Apple Reviews

I am a film student trying to get some work done and what do I discover? Those lovely, FREE updates to iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie (included in this software) make it so that if you want to export from iMovie to iDVD, you have to upgrade iDVD. Now guess what the only way you can accomplish that is! By buying this software package. So, you get to spend your fifty bucks on one piece of software and the upgrades for the other 3 that are available for FREE from Apple. So basically, they screw you into buying iLife to complete the upgrade. Seriously, Microsoft isn't so underhanded!!! Shame on you, Apple!!!

iLife '04 has replaced this product. Do not order iLife 1.1, order iLife '04.

Truly, what this makes easy is amazing. Photo albums and do-it-yourself coffee table books, movies, DVDs, music and more.

If you have any older i-___ apps, upgrade now to iLife. It fixes bugs and problems that formerly required work arounds...like now you can adjust the volume in movie tracks...it's elegant and so useful.

But the big advance in iLife is that it the formerly disparate media types now all work together. Laying music tracks into my home movies is a snap. The Ken Burns effect puts photos into movies with style and beauty. Then it all flows into iDVD.

We have friends who hire a computer maven to manage and edit their photos and camcorder video. I just gave them a photo book I made in iPhoto of the wife's 50th birthday party. It earned her thanks and praise. And her computer guru had never seen something so nice. It was easy and fun.

OK, it has some bugs and hangs occassionally...but crashes have never lost any of my data. Just force quit and restart the app and you're rolling again.

But it makes it easy and fun for us non-techies to make beautiful results.

This is a huge step back for Apple's iApps, particularly iPhoto, which is an absolute disaster in this release. We typically cannot launch iPhoto without crashing unless we trash three catalog files. Importing more than once a day is impossible - the app says it cannot access .../iPhoto Library/month/date the second time you try to import.

Add to that the continued game of keep-away with iDVD, which will not work with external DVD burners. If you bought anything less than the highest-end Macs, or models like the Cube or iBook that have never had built-in DVD burners as an option, well, too darn bad! Kind of obviates the coolness of FireWire when peripherals are deliberately not supported by Apple.

Crashing and losing user data is NEVER acceptable. Apple, more than anyone, is supposed to know this. The company should be absolutely ashamed of this pathetic product, and should not offer it for sale until they work out the bugs and stop being such jerks about DVD burning.

The the 10.3 Family Pack and the iLife Family Pack license have exactly the same language -

"as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy that same household".

For those who respect intellectual property and read their licenses carefully, this means that the 10.3 Family Pack cannot be installed on a Powerbook which then is taken outside the same household nor on another Mac located at another of your personal residences. Apple has confirmed that this is the correct interpretation of their license language.

All Apple had to do with both Family Pack licenses is change "located in the same household and used by" to"located in the same household OR used by".

Unfortunately the lawyers cannot seem to agree with that simple change so don't waste your money on the Family Pack unless you can comply with the license or choose to ignore it.

The iLife Family Pack license has exactly the same language as the Panther family pack -

"as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy that same household".

For those who respect intellectual property and read their licenses carefully, this means that the Family Pack iLife cannot be installed on a Powerbook which then is taken outside the same household nor on another Mac located at another of your personal residences. Apple has confirmed that this is the correct interpretation of their license language.

All Apple had to do with both Family Pack licenses is change
"located in the same household and used by" to
"located in the same household OR used by".

Unfortunately the lawyers cannot seem to agree with that simple change so don't waste your money on the Family Pack unless you can comply with the license or choose to ignore it.

This is a collection of iTunes 3, iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 3 that Apple offers on all their latest machines with Superdrive installed. All but iDVD 3 are available as downloads from the Apple website, but it is worth the $...or whatever to get them altogether and include the iDVD 3. The iDVD 3 is not available as a download because of its size (>1.3 gig) Each of the four programs is good, but the seamless combination of the four (five including iPod) makes this system an easy to learn combination. After looking for almost a year and a half at different software/hardware combinations for editing and converting (to digital for DVD), I decided on the Mac and the iLife package. There are certainly more powerful individual programs available on both the PC and Mac platforms, but this combination beats everything else that I looked at for ease of use and simplicity in learning. I am very pleased with my decision.

Where to start to talk about how amazing the latest offering is from Apple for the Macintosh? Let's take it one step at a time.

iMovie 3: Apple took their already great DV editing program and added so many new features it's almost mind boggling! Drag and drop from your iPhoto photo library. Drag and drop from your iTunes music library. Granted, you were able to do these things before in a somewhat clumsy way through the "import" command, but this makes it beyond easy. Chapter support (The ability to break up longer videos on DVD's to easily skip back and forth) for iDVD. Individual volume control for each audio track at any point in the track. One click access for all three of the other iApps. New titles, new transitions, the "Ken Burns" effect with stills. No other DV software available for ANY platform is as easy to use as this. Also if you download from Apple it's FREE!

iPhoto: Still mostly looks the same, but there is now support for the other digital lifestyle iApps built in. The "Retouch" editing feature works amazing well. Also if you download it from Apple it's FREE! If your into serious photo editing, you'll still want a companion program. Photoshop Elements is a good choice. 70% of Photoshop at 1/5 of the price.

iTunes: I honestly don't see much difference here. I'm sure changes were made to integrate it with the other iApps. Still a great program though. If you download it from Apple (deja vu) it's FREE!

iDVD: Some new themes, some new features make this a worthy addition to any SuperDrive equipped Mac. No other DVD authoring software I've seen is as easy to use and as intuitive as iDVD. AND if you download it from Apple it's....um....not available. iDVD can only be purchased as part of the iLife package AND then only installed if you have a Superdrive equipped (internal drive only and as far as I know ONLY if installed by Apple) G4 PowerMac.

Complaints: Yeah a few. iMovie crashed a few times while performing multiple operations (granted it was doing 4 "Ken Burns" and 5 transitions at the time) on my 933 SuperDrive G4 Quicksilver Tower. Also the Apple restricts iDVD to only those people who bought their SuperDrive equipped G4 computers. C'mon Apple! We bought the hardware. Let us configure it ourselves without penalties! Also, you must be running at least 10.1.5 or later (10.2 HIGHLY recommended). System 9 users are officially out in the cold for this product.

In conclusion: If you meet the hardware/software specs, this is a must buy! No SuperDrive? Find a fast online connection and download the other pieces.

If you're on a Mac, you've probably used at least one of these programs by now. If not, you're missing out on what Steve Jobs calls "The hub of your digital lifestyle."

iMovie - For the amatuer film maker, or somebody who just wants to edit their own home movies, this is a cakewalk. Once you connect your camera through a Firewire port, you import your video. Add titles. Add fades, transitions, etc... Add some background music. Then, download it back to your camera (or, with a bridge, to a VCR). Better yet, save it out and import the video to iDVD for burning.

iDVD - I can't begin to tell you how easy this is. Create a menu (or select one of the many theme menus). Import your video. Click burn to DVD. It is literally that easy. I made a DVD of our improv troupe for all the members' Christmas gifts.

iTunes - If it's a music file... mp3, aiff, wav... it can import to iTunes. Create a music CD. Burn it as a standard or mp3 CD with a single click.

iPhoto - You can set this up to open and import the images as soon as your camera mounts to the desktop. Organize the images. Edit them for color or size. Then, burn a CD, make a slideshow, or even order a personalized bound book with your images and text.

The one major flaw of these programs has been the lack of manuals (except through third parties). A small price to pay for this kind of quality. Also, if you have no need for iDVD, the other three are available for download from the Apple web site.

Very noisy & slow scanner.
ADF unit stopped working after 6 months.
Scans not the best, would not reccomend.

When using the automatic document feeder, it produces document scans that are skewed slightly. HP technical support says this is normal. I find this completely unsatisfactory. You will not be able to produce accurate document scans.

Do not purchase this scanner if you intend to scan photographs. The scan quality if very poor. Scans appear with no contrast and overly pixelated in dark areas of photo scans. The colors do not appear correct.

The performance is also unsatisfactory. It is very slow and extremely noisy.

I love this scanner! I got it over a year ago and it is still working strong. I got it for the ADF feature. I use the ADF with Acrobat Writer. Very rarely does the ADF jam and when it does its due mostly to user error. When it does jam it does not eat the paper and it's easy to correct. The software that comes with it is simple to use. Make sure your computer has loads of memory if you plan on scanning anything over 600dpi. I've also used this to archive photos taken on the job and it does a great job at that. I don't suggest buying this scanner if your main requirement is film or slides. For that you should get a dedicated machine. I've used with USB and SCSI. SCSI is faster but usually I don't notice the difference unless I'm scanning over 600 dpi. The only bad thing I can say about this machine is that it can be noise. Good luck.

I've owned, recommended and used HP products for many years and am a business systems consultant. I have written and designed systems software and application software as well as sold software. Most of my experience has been in technology and sales management.

Do not buy this scanner. The software is worse than bad. I too could not believe the other reviews and wanted the ADF so bought it anyway. Normally, HP does quality work, but not this time.

If HP had any decency, they would create a new version of the software and release it to the owners of this product along with an apology. In my many years of work in the information technology sector and considering the current state of technology, I cannot remember a product this poor from a major vendor.

I should say I didn't believe that this product is as crappy as other reviewers described. Because I really like some of HP products, especially HP has been in ADF scanner business for so many years.

So I went ahead and bought a HP 5550C with thoughts that I (as a computer professional with 12 experience and a former HP employee) can manage to make it work.

But clearly I'm wrong, and so wrong that the 5550C software is by far the worst software I have ever seen!!! I really do not understand that why HP even bothers to release this product to market, and HP should really "fire" the software team and the QA team for doing nothing but damaging its reputation.

I agree with other reviewers completely. The 5550C hardware looks well constructed and sturdy. The problem comes from the software piece.

Sigh ....

I use the scanner everyday for everything from documents to photographs. It is actually capable of scanning a stack of pages in the ADF very quickly into B&W PDF files. Unfortunately, as other reviewers point out, the HP software is mostly useless for this function. There is a trick that I will point out to everyone with this scanner or considering it if they can pick it up cheap from others who have given up: if you use Paperport or similar software and set the driver to windows WIA (rather than the HP driver), then set Page Size to "Quarto" when scanning from the ADF, then it works great. This is bizarre, and I have tried all the other page size settings and Letter will not work--you must use Quarto. Anyway, this proves that the machine is capable of good performance. It is alas software that limits the performance. Perhaps better WIA support will come in the future. In the meantime, despite the bad software, I found this machine to be the best value for a combo flatbed/ADF scanner that could take at least 35 pages. There are other choices like the Fuji if you want ADF without a flatbed, but it's still more expensive.

I've owned mine for a couple of years, and have gotten good results with it. The main reason I chose this printer was for its ability to print on 11 X 17 paper. I've made some very nice 2-page real estate fliers using this size paper. My only gripe is that it does not handle heavy card stock well at all, even carefully using the rear manual paper feeder that provides a straight path. Every time I try, I end up throwing away as much as I use. That was a big disappointment.

I'm an unabashedly big fan of HP inkjet printers. I have found their color management drivers, not to mention their ease of connectivity, to be completely conducive to excellent output. The quality is obviously superior to HP's chief injet rival, Epson.

This printer is no exception. Aside from the somewhat obscure color cartridges (my local suppliers don't stock a lot of them because they're only used in three other printers), I've found nothing to complain about in the two months I've been using it.

The printer is truly whisper silent, and it's massively faster than my old HP 890. I print on odd sizes of paper, so I love the fact that I can now do special jobs without having to go to a service bureau to make tabloid and larger sizes. The onboard memory is sufficiently large to allow me to dump really complicated graphical files without tying up my CPU. As an example, a full-color, legal-sized flyer with multiple graphical layers used to take something on the order of 12 minutes to send to the printer and print. Now it's a matter of 3-5 minutes. True, some the speed increase is that this printer connects through a USB port, but I suspect that even if I hooked it up with the parallel connection, there'd be a massive improvement in speed. At any rate, I used to sometimes crash my computer if I tried to do smething else while a complicated project was printing. Now, nothing I do outside of starting a 3-D game will shake my system.

I cannot recommend this machine enough. However, you should take a look at the 1220Cxi version, just in case you need the added PostScript flexibility.

I have used this printer for four years and it still works perfectly. I prints photos on photo paper beautifully. I love being able to print 11x17, and friends and family ask me to print for them. I use this printer heavily but have only bought new cartridges once in four years. I often print using the print quality of 'Fast'. The 'Fast' option looks like 'Normal' for most printing except photos. This printer was worth the expense. I also have an HP LaserJet 4L that is still working after more years than I can remember, and it's still fast compared to many newer printers on the market.