Product Reviews

CorelDRAW! has long led the PC graphics market, due as much as anything to its amazingly comprehensive bundle. The current version 7 is bigger and badder than ever, and users who want to get serious in every possible way will probably look no further. However, they'll have to shell out a couple of hundred quid, and they'll probably never use half the facilities on offer, while at the same time they'll risk outgrowing some of the others.

Buyers with slightly lower ambitions and smaller pockets may well get a better deal from DRAW! 6.0, which Corel has substantially discounted. (You can still go back as far as DRAW! 4, if you shop around, at ever-decreasing prices.) Available for around £89 (£105), CorelDRAW! 6.0 includes DRAW! itself, Corel PHOTO-PAINT 6, CorelDREAM 3D, and CorelPRESENTS 6, a business presentation

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tool. In the Corel tradition, the volume of clip art and fonts included goes beyond the merely extensive and into the territory of Monty Pythonesque excess (just one more wafer-thin video clip, monsieur?)

Without even attempting to do justice to DRAW!'s feature set, suffice it to say that just about everything offered by the other packages is here too, with several dozen more buttons and sliders. Whatever you're wondering you can do - yes, you can, or if you can't you can't do it in any other package either, so there's no point fretting about it.

Not so PHOTO-PAINT, however. Its colour-correction facilities are outdone by Micrografx PhotoMagic, for example, while Paint Shop Pro is catching up with its painting tools. Then again, it does offer frame-by-frame editing of AVI and MPEG video files and supports full OLE automation plus scripting, which makes Paint Shop Pro's batch processing look a little sheepish. CorelDREAM 3D isn't very much of a modelling/rendering package, and certainly won't take you into Toy Story territory, but it's still much more powerful than, say, Windows Draw's Instant 3D. And we still haven't covered Corel MULTIMEDIA MANAGER, Corel CAPTURE, Corel OCR-TRACE, CorelDEPTH, or the aforementioned CorelPRESENTS.

You can't beat Corel in terms of bang per buck. However, its massive feature set and NASA mission control-style user interface are not for the faint-hearted.