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From: papa@uscacsc.UUCP (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: COMDEX report
Message-ID: <300@uscacsc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Nov-87 15:40:58 EST
Article-I.D.: uscacsc.300
Posted: Thu Nov  5 15:40:58 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Nov-87 10:51:27 EST
Reply-To: papa@pollux.UUCP (Marco Papa)
Organization: Felsina Software, Los Angeles
Lines: 70

This is a report after a frenzy 1-day at COMDEX, with lots of time spent
at the Commodore-Amiga booth.  Some of the things that were shown finally
cover the known current shortcomings of the Amiga. So here it goes.

The show is a PS/2/any-hard-disk-you-want/CD-ROM kind of show.  The most 
interesting things I found at the Commodore booth were the following ones:

* The A2024 Commodore monitor.  This is an yet unreleased monochrome
monitor, with 1000x800 resolution.  I talked a bit with Hedley Davis of
CBM West Chester (Hi, Hedley, don't kill me for this :-), and it turns
out that it runs with the NEXT release of Workbench, and off the A2000
(which was connected to it at the show) or the A500.  No word if it will
work with the A1000.  The display was great. It was running CityDesk and
it was connected to an HP Laser II.  It turns out that running programs
with this monitor showes who did things right and who didn't (the trick is
to set MaxWidth and MaxHeight to ~0 when you open your workbench windows,
Scibble for example fails).  The monitor does not require any extra hardware 
with the A500/A2000, it just takes the signal off the RGB connector.  The data
is 1000x800x1 bitplane, and the current blitter can do that no problem.
Price and availability were not announced, but if it is within the $500 range
it will allow to build the cheapest desktop publishing system around:

A500+A2024+CityDesk+Okidata Laserline 6, all for < $ 2500

(a good run for the money for Atari's new SLM804 Laser printer Mega ST system)

* FlickerFixer from MicroWay.  This is the first Amiga product from MicroWay,
a company known for building good hight-speed hardware for PCs.  This is the
much requested de-interlacer.  It takes both interlaced fields and builds 
a single one with twice the frequency (35 instead of the standard Amiga 17.5).
It will be available in January and will retail for $595.  It can be connected
to all the widely available multi-scanning monitors, such as NEC Multisync
and Sony Multiscan (which will lock at 35) and is also compatible with all
VGA monitors.  For further information call MicroWay at (617)746-7341.
If you need flicker-free interlace color, this solution will cost you about
$1000 (including the monitor).

* Thomson was showing an Amiga-compatible monitor, the 14" 4120. Dot pitch is
.51 mm, and Thomson has a special Amiga cable that is sold with it. List 
price is $429. Thomson can be reached at 1-800-325-0464 (1-800-237-9483 in
California).

* NewTek's Tim Jenison showed "Video Toaster", a "real-time, full color
digitizing, real-time digital-video effects and a broadcast quality
genlock in one systems", for $799.95.  At this price, it looks much better
that all other genlock-only systems that cost pretty much the same.  It 
will be upgradable with add ons that include:real time-processing support,
TMS 34010 video coprocessor, croma-key, programmable video switcher (??).

* NYIT "Live!" :-) digitizer was shown by a dealer in Seattle, Washington. 
It supports some preliminary image processing, but I have not much info since
no guy from NYIT was around.

* As of Wednesday, the 82086 board was still held up at customs (it came from
Germany), but there was talk that an 80386 board (also from Germany) will
be demonstrated at one of the Spring Shows.

I also went to the ATARI booth and spoke to Tim King (AmigaDOS) about the 
ABAQ workstation and the Helios operating system from Perihelion software. 
It did look just like a "prototype", and some of the Helios developer docs
will not be available until January 1988, so I sincerely doubt that we'll 
see any production machines in 1988.  As Chuck pointed out, this is no 
home-user machine. Pricewise it will go against Suns, Mac-IIs, and Microvaxes.
Also, all the monitors for high-res that were shown (NEC mostly) are fairly 
expensive units.

All in all, it was a very interesting COMDEX.

-- Marco Papa
   Felsina Software