Kroy's Blog on Video Production and Marketing » Hardware Reviews

New Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet has Cool Features

Kroy — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:17:46 +0000

Corey Barker and RC from Layers TV ( of Layers Magazine, which rocks by the way) are talking about the new Wacom Intuos 4 professional pen tablet.

Usually I don’t get too excited about tablets because I don’t use them a lot on a day to day basis. And when I do it’s not very fun for me as a lefty because all the pro tablets used to be made for right-handed folks – buttons and cables get in the way all the time. But Wacom created the new Intuos 4 with lefties in mind. Check out the video for the deets, including lots of other really cool stuff you can do with the Intuos 4.

After Corey’s feature demo of the tablet, RC follows with a short and sweet Photoshop layout tip. Both are worth your time. (If the video below doesn’t play, check it out here)

By the way, you’ll want to check out the Photoshop tutorials on Layers Magazine, especially Corey Barker’s amazing tricks.

Solid State Disks vs Hard Disk Drives

Kroy — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:09:52 +0000

Here’s a side by side comparison between solid state disks (SSDs) and conventional hard disk drives (HDDs, the mechanical stuff you probably have in your system).

The video came from Samsung, one of the tech companies who jumped on the SSD wagon early. Keep in mind this video is far from recent but it gives some great visuals as to why solid state disks are the future and our “trusty” hard disk drives are going the way of the Dodo very soon.

For us video and digital content creation (DCC) folks, upgrading to Flash SSDs is pretty much a must, at least as a boot drive. Note how Photoshop opens up nearly instantly compared to the hard disk drive. Now if we could only get SSD terabyte drives we could throw our content on these bad boys too.

Tests and Benchmarks for new Dell XPS 730x with Core i7

Kroy — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:42:31 +0000

The folks over at HotHardware.com did a thorough write-up on Dell’s new XPS 730 series with Core i7 equipped machines. Very thorough.

We don’t care about gaming at all but for digital content creation (DCC) the XPS 730 seems a great fit.

Personally I don’t like the chassis look of this thing at all, but we’ll need to look beyond the appearance part and see what this thing can do for us in terms of high definition video editing, large scale photo manipulation, and graphics/Flash creation.

Not surprisingly, the Core i7 chip makes all the difference in the world, even compared to any of the “newer” Core 2 Duo/ Core 2 Quad processors. Read more about the XPS 730