Mesh Photo Pro 200 review

If industry pundits are to be believed, 1998 will be the year digital cameras become mass-market products. At the moment, digital photography is a valuable resource for illustrating databases, training apps, electronic publications, multimedia presentations and Web pages. However, the potential market for digital cameras in the PC arena is only just starting to be realised.

The problem is that digital photography as a consumer technology requires compact, inexpensive and high-quality colour printing. If you can add that to the sort of graphics handling capability now commonplace on the PC and throw in a straightforward photo-editing package, you have a digital home photographic studio.

This heady goal is what Mesh is attempting to achieve with the Photo Pro. The setup consists of a 200MHz AMD

K6-based desktop PC, complete with an internal Aztech photo developer in one of its drive bays, and a Fuji DS-7 digital camera.

The PC itself is a decidedly overfed-looking desktop beast with a clearly audible fan. It doesn't make an unpleasant noise, but it still makes a noise. There's a master power switch at the back and a sleep/wake switch at the front, but this didn't make a reliable contact so I had to fumble around at the back to turn the PC on and off.

The keyboard supplied is unremarkable, characterised only by a slightly gritty-feeling action and a generally low-cost air. A standard Microsoft mouse is also included. A 15in ADI FST monitor sits on top of the case, with digital controls for pincushion, trapezoid and rotation corrections, but oddly not parallelogram. The image diagonal measured 13.7in, with the picture itself reasonably sharp at 800 « 600 and free of any noticeable distortion or moirÚ. Unfortunately, the graphics subsystem imposed a top vertical refresh rate of 75Hz in SVGA mode, although the tube itself can handle anything up to 100Hz vertical refresh.

Apart from the camera itself, and a headset for use with the bundled copy of IBM's Simply Talking dictation software, the other major peripheral to consider is the set of Yamaha YST-M20 speakers. These deliver a punchy 10W per channel of decent audio quality, with enough bass, clarity and crispness to handle music playback, as well as multimedia apps and games.

Inside the case on our review system, we found a small Chaintech motherboard based on an SiS chipset. This proved very unstable in early testing, and Mesh has stated it will be using an Asustek board in production models. An Asustek board was onboard when we benchmarked the machine, which supports both SDRAM main memory and an UltraDMA-2 hard disk interface.

The three available ISA slots were filled by the Creative Labs AWE 64 Value wavetable sound card, the 33.6K modem and an interface board for the Aztech photo developer. One of the three PCI slots has lost its backplate cut-out to a serial port, leaving one unobstructed and one shortened to half length by the processor cooling fan. This means upgrade space is, to say the least, rather limited.

Drive expansion is also limited, with a single front-opening 3.5in bay providing the only free space. Hopefully the 3.2Gb Quantum Fireball hard disk will see to your data storage needs.

This is one of those machines designed with an integrated graphics controller - in this case an SiS 5598 - which appropriates a share of main system memory for its own requirements. This leaves the system with just 28Mb of the original 32Mb, which undoubtedly contributed to the below-average benchmark scores. The remaining 4Mb graphics subsystem is capable of delivering