WebTV review

[Andrew Wohrley, Science & Technology Referen]

I saw WebTV last night in a store and here is my review.

WebTV comes with a box and a remote.  The keyboard is extra, but 
essential.  What makes WebTV unacceptable right now is how badly the 
screen flickers.  It's a nasty lasing effect around the edges of 
graphics and the flicker does not seem controllable.  The salesman 
handed me a handout which declares that WebTV uses patent pending 
technology to eliminate flicker.  That wasn't the case from what I 
saw.  The 'Lectric Law Library was particularly bad because of the 
designer's choice of Gothic script for some titles, but HotBot had 
some bad flicker on it's page too.

Aside from the fact that you will go blind looking at a WebTV page, 
the rest of the system wasn't bad.  The keyboard was basic, but I 
could understand what the keys did.  When I went to the Space 
Telescope Science Institute, (http://www.stsci.edu) I could click
the JPEG images without trouble so long as I only browsed the 
smallest images.  I expected that, so I didn't mind.

If it wasn't for the awful image quality, I would say that for what 
they charge for WebTV, the consumer is getting a good deal.  When I 
thought about it, I concluded that what I saw was the equivalent to a 
beta hardware release.

Andrew Wohrley
Andrew Wohrley
Science & Technology Department
Auburn University Libraries
http://www.auburn.edu/~wohrlaj
wohrlaj at lib.auburn.edu