Product Reviews

The USB ports on the iMac and the new Power Mac G3 provide a reliable, versatile and easy-to-use alternative to the modem and printer ports on older Macs, and the number of USB peripherals on the market is growing daily. However, most users upgrading from older Macs are likely to already own a number of devices designed to plug into a serial port. With the Keyspan USB Serial Adaptor, your legacy serial hardware can be spared.

This small white box plugs into a spare USB port and provides two standard RS-422 mini-DIN8 serial ports. The device will not run off the spare USB port on the keyboard, and needs to be connected directly to the Mac or a powered USB hub. Driver software is provided on a CD-ROM, along with documentation in HTML format.

A control panel is installed for checking the status of the

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device, and this also allows you to patch various printer drivers to make sure they recognise the newly added serial ports. Devices whose drivers use the Comm Toolbox for communicating with serial ports simply list the adaptor's ports in their port selection menus.

USB and serial are quite different technologies, so the Keyspan device isn't compatible with all serial devices. It will work with most modems, PDAs (including Palm and Psion organisers), most digital cameras, Hewlett-Packard DeskWriter printers and selected Apple printers.

Devices which use the serial port's LocalTalk networking capabilities, such as Apple's LaserWriter series of printers, aren't supported, and neither are GeoPort and MIDI devices. A full list of what is and isn't compatible is available on Keyspan's Web site.

These compatibility issues are a limitation of the technology rather than a specific hardware problem, and alternative solutions do exist for connecting other legacy serial devices such as Farallon's iPrint adaptor and InfoWave's PowerPrint USB.

Many printers and digital cameras which run directly off the USB port are available now or will be available within the next few months. But for those who feared that buying a new Mac would make their existing serial peripherals instantly redundant, the Keyspan adaptor is the perfect solution - even if it is rather expensive for what it is.