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Acrobat 5 / Epson 890 Reviews

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for June 14, 2001

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2001 All rights reserved. 

This week, we have something for both software and hardware fans: reviews of Adobe's Acrobat 5 and of Epson's latest colour inkjet printer, the Color Stylus Photo 890.

Without a Net... 

Adobe's Acrobat and its portable document format (PDF) have become commonplace, both on the Internet and as an alternative way to send virus-free, formatted documents via e-mail. 

Although the full Acrobat program costs hundreds of dollars to purchase, the Acrobat Viewer is freely distributed through Adobe's Web site ( www.adobe.com ), with links to it appearing darned near everywhere. Each time you upgrade Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it comes as part of the deal for example. 

It also works as a plug-in to Netscape Navigator 4.xx, but so far Adobe hasn't been able to make it work with Netscape 6. Version 5 of Acrobat hasn't corrected the problem, either; it carries a warning in its readme file noting that to view a PDF document in Netscape 6, you'll have to download it and view it separately. 

There are a number of new features in Acrobat 5. One that will come in handiest is the ability to "repurpose" a PDF file. That's Adobe-speak for being able to save the file into other formats. Full documents can be saved as rich text format (RTF) files, as PostScript or Encapsulated PostScript, or as images in a variety of graphics formats. 

Also new is the ability to strip graphics out of a PDF file through the file/export function. You can't select individual graphics; the application processes all of them or none; but the quality of the images is as good as the original in the document. 

Security enhancements include 128-bit encryption and support for digital signatures. For professional users who need to collaborate on documents or seek levels of review approval from managers or clients, Adobe has added a means to embed and share comments. 

Accessibility settings have been added for disabled users, including high-contrast settings, keyboard shortcuts, and specific support for text-to-speech readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes. 

There has also been some minor fiddling with the interface, an improved Web capture submodule, support for embedded Javascript, and a few more odds and sods. 

Unfortunately, all of this comes at a price. I thought it was just me, but several comments in the user forum at Adobe's Web site confirm what I found. Acrobat 5 is significantly slower than earlier renditions. I tried it on three different documents, two generated from Corel's Ventura and one from Microsoft Word 2000. The most complex, a six-page newsletter with one spot color, a couple of digital greyscale photos, and a similar number of JPEG bitmaps created from scanned line art and greyscale images, brought it to its knees. And that's using a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 with 256 MB of Direct Rambus DRAM. 

In general, I found that photos and text rendered quickly, no matter which application produced the original document. However the JPEG line art and one TIFF picture of my signature threw Acrobat into loops. 

Conclusion: if you already have version 4.05 of the full Acrobat package, particularly if you're on a slightly underpowered system, stay there. 

Acrobat 5 is available for both Mac and PC platforms. The list price at Adobe's Canadian Web site is US$249, with US$99 for an upgrade. I found it at a couple of Canadian online sources ranging from $349 to $399 for the full version or $149 for the upgrade. As noted earlier, the Acrobat viewer is free. 

You may also want to upgrade your viewer if you haven't lately, otherwise recently posted PDF documents in Acrobat 5's slightly altered format may not render all elements, such as transparency, correctly. You may also get funny results from sites that use PDF-based forms.

I'll have that in colour... 

While Hewlett Packard continues to dominate the ink-jet printer market with Canon not far behind, Epson (www.epson.com) continues to produce quality products. 

Epson has two innovations going for it. Instead of heating ink and blowing it onto the paper (the standard ink-jet methodology), Epson uses a piezoelectric crystal to vibrate the print head, almost literally shaking the ink out. According to the company, this gives it better control over dot-sizes (down to four picolitres) and, because there's no heating and cooling of the ink, makes its printheads last longer. Whatever. Regardless of the technology, the company's printers produce quality I've never had any reason to complain about. Their second innovation is the development of special inks for their photo printers that, the company claims, will last as long as a silver-halide process photograph – about 20 years or so. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait another 18 years to find out if that's the case. 

The Stylus Color Photo 890 replaces an earlier model, the 870. It's billed as a photo printer because the colour cartridge contains five colours, cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, and yellow (the black cartridge is separate). 

New features include higher resolution – 2800 by 720 dots per inch at the highest setting – and "borderless" printing for photographs on 4 by 6, 5 by 7, or 8 by 10-inch stock. It will also print banners up to 44 inches long. 

It does these tricks through an attachable roller with a continuous strip of paper. The unit ships with a 4-inch roller and a roll of paper, but according to the company's spec. sheet, there are six more roller (and paper) sizes available as options. 

In my tests, there was nothing to complain about. Both the quality and speed – one of the fastest units I've tested this year at 4.3 minutes for an 8 by 10 colour photo on glossy stock at the highest quality setting – were well within my expectations. There was no distortion of colour values or in darker areas and fine detail came through without a hitch. 

The Stylus Colour 890 has, according to Epson Canada, an "estimated street price" of CDN$449 but searching online found it for $499 and $532, so shopping around may be a good idea. It's one of three new models including a slightly less expensive ($299 estimated after a $50 mail-in rebate) model, the 780, without a paper-roll option, and a bigger unit with a 13-inch wide paper carriage, the 1280, priced (again, estimated street price) at $749. 

More info at 1-800-GO-EPSON (1-800-463-7766) or www.epson.com, where the prices you see will be in US funds.