(FORTUNE Magazine) – printers

Remember the paperless office? Ha! We're printing more than ever. Today's inexpensive inkjet printers can jazz up boring business correspondence with color and graphics, while also producing high-quality glossy photos that rival commercial prints.

Lexmark's new Z65 ($200) is definitely not the quietest or sleekest inkjet around, but it blasts out up to 21 pages a minute in black and white, 15 pages a minute with color. It's also the first printer to offer 4,800 x 600 print resolution on plain paper, which is unmatched in its price class.

A strong-and-silent rival is the C80 from Epson ($179; top), a smooth operator that reduces printing costs by using separate ink cartridges for yellow, magenta, and cyan, the three colors that, with black, allow the C80 to produce durable, high-quality photo prints. (Most other color printers combine all the colors into one expensive color cartridge, so if you've been printing a lot of red ink on those balance sheets lately, it'll cost you a lot of green.) The C80 is fast and rugged.

Copying, scanning, faxing, and printing--the flatbed Hewlett-Packard PSC 950 ($400; middle) does it all. It even includes built-in card readers to allow photo printing directly from a digital camera memory card, bypassing the computer.

tech toys

We asked five self-professed gadget fanatics about their favorite new gizmos....

Steve Kirsch CEO, Propel Software

I built a new house and wanted to get the latest and greatest home control system, so I used the same guy Vinod Khosla did for his home control. Then I went to Kevin Fong's house and saw the advanced version of what I had, and clearly I had to have it to out-do Kevin. So I hired the same firm. They came in and upgraded my old push-button system to an Escient Convergence system with full touch-screen panels. The latest models have live video fed to them, so it's really very cool. You use the touch screens to control the audio--to select which songs to hear--and you can jump to a song or album by touch. They show the album covers on the touch panels. I also have the touch panels integrated with video--I've got nine or so satellite receivers, one for each room, and ReplayTV. And DVD players and VCRs. You can patch in any source to any room, and view the TV on the touch panels, and the security cameras, and the ReplayTV.... Does it ever crash? Well, it's a lot better than it used to be. They still haven't wired in the temperature controls. I used to have control over the lights and don't anymore. We've been working on it for three years, and the damn thing is still not done. Here's my advice: This is for professionals only. Don't try this at home.

laptops

--Toshiba Portege 2000: At just 2.6 pounds and less than three-quarters of an inch thick, the $2,199 Portege (por-tuh-zhay) 2000 is the supermodel of the ultraportable jet set. It will be coveted by frequent travelers who hate to carry a single unnecessary ounce. The Portege 2000 has a 12.1-inch XGA display, a nearly full-size keyboard, and a 20GB hard drive. The 750MHz Intel Pentium III Mobile processor, backed by 256MB of memory, is sufficient for standard office applications. Battery life is a disappointing 90 minutes, so you'll want to carry the second, more robust battery that Toshiba includes with the machine. Along with the AC adapter, that adds about 1.2 pounds to the travel weight.

--Apple iBook 14-inch: Compared with the Sony and Dell machines, Apple's snow-white beauty is a dwarf, with just a 14-inch screen. But 14 inches is significantly bigger than Apple's original, still-popular 12-inch iBook display. Besides the larger display, the new $1,799 iBook has phenomenal battery life, up to six hours. Along with the six-pound weight and the rugged polycarbonate cover and magnesium frame design, the battery life makes it great for education and traveling. The processor is a 600MHz G3 PowerPC chip. The unit we used has a combination CD-RW and DVD-ROM drive. The base model's 256MB of memory is barely adequate, as is the 20GB hard drive. I'd pay $175 more for 384MB memory and a 30GB hard drive. Other than that, it has nearly everything I want, including a built-in Airport wireless networking antenna and ports galore.

--Sony VAIO GRX590: With its 16.1-inch UXGA display screen--the biggest and sharpest display available on any portable computer, and the equivalent of a 17-inch desktop monitor--the Sony VAIO PCG-GRX590 ($2,999) is all show with some go. This is the kind of portable that will spend most of its life tethered to the wall by the AC adapter, but even so the battery life is unspectacular unless you swap the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive for a second battery. The Sony uses a 1.7-GHz Pentium 4 Mobile processor, backed by 512MB of DDR SDRAM and a 40GB hard drive, plus a DVD/CD-RW combo drive. But you'll forget all that when you get lost in the giant screen.

--Dell Inspiron 2650: You can spend a fortune on a full-featured laptop, but then you can't afford to go anywhere with it. A better idea: With prices starting at $1,199, Dell's Inspiron 2650 offers a lot of technology for the money: a Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor (1.4 GHz in the base model), a 14- or 15-inch display, hard drives from 20 gigs on up, built-in Ethernet, Windows XP Home, and Nvidia GeForce 2Go graphics for killer gaming. It's a smart choice for college, with excellent battery life and an optional DVD-CDRW combo drive to fill tedious hours of study with DVD movies and homemade music CDs. It weighs 7.2 pounds and fits nicely in a backpack.

pdas

Sony Clie T615C: When it comes to PDAs, beauty is in the hand of the beholder. The slim, industrial aluminum design of the Clie (klee-ay) PEG-T615C, along with its bright 320-by-320-pixel color display, makes it the best looking of the Palm OS-based organizers. But it's also just plain the best, as long as you don't depend on it for wireless e-mail or Web browsing. The T615C ($400) comes with 16MB memory and a Memory Stick expansion slot. (Sony offers a Memory Stick-based digital camera as an option.) It even doubles as a remote control. Bummer: It doesn't work with Macs.

Palm m130: It took a while, but Palm finally has a decent color display. The m130's color screen is bright and crisp, and Palm has even added some blue-steel color to the oddly shaped case. Like the more expensive Palm models, the m130 ($279) has an expansion slot (SecureDigital or MultiMediaCard) for adding more memory or special applications, like a guidebook for European cities. One gripe: The m130 and its docking cradle don't fit together very smoothly.

HP Jornada 565: If the HP-Compaq deal goes through, the new company could dominate the market for Pocket PC-based handheld organizers. HP's new Jornada 565 ($500) is a worthy challenger to Compaq's flagship iPaq, currently the most popular Windows-based PDA. As one can guess from the price, the sturdy construction, and the Pocket PC-based applications, it's geared more toward business users than consumers. Even so, it has multimedia features for playing music and making voice recordings. The 565 has 32 megs of RAM, a fast StrongARM processor, and a single Type 1 expansion slot for adding optional wireless data connectivity. The color screen isn't the world's best, but it does the job without sacrificing battery life. And here's a back-handed compliment: The 565 is almost handsome compared with earlier, dorkier Jornada PDAs.

tech toys

Avram Miller CEO, Avram Miller Co.

I got into using computers in 1966 because I wanted to combine biofeedback, computers, and musicians to create music. I never got it to work, but it did change my life. I use a product called Logic from a company called Emagic (www.emagic.de) to compose. Logic is to music what Photoshop is to photography. It's amazing but a bit difficult to learn (like Photoshop). The program that I use to jam--I play jazz piano--is called Band-in-a-Box from PG Music (www.pgmusic.com). It's an inexpensive, easy-to-use program that lets you enter styles (like jazz waltz) and chord changes like those found in a fake book (Cm7, Fm9). It will also create a score and complement it with a number of instruments. For instance, it will create a jazz quartet. I use it mostly to play bass and drums while I play piano.

monitors

If you've been thinking about buying a flat-panel liquid-crystal display, now is the time to act. Prices won't be this good again until 2004. "This is the best time for the next two years to buy a flat-panel monitor," said Barry Young, vice president of DisplaySearch, a consultancy that tracks trends in the LCD industry. "Performance is up and costs are down. The viewing-angle technology has improved, the brightness is getting better, and the contrast ratio is higher than it's ever been."

The best deals, however, are rarely found among the very cheapest flat-panel displays. Here's the skinny: Those no-name companies often use panels that are rejected by top-tier manufacturers. Watch out for bad pixels and substandard brightness.

The Samsung SyncMaster 171P (about $900), a 17-inch beauty designed with the help of the F.A. Porsche design team, is our pick for the desktop. It boasts both VGA (analog) and DVI (digital) connections--digital is best, if your computer's video card supports it. Although it has an exceptionally wide, 170-degree, viewing angle, it also swivels easily to allow someone on the other side of the desk to see the screen. And it pivots, too, between horizontal (landscape) and vertical (portrait). The brightness is superb, and the contrast ratio is somewhere north of 400:1, which is very good.

The NEC MultiSync LCD1830 (about $850) offers a bigger 18.1-inch screen that is the equivalent of a 19-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) desktop display. Inch for inch, it's a bargain. The LCD1830 lacks a digital connection, but with a native resolution of 1280 by 1024, you may find that you don't care. The viewing angle is wide, and the contrast ratio a respectable 300:1. If you're so inclined, you can remove the base and mount the 1830 on the wall. Best of all, the monitor automatically adjusts itself to yield the best picture.

Cathode-ray tube displays are almost always cheaper, brighter, and more responsive than the LCDs. The disadvantage is bulk; the bigger the screen, the bigger and heavier the monitor. That's why the ViewSonic GS790 ($295) is a favorite. It offers a 19-inch screen (18-inch viewable area) in a short-neck case that takes up as much desk space as a 15-inch display. The 0.22mm dot pitch yields sharp and vivid graphics. It's ideal for digital photography.

Okay, so the NEC FE700+, a 17-inch CRT monitor with a flat-faced aperture grill, isn't totally flat. But it won't leave your budget flattened either. Its $210 price tag makes it attractive. Or wait for June when a next-generation "SuperBright" model, the FE771SB, hits the stores at the same price.

tech toys

Gary Hoover Author, Hoover's Vision: Original Thinking for Business Success

All of the old classic pinball machines are great, but my favorite one is called Space Mission, from the Williams Pinball Machine Co., which is now called WMS Industries. I think it's a '79. It was made in the era when they were moving away from electromechanical, with old-fashioned bells and scoring systems that were reels instead of LED readouts, so it has a heavier feel and better sounds than more recent machines. I've got some others from the same era, a Bally game called Eight Ball and another called the Harlem Globetrotters, which is the most fun to play. But my Space Mission was one of the last made in that era, so it was the best. With this one, the ball flies around, and it requires a lot of skill. To me, there's nothing like the silver ball and the way it rolls around the table. You're fighting gravity.

desktops

Dell Dimension 8200: For those who want the ultimate PC and for whom money is no object, consider the Dimension 8200 with Intel's fastest 2.4GHz Pentium 4, topped by an absolutely gorgeous 19-inch LCD flat-panel display. Add a DVD+RW/CD-RW drive, surround-sound speakers, top audio and video subsystems, an 80GB hard drive, and other options, and before you know it, dude, you've spent your kids' college fund. Control yourself, and the price can be as low as $1,800.

Apple iMac 800MHz: Even though Apple recently raised the price of the new iMac by $100, to $1,899, it's still a great bargain. Much has been made of the iMac's radical design--an icy white hemispherical base and a stainless-steel arm that supports a floating 15-inch color flat-panel display--but design aside, it's a remarkable multimedia and computing machine. The Pioneer-made Superdrive reads and writes both DVD and CD disks, and the 800MHz PowerPC G4 processor is robust enough to handle the most demanding audio, graphics, and video applications. The 60GB hard drive is generous, but I'd pop an extra $150 to double the machine's standard 256MB memory. For work or play, it's a delight to use.

tech toys

Barry James Folsom CEO, PlaceWare Inc.

My favorite gadget these days? The Palm i705. I primarily take notes during meetings with the Palm. Because folks think I am doing that, they don't know I occasionally receive and respond to a few e-mails during the meeting. With a BlackBerry, it's obvious that all you are doing is e-mails and not paying attention. This way I get much more done. Also with push wireless, the Palm has replaced my PC as my primary device--I'm definitely now a big believer in the post-PC world! Another favorite is the Panasonic DVD Recorder. I also have a computer DVD recorder, but it takes hours to do. With the Panasonic I get it all done in minutes! Why spend hours "editing" while the few folks who will actually watch your home videos can fast-forward through what they don't want to sit through? They get content quicker, and I don't waste hours preparing the DVDs.

Gateway 700XL: While I was reviewing this multimedia monster, Gateway had a sale going. For $2,999, it offered a full gigabyte (1,024MB) of expensive, high-performance RDRAM, on top of a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 chip with 512K L2 cache, a 120GB hard disk, a DVD-RAM/R plus CD-RW drive, an 18-inch flat-panel LCD display, Nvidia GeForce 4 Titanium 4600G graphics card with TV Out, a SoundBlaster Audigy audio card with FireWire, five decent Boston Acoustics surround speakers, and Microsoft Office XP. And some other stuff as well. Cowabunga! It's actually reasonable moolah for such a prime system.

HP Pavilion 780n: It won't win any beauty contests, but HP's $1,599 Pavilion 780n is a finalist for the congeniality award when it comes to price and performance for machines that can read and write DVD discs. It sports a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 chip and 512MB DDR SDRAM, along with a generous 120 gigs of hard-disk storage; but the DVD+RW drive is what sets this model apart from others on the shelf. (If bought separately, the drive alone would cost $499.) The system we tested was paired with a $599 Pavilion f50 15-inch LCD.

tech toys

Sheldon Laube Chairman and CEO, CenterBeam Inc.

Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I had to buy a new minivan a few weeks ago. The good part was that I got a new Chrysler Town and Country, and it came with an extra two sets of wireless radio headphones. That means that if there are children in the back seat, they can listen to completely separate audio from what you're listening to over the same radio--it's literally like two different radios. Or someone can listen to radio while someone else listens to a CD. For anyone who takes long car trips, it's one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century! My father-in-law is visiting, and he likes to listen to Rush Limbaugh. So he can listen to Rush, and we can listen to heavy metal at the same time!

Feedback? technology@fortune.com