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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/49191
FEA TURE REVIEW InDesign, every instance of Italic gets changed to Palatino Regular. You are royally screwed. You have to go back by hand and pick out every place where italic is supposed to be, and put it in by hand. And believe me, you'll miss a few, no matter how good you are. The job takes several hours. This is so exactly an illustration of what computers are supposed to do! Of course InDesign has workarounds you can learn to make this easier. But they're still kludgy, time-consuming, nerve- racking. Gazillions of versions later, this is still the way InDesign works. But it's not the way any other program in the world works, so it's nearly impossible to work with InDesign and text generated from other applications. It's like InDesign is dragging us into the past, not the future. And that's just one reason why we're awarding QuarkXpress 9 this year rather than InDesign 5.5. There are a hundred other reasons and most of them are due to the same kind of thinking on Adobe's part, some of which are detailed in previous years' awards features. What it really comes down to is that Quark gets the job done in half the time. We all want to love Adobe, me included, but it's getting harder every year. Steve Jobs didn't love Adobe at all in his last couple of years. Celebrating the Laser Printer The workhorse monochrome laser printer gets no mindshare these days, but after 30 years, it is still incredibly useful. Why? The best monochrome laser printers: • print much faster than any inkjet (true 30 pages per minute is common) • have much higher, more precise text quality than any other printer type — only a laser can bring out the quality in good fonts • print text that is archival and smudge-proof • print more economically — costs are typically 1 to 3 cents per page — Inkjet is typically 10 times more expensive. If you need the highest text quality, or you need to print hundreds or thousands of pages affordably, then monochrome laser is your best bet. This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the IBM 3800, the world's first commercial laser printer. IBM's printer division has now become Lexmark, and Lexmark is still leading the industry on power, quality, and innovation, although Hewlett-Packard has the larger market share. What's the ideal laser printer for a Mac- equipped studio, home, or office? We think the outstanding choice is Lexmark's E260 series. It's a stunning combination of speed, quality, value and style. The first stylish laser printer didn't come from Steve Jobs. In fact, Apple never really came to grips with the problem, which is one of the most difficult in industrial design to solve. The solution came from a talented design team at Lexmark in the mid-1990s led by Pete Mendel and John Gassett, who won a design patent for their work. Lexmark has never looked back, and the E260 is the best-looking laser printer available today. In fact, it's the only one that looks at home in a Mac environment. With 2400 dpi (the highest resolution in the industry), speeds around 30 pages per minute, superb Postscript, great Apple support, broad media support — take it all together and it's an unmatchable combination. Best External Drive of 2011 We usually insist a hard drive must have RAID and a tri- or quad interface before we'll award it. We break with tradition this year to award Hitachi's Touro Desktop Pro. The Touro Desktop Pro is a 3TB, 7200 rpm drive with staggeringly fast speeds, a USB 2/3 interface, and the astonishing low price of $139 from Amazon and other discounters. That's especially low considering Hitachi's consistent reputation in the industry for making the most reliable hard drives. Now add power management and no noise in a stylish and fanless enclosure. You can't get this level of storage quality at such a low price from any other manufacturer. Connect to your Mac via USB 2 for fast performance, or to one of the new PCs via USB3 for blazing performance. We think Apple will offer USB 3 early in 2012 because Intel builds it into all the chipsets Apple will be using next year. 102 MacDirectory n o t