By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, December 19, 2007 - 1:45:01

In 2007, we were once again treated to a large number of new applications and hardware that allows us to perform our creative tasks with more pleasure, and above all: easier and faster. We composed the list of Award-winning products based on our reviews and how the market reacted to them. Sit back, and enjoy IT Enquirer Awards 2007.

Spotlights on, please! And don’t forget to chill the champagne. This year, we are awarding products in over a dozen categories.

Hardware

Apple Mac Pro Quad Core 3GHz with the ATI video card or the nVidia stereo card earns a Golden Cube for its speed and quality of build. Impressive processing results paired to an incredibly easy design with regards to the internals of the machine is what earns it a Golden Cube.

Apple’s iMac 24 inch earns a Silver Cube, for its good looks, its pricing and its capabilities.

Printers and Printing

For the second year in a row, the HP Photosmart Pro b9180 earns a Golden Cube for best photo printer. Compared to Epson’s offerings in this market space, the Photosmart stands out both for print quality and quality of build.

The HP DesignJet Z3100 earns a Silver Cube for its quality, but it does not earn a Golden Cube as many photographers still see a touch of bronzing in the prints they make.

PerfectProof ProofMaster 3 earns a Golden Cube for Raster Image Processing. Both in terms of workflow and depth of printer control, ProofMaster has no equal.

Photo Cameras

The Sony Alpha 700 was the big revelation in 2007. This is a very inexpensive semi-professional dSLR camera --you may call it cheap, given its stunning quality of output. The Sony Alpha 700 earns a Golden Cube in the semi-pro market niche, because it is part of a well-balanced photo equipment system that also appeals to professionals (the Zeiss lenses come to mind), and because of its excellent results. Sony’s new lens for the A700, the 16-105 mm kit lens is almost as good as the Zeiss zoom lens currently available.

In the professional photography market the Golden Cube goes to Hasselblad for their H3D and H3DII cameras. The H3D and H3DII are true Hasselblads in every sense of the word: quality is near-perfect, and the cameras, although large and heavy looking, are still manageable so that spontaneous photographing remains possible.

Colour Management

The big surprise in 2007 was the Polish LMC03 monitor calibration instrument. This grey brick earns a Golden Cube for both quality of build and accuracy of results. Another Golden Cube goes to basICColor for their excellent display 4.x monitor calibration software. There’s little competition in the market for display 4.x in terms of accuracy and ease-of-use.

A third Golden Cube in this category goes to the complete product range of ExpoImaging, but especially to the ExpoDisc white balance tools for digital cameras. ExpoDisc is by far the easiest way to rapidly create a custom white balance with a digital camera, effectively contributing to correct colours in the resulting images.

A fourth Golden Cube goes to X-Rite GretagMacbeth’s iO robot with the Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer, combined with ProfileMaker 5.0.8 Packaging.

ColorEyes Display earns a Silver Cube for monitor calibration. It’s on par with display 4.x, but technical support is worse and the licensing is not as easy as it should be.

Video and Audio

Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 earns a Golden Cube across the applications in the box. Motion, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Color, Cinema, Compressor, and SoundTrack Pro, are all highest level professional products but they have an ease of use that befits an amateur program. The result of this approach is that video creatives can do their job faster, and have more pleasure in their work. That in turn leads to more creative results.

Apple’s Logic Studio follows the same recipe and now has a familiar, gorgeous, unified interface. Mainstage is an incredibly powerful and pleasing stage performance tool. Logic Studio earns another Golden Cube, both for its power and its interface design. It’s simply incredible what Apple has done to this originally so complicated software, and it’s hard to come up with reasons why a musician or a video sound score artist should not use this pearl of a software.

Graphic Design and Layout

Adobe released its Creative Suite 3 and earns a Golden Cube for Illustrator and InDesign CS3. These two applications alone make up for the price of any Creative Suite bundle that comes with them in the box. After Effects CS3 earns another Golden Cube, as do Adobe Bridge and Lightroom.

Another Golden Cube goes to Quark Interactive Designer, which lets layout designers construct Flash sites with a minimum of effort and Flash-coding skill. Quark earns a Silver Cube for its Quark Job Jackets technology that is part of QuarkXPress 7. Job Jackets enable JDF workflow, and consistency and automation of design, but at the expense of a steep learning curve --hence the Silver Cube and not the Golden one.

Web Design

Panic Software’s Coda and CSSEdit both earn a Golden Cube for the way they innovate the coding of web sites and pages. While Coda pulls off this trick for every type of code, including PHP and even XML, CSSEdit does it to Cascading Stylesheets.

A Silver Cube goes to Xylescope that gives web designers a structural view of a web page and its design elements, translated into the HTML and CSS elements.

Business Applications

A Golden Cube goes to Marketcircle’s Billings 2.5, which is now probably the best and most integrated invoicing application for Mac OS X. Merlin 2.5 (beta) project management application gets a Golden Cube for its feature-richness, power, integration with Leopard and a whole slew of other applications, and its ease-of-use.