are three interesting revelations:

First, it doesn't matter what connection you use, with the same amount of data, it's faster to transfer when the data is in the form of a (few) large single file(s) than of multiple small files. This is another reason why you should compress your data into one single file (in ZIP or RAR, or any other types of compression format) before copying it onto another storage device, besides the apparent fact that compressing shrinks the size of the data itself. Of course, this only makes sense if you don't factor in the time needed for the compressing process.

Second, USB 2.0 is much slower than Firewire 400. Judging by the score, FireFire 400 could be up to 40 percent faster than USB 2.0. This is very interesting because on the specs; USB 2.0 is slated to have the transfer rate of up to 480Mbps, while that of FireWire 400 is only 400Mbps.

And last but not least, FireWire 800 is faster than FireWire 400 but not by a big margin, just a few percentages points, in writing. In reading, however, it's actually slower by about the same margin. This is also very interesting as FireWire 800 is slated to potentially offer twice the speed of FireWire 400.

So the conclusion is: yes FireWire connections are definitely worth it when it comes to speed, however, there's not much difference between the two. This means if your computer has a FireWire port, by all means, go ahead and get a drive that can take advantage of that. However, it' s pretty easy to decide which one to pick between FireWire 400 and FireWire 800: either one is fine.

A little disclaimer: these findings are only applicable to external pocket-size bus-powered hard drives working with a Windows XP machine. Full-size external hard drives with separate power adapters might yield different performance patterns.

In the end, personally, I still want my drive to support all these three connections, though I might just continue to use just the USB 2.0. But that's just me.

When Jasmine and I evaluate MP3 players for CNET reviews, we always try to spend a few sentences describing any noticeable audio performance characteristics we detect during our subjective testing. We'll play around with all of the gadget's different EQ and sound enhancement options, listen back on our reference headphones, and run through a playlist of familiar music. We're only human, however, and hearing loss, ear wax, head congestion, and hangovers can skew our perceptions of audio quality from day to day. Thankfully, we have Eric Franklin.... Read more

The Kramer VM-2DVI

(Credit: Kramer Electronics)

A couple months back I attempted to test two 30-inch displays--the Samsung SyncMaster 305T and the Gateway XHD3000 Extreme HD-- at the same time using CNET Labs' current distribution amplifier (DA), the Extron Electronics D2 DA4 DVI D2 DA4 DVI. This device allows up to four displays to simultaneously view the same video signal from one system. For years we've used this device to not only speed up testing, but to do accurate direct comparisons as well. Unfortunately the native resolution for the aforementioned 30-inchers is 2,560x1,600, and the maximum resolution the Extron supports is only 1,920x1,200. So, without a means to test them simultaneously at their native resolutions I was stuck in a bind. I could have tested them one at a time, but since our testing--which includes DisplayMate--has a high level of subjectivity to it, it's always best to do direct simultaneous comparisons, instead of testing one display today and then waiting a couple days to test the next. Testing them simultaneously allows you to see the exact differences between the displays.

So I delayed the testing and the review for a few weeks. In the meantime I got in touch with a colleague at DisplayMate, Ray Soneira. He put me in contact with a company called Kramer. Kramer manufactures a number of distribution amplifiers including the Kramer VM-2DVI. This particular DA is Dual Link compatible and supports each 30-inch display's 2560x1600 resolution. So now I could test both 30-inch displays simultaneously at their native resolutions in DisplayMate and in our current games test, World of Warcraft. However whenever I attempted to run either our Kill Bill Vol. 1 DVD or our Swordfish BD on both displays at the same time, the DRM gods reared their ugly heads and denied me salvation. So when testing how each display handles disc-based movies, I was forced to evaluate each display one at a time. The Kramer VM-2DVI is not advanced enough to circumvent DRM tomfoolery, unfortunately. That said, we're still very pleased that the VM-2DVI allowed us to do the bulk of our testing as fairly and accurately as possible.

The issue of not being able to view certain disc-based movies simultaneously on two or more displays may not be an issue for long, as CNET Labs is considering moving away from using movies--and even games-- to evaluate the quality of a display. The reason being that video images generally move too quickly to do a picture quality comparison, whereas static images such as high-quality photos can be studied as long as necessary in order to examine their quality. No decision has been made as yet, though, but look for more on this in a future Inside CNET Labs post. ... Read more