And the Winners Are

1998 Products of the Year

Nokia 445XiPlus 21"

This 21" monitor from Nokia (Sausalito, CA 415-331-4244) stood out from the pack in tests last year. The 445XiPlus had the least moirư, the sharpest contrast, the crispest text and the most accurate color display. The on-screen controls are navigated with one menu dial and separate brightness and contrast controls. It supports resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200 at a refresh rate of 88 Hz. It's street priced at $1,340, a competitive price for a top-quality display.

Equilibrium Debabelizer 4.5

Are you befuddled by foreign file formats? DeBabelizer Pro 4.5 by Equilibrium (Sausalito, CA 415-332-4343) lets you view those images and change them into a format your system supports. It is a customizable, automated graphics processing program ($399) that supports 250 formats and lets you batch process images quickly. It can convert images from CMYK to RGB and vice versa. A neat feature is HTML parsing, which lets you extract graphics from HTML files and place them in batches for easy processing. URL referencing creates graphics links to the Web. There is also version 3 for Mac.

Sony GDM-500PS

Sony (San Jose, CA 408-432-1600) continues to be the master of the aperture grille domain with their Trinitron line of monitors. The GDM-500PS 21"monitor supports resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200 at 85 HZ refresh rate. Controls are navigated with four direction keys and a menu button. This $1,500 monitor would suit intensive graphics applications with its sharp display, great contrast and saturated color.

Yamaha 4x CD-RW Drive

Yamaha (Buena Park, CA 714-522-9011) set the pace for CD Rewritable late in '98 with their CRW4416S series recorders ($499 to $599). Yamaha's 4x writing speed for CD-RW and CD-R cut the time it takes to record 650 MB in half. The drive has a maximum rewrite speed of 4X and a read speed of 16x. The substantial 2 MB buffer safeguards against data under runs. The tray loading drive supports disc-at-once, session-at-once, track-at-once, packet writing (variable and fixed) and multisession writing methods.

MTI OCR for Forms

We found that this $15,000 mid-range forms product from Microsystems Technology (Tampa, FL 813-222-0414) excelled in four key areas: form creation, image enhancement, form ID and administrative statistics. OCR for Forms is the leader in the ability to simply and quickly modify a form definition. It can accept EDI input and combine it with a data stream from paper forms.

Plasmon NetReady

This device lets you cache up to 18 CDs worth of data for fast hard-drive access times. The 9 GB unit can be used with server software for any platform, storage management software and/or any D-Series CD jukebox from Plasmon (Eden Prairie, MN 612-946-4100). It saves wear and tear on jukebox robotics. The NetReady Server uses a standard network jack for Ethernet or Fast Ethernet connections and comes in three configurations priced at $4,600 to $8,160.

OTG Disk Xtender 4.0

OTG (Bethesda, MD 301-897-1400) completely revised the architecture of its Disk Xtender storage management software ($600 to $27,000) to rely on Windows NT's built-in NTFS filing system. The storage management software now supports NTFS as well as OTG's own proprietary disk format. NTFS support liberates the user from having to use the jukebox management system just to read a couple of files on a standalone MO drive. It also offers an extra level of flexibility if your storage management system goes down.

Smart Storage SmartCD 2.6

Smart Storage (Andover, MA 978-623-3300) likes to talk up in-jukebox recording, but what we like most about SmartCD jukebox management software is the Express Cache feature. Express Cache lets you cache entire CDs on fast hard drives. The combination of a CD jukebox, SmartCD ($1,600 to $9,000) and inexpensive, high-capacity hard drives has made the CD-ROM tower obsolete. It saves those who need to keep multiple CDs online thousands of dollars in hardware savings and lost time.

Sony 5 1/4" Magneto-optical drive

Sony (San Jose, CA 408-432-1600) took the lead in bringing 8X (5.2GB) drives to the venerable 5 1/4" magneto optical format. This potentially doubles the storage capacity of MO jukeboxes in the field and, for little or no extra cost, doubles the capacity of new units being sold today. Fast access to data, super reliability and a painless upgrade. End users couldn't ask for more.

Panasonic DVD-RAM

For too long the world of DVD recordables was talk, talk, talk. But Panasonic (Milpitas, CA 408-945-5600) made it real and affordable ($800) in 1998 by being the first to market a DVD-RAM drive. Single-sided DVD-RAM disks have four times the capacity of CDs and they're within striking distance of MO at less than half the cost. It's even possible that DVD-RAM can replace CDs, floppies and nearly all other removable storage media, including low-end backup media like tape.

Metrowerks Codewarrior 4

By offering a single, integrated development environment, Metrowerks (Austin, TX 512-873-4700) has smoothed over the differences between CPUs and operating systems. By removing the barriers between different operating systems, Codewarrior Release 4 ($450) for Windows NT, 9x, Solaris, Pilot, Windows CE, etc., gives developers greater flexibility in serving their customers in a fast-changing industry.

Captiva's FormWare

FormWare from Captiva (San Diego, CA 619-586-7885) boasts strengths including a solid key-from-image function, the ability to feed forms processing results into a mainframe and the ability to send information to multiple databases at once. It's a standout high-end forms processing product offering customizability and robust performance in high-volume, high-demand applications. Formware 2.0 released in December added ODBC compliance, support for multiple OCR and ICR engines and expanded test modes.

Snowbound Rastermaster Java Toolkit

Java's maturation process continued this year with the introduction of the first Java imaging toolkits. Introduced in February 1998 and already on version 2.0, Snowbound's (Newton, MA 617-630-9495) Rastermaster Java ($1,350) was one of the first Java toolkits available. It is also one of the most powerful and complete Java toolkits. It supports more image file formats than other Java toolkits on the market and Snowbound has a Java annotation extension as well.

Cardiff's Teleform Elite

The price-conscious should find happiness with Teleform Standard and Elite from Cardiff (San Marcos, CA 760-752-5200 www.cardiffsw.com). These are low-to-mid-range forms processing solutions priced at $1,495 and $5,995, respectively. Teleform Standard handles an impressive roster of forms tasks including form creation, image enhancement and key from image, while Elite adds image enhancement and electronic forms support. A late-year upgrade to Elite added administrative reporting, a move aimed at bringing Cardiff beyond the midrange.

Kodak 3500 scanner

A fast and reliable transport, robustness and first-rate optics make the Kodak 3500 midrange scanner ($16,990) an easy choice for production scanning. Kodak (Rochester, NY 716-724-4000) designed the 3500 to handle mixed batches of paper of varying sizes and thicknesses without jamming. It scans 75 pages per minute (landscape) with no problem. An 8,800 element CCD captures 600 dpi and reduces it to 200 or 300 dpi, resulting in better quality in a modest file size.

Wicks & Wilson 4001, 4002

The 4001 and 4002 microfilm 16mm and 35mm roll-film scanning workstations provide an affordable ($40,000) way to convert microfilm into digital images. The 4001 delivers up to 400 dpi while the 4002 goes up to 600 dpi, the highest-resolution roll film scanner on the market. Wicks & Wilson (Basingstoke, UK 44-1256-842211) includes SmartScan software that handles dynamic adaptive thresholding, despeckling and other types of image enhancement.

Xerox Document Centre 230 st

Xerox (Rochester, NY 716-423-5090) is the first company to bring an easy-to-use, copier-like solution to work group scanning. The Document Centre 230 ST copier/printer/scanner ($9,000) scans 30 pages per minute. The scanning component comes with Textbridge Pro for OCR and 25 seats of Visioneer's PaperPort for simple manipulation, storage, emailing and faxing of images. The unit provides 600 dpi resolution and 256-level grayscale.

Insci Coinserve NT COLD

"Enterprise Report Management" is the new lingo for COLD, but one of last year's best products came from and old, familiar name: Insci (Westborough, MA 508-870-4000). The company's Coinserve NT 1.5 offers multi-platform client support, an open integration architecture and intuitive administration interfaces. Functions include search and retrieve, report distribution and online data mining in Windows NT or Web environments. Computer output pages, intelligent data streams (supporting mixed native formats) and scanned images are written to magnetic or optical storage, or you can add hierarchical storage management to migrate data automatically. Pricing starts at $19,500 for 10 concurrent users.

Mosaix ViewStar 5.0 Workflow

Mosaix (Redmond, WA 425-885-7678) kept a clear view on customer relationship management when it upgraded ViewStar 5.0 for high-volume production workflow. ViewStar captures and unifies incoming requests of any type: phone, fax, email, the Web, you name it. You configure your workflow to automate and prioritize the customer contact stream. File services can be located at a single server or distributed throughout a workflow system. Applications can utilize multiple database engines simultaneously, regardless of platform or location. ViewStar starts at $125,000 for a 25-user system.

Tower Technology's Knowledge Management System

Imaging & Document Solutions believes in color imaging and Tower does more than babble about it. The Tower Knowledge Management System combines imaging, document management, COLD and text retrieval, and it's designed to integrate with Staffware production workflow. Tower (Boston, MA 617-236-5500) supports full-color processing to simplify form identification and improve data removal. The document manager integrates into Microsoft environments, including Exchange, BackOffice, SQL Server and NT. Exchange can be used as a staging area or for permanent storage. It's a scalable solution that can be deployed across geographically dispersed organizations. Costs average $1,500 per concurrent user.

Caere Developer's Kit 2000

Completeness and value mark Developer's Kit 2000 from Caere (Los Gatos, CA 408-395-5148). You get OCR, ICR, barcode, OCR-A, OCR-B, MICR and OMR in one toolkit priced at $5,495. It's a single source for nine different recognition engines in all. You can perform OCR in more than 110 languages. You can output in Unicode, ANSI, popular word processing formats, RTF or even HTML. An open API architecture lets you integrate other engines and capture technologies with the help of Active X or C interfaces.

Ceresoft Freestyle ICR

Ceresoft (Silver Spring, MD 301-445-8413) broke new ground in 1998 with its Freestyle intelligent character recognition engine. In our very first tests, Freestyle did it all: slanted, overlapping, touching and even cursive--all without the constraints of boxes or combs. The engine is strong on its own, but it's made even more accurate with the help of dictionaries, lexical and geometric context and word-element analysis. Freestyle was launched in the FormAgent Suite document processing system ($12,000), but Ceresoft has added a toolkit version ($8,750) aimed at developers.

IBM EDMSuite

IBM (Somers, NY 914-766-1330) polished its best-of-breed imaging, COLD/ ERM, Web-enabled document management and workflow solutions and knit them together with a middleware layer called ContentConnect. ContentConnect integrates multiple repositories with access via Web browsers, Lotus Notes clients or the ContentConnect client. OnDemand COLD/ERM was advanced with improved storage management and database maintenance. MQSeries Workflow replaced IBM's old FlowMark product, with better integration and messaging between applications. Domino.Doc 2.0, which layers document management on top of Lotus Notes, added review, approval, publishing and archival. IBM's VisualInfo imaging system for AS/400 was upgraded and broadened to other OSs. All of the pieces can be integrated with other applications.

KeyFile Keyflow 3.0

Microsoft Exchange users delight in Keyflow 3.0 ($195 per seat) from Keyfile. Tight integration makes Keyflow work beautifully with Exchange. Users don't have to learn a new program to work with Keyflow, and users at any remote location on the Web can participate in a workflow. Keyflow is a value leader offering advanced resource scheduling and time and event automation. Keyfile (Nashua, NH 603-883-3800) has designed a scalable product that can span multiple Exchange servers in a single Exchange site.

OpenText Livelink 8.0 IDM

Many products became "Web enabled" in 1998, but Livelink 8.0 from Open Text (Waterloo, Ontario, 519-888-7111) was designed for the Web from the start. It brings document management, workflow, search, project management and collaboration (a very real knowledge-sharing technology) to corporate intranets. The system is easy to use and it's cross-platform on the client side. With no software to install, it quickly scales up at even the largest organizations. Pricing starts at $895 per user, but wide-scale deployment can bring costs down to $100 per user.

Silicon Graphics Flat Panel

Silicon Graphics (MountainView, CA 650-960-1980) was one of the first companies to introduce a high-resolution digital flat panel display. The 1600SW FPM has a resolution of 1,600 x 1,024 and it supports true 24-bit color (16.7 million colors). The 17.3" monitor has an equivalent viewable area of most 19" CRT monitors. The solution comes with the Revolution IV-FP 32-MB, 128-bit graphics card from Number Nine. The package is street priced at $2,795.