Pros: ===Overview=== This is the only affordable capture device that captures to lossless (no image degradation) as indicated by its *avi feature. There are a few issues with capturing directly to lossy formats (eg. mpeg2, wmv), namely editing in these formats causes alot of problems and the capture device will always produce very poor encoding quality as well as incorrect image sizes (eg. hi8 is 352x240, but capturing into mpeg2 will produce a 720x480 file which is a waste of space). And you will need to edit if you dont want a bunch of empty space before and after your videos. There are a few difficulties in the device itself and the way its lossless format is read, so here is a guide to getting whatever your transferring into a visually identical yet nicely compressed format. ===Requirements=== My system is a core i7 920, 12gb ram, geforce 9600GT, windows 7 Pro 64bit, and a 3x1TB raid0. You will need a large harddrive thats not your main harddrive, at least 700GB free per 24hrs of t

Cons: ===Before you begin===== Contrary to what another reviewer stated this does work on 64bit windows 7 however it seems to have some quirks. Firstly it seems to be very dependent on your system; i tried this on a few different computers (32 and 64 bit) and had problems ranging from no audio, to excessive framedropping due to a single slow harddrive, to it simply not working (this was on a buggy all-in-one computer i had). I got it to work on my main workstation only after plugging it into the computer itself (instead of a hub which gave me the no audio problem), and then i got an odd behavior where even with it plugged in it gave a black screen indicating no connection. The trick i found was to plug it back in after the computer loads, have a web browser open and selected, then open the program so that it steals focus, then it will show blue (for my hi8 at least) that means its reading the signal. You may have to try a combo of this a few times, it will catch eventually.

Overall Review: ====The process=== 1. Once the program loads successfully, click the gear icon, select avi, then set the destination to your spare drive (do not use a usb drive for this!), click the record button and press play on your camera. Click again when your done. 2. Download virtualdub, staxrip, and install the lagarith codec on your system. 3. Take your .avi into virtualdub, video->framerate. If it says 59.94 as the framerate then select "process every other frame". 4. Video->compression, select lagarith, select configure, select YUY2. OK, OK. 5. Select the range you want using the black arrows on the bottom. Select a small range first to test the video. 6. File->"save as avi", save to spare drive. If the video stutters then go back to step 3 and select "process all frames". 7. Open staxrip, import your edited avi, select the 2-pass x264 film medium profile. Deselect all but the source filter. Test various video bitrates, 1500 is good for most stuff. 8. Select next,

Pros: It looks cool and works.

Cons: Received it with a broken bay, called startech to see if could just replace the bay and not the entire thing and they gave me the runaround, even though another review on here said they would do this (prob a startech employee). Also found that the fans had alot of emi, which was causing my drives to lose 10-20MB/s. But not a big deal, they're easy to remove.

Overall Review: Companies should wise up before being jerks to their customers, it just costs them more in the end.

Pros: Works great, i get alot more range this way.

Cons: none

Pros: Fast for a while.

Cons: They die within a year or two, and theres absolutely no way to recover your data short of spending $800 per drive to send them off. Fortunately OCZ's warranty covers "repairs and replacements" of a failed drive, however when i requested they recover my data, they told me the warranty doesn't cover that and that i had to send it off. I call the repair place they recommended and the tech informs me a data recovery procedure is essentially a drive repair. After bringing this to OCZ's attention they used the "at our discretion" loophole they placed in the warranty to get out of honoring it. Yet another shameless abusive company pushing hyped overpriced junk. Read around on how they treat their customers, i am not the exception.

Pros: Fast for a while.

Cons: They die within a year or two, and theres absolutely no way to recover your data short of spending $800 per drive to send them off. Fortunately OCZ's warranty covers "repairs and replacements" of a failed drive, however when i requested they recover my data, they told me the warranty doesn't cover that and that i had to send it off. I call the repair place they recommended and the tech informs me a data recovery procedure is essentially a drive repair. After bringing this to OCZ's attention they used the "at our discretion" loophole they placed in the warranty to get out of honoring it. Yet another shameless abusive company pushing hyped overpriced junk. Read around on how they treat their customers, i am not the exception.

Pros: - Wont get ripped off by ink scams propagated by all other printing technologies. - Probably alot more reliable than modern printers

Cons: - Loud - Normal paper has to be hand fed one at a time - Its grabs the paper sitting in the tray, but doesnt always do so correctly so everything can get skewed or sometimes crumpled. - Slow - Deforms the paper - Print quality seems pretty low by todays standards, i wouldnt print anything serious with it. - Leaves smudges while printing. - Tries to provide a non-dotmatrix look closer to modern printers, but fails at it and doesnt provide a way to print in the dotmatrix look despite there being font settings on the printer itself which do accomplish this. - Parallel to USB connection works, but is a pain to setup and will break if you change usb ports.

Overall Review: Really i wanted it to look dotmatrixey, but it couldnt do that, but instead tried to be something its not. It really was a pain to setup, as i eventually found you have to go into "devices and printers" then "add printer" then "local printer" then you have to update the list which takes a while then select it, then "replace driver" (this is key), then it will finally work, on that particular port. If you try to change ports its not as easy as just deleting the printer and re-doing the process. Alot of my gripes are just dot-matrix tech in general, but the fact that panasonic couldnt write decent drivers so as to not make this so difficult, or to make it work with more than one paper in the tray, is really just bad engineering. Overall it looks neat and i like the fact im actually able to use the ink i paid for, but its just too much labor involved and the end product just isnt worth it.