CANON
PIXMA iP5000: $199
consumer.usa.canon.com

Several of us here at RAM have spent some time debating the merits of photo-quality printers in the workplace. I've since been forced to concede the importance of accurate image reproduction in a real-estate office or anywhere else that places a value on professional looking prints. Running to Kinko's every time there's an emergency is both expensive and aggravating, I hear.

Investing in an inkjet photo printer won't solve all of your customers' printing needs. It's a light-duty device, after all, and ink can get expensive quickly. But in a realtor's office, the prints are generally smaller anyway. Outfitted to accept many types of paper (letter, legal, credit card, 4"x 6", 5"x 7", and #10 envelopes), Canon's PIXMA iP5000 is well-suited as a complement to an existing monochrome laser or business-class inkjet.

With print resolutions up to 600x600 in black and 9600x2400 dpi in color, the PIXMA generates some great looking images. A quick side-by-side comparison reveals very few differences between the Canon print and developed film. At least, nobody in my family could tell. There are five ink tanks to maintain, and Canon's software monitors the status of each.

As is the case with most printers, Canon overestimates the iP5000's performance in a typical usage environment. It still prints quickly, though, and it is quieter than the HP DeskJet I used previously. PictBridge support makes it ridiculously easy to connect a digital camera via USB and print images directly, too.

CI DESIGN
SR 208: $645
www.cidesign.com

Most small business servers tend to be of the pedestal variety—freestanding towers with a single system chugging along on its own. But when operations expand and it becomes necessary to buy separate file servers, Web servers, and application servers, a rack-mounted design is much more space efficient. Ci Design specializes in the rack-mount enclosures that you'd use in such a case.

The latest SR 208 is a 2U chassis with enough space to accommodate eight hot-swappable SCSI or ATA hard drives. There's enough room to install an AMD Opteron- or Intel Xeon-based motherboard along with full-height or half-height expansion cards.

Naturally, thermal constraints are particularly tight in a dense rack. Ci claims that the SR 208 accepts dual-processor setups and redundant power supplies without any sort of heat problem. Four 80 mm system fans keep air circulating inside the box, while a pair of 40 mm fans exhaust dirty air out the back.

Ci Design warrantees the chassis for up to three years. And if your customer has specific server needs, Ci will alter the SR 208 as needed. Especially as you move from selling individual towers to outfitting more powerful racks, it's good to have a partner with the capacity to make changes as you audition different internal components.

Buffalo
Terabyte Network Attached Storage: $999
www.buffalotech.com

Nobody can afford to lose business information nowadays, be it simple accounting files or a massive LOB database. Tape is the traditional solution for archival due primarily to its low cost and the simplicity of buying more capacity. But tape archiving performance is absolutely unacceptable when it comes to digging up individual files. That's why I've been promoting the heck out of external hard drives in the SMB space.

Buffalo Technology's Terabyte Network Attached Storage series is actually a jack of many trades consisting of several hard drives. Use it as a media server to distribute high-def content across a home or as a file server at work. Given the available space, I'd start by pitching it as a replacement for aging tape technologies, too.

Of course, it's first important to understand the advantages of network-attached storage versus direct-attached solutions. Just as sharing a network printer makes that resource widely available, so too does adding network storage improve the flexibility of your backup investment. The most popular small business backup applications allow automated saves from each client machine to an external device. Adding Buffalo's NAS system makes it easier to protect servers and clients alike.

Mechanical redundancy is one of the array's critical selling points. The 1TB model actually hosts four 250GB drives, which can be configured in a variety of ways. Least likely is RAID 0, where all of the drives are striped together in a high-performance 1TB cluster. Should one of the drives fail, though, all data is lost. RAID 5, on the other hand, uses three drives for storage and the fourth for redundancy. That's the preferred setup.

Hooking it all up is a piece of cake through an RJ-45 connection (at Gigabit speeds). Buffalo even includes a built-in server for sharing an office printer.

ATI
Radeon X850 XT
Platinum Edition: $549
www.ati.com

I'll break the bad news first Rabid multimedia enthusiasts who've waited more than six months for ATI's All-in-Wonder X800 XT will be disappointed to learn that it's only being offered in AGP trim. Yes, despite Intel's frenzied push toward PCI Express, early adopters have to keep waiting.

Now, the good news. If you're still running a motherboard with AGP graphics, ATI's All-in-Wonder X800 XT is an incredible video card. It packs power, it packs features, and it showcases the very best of 3D and multimedia. Gamers will be the first in line to audition ATI's X800 XT processor running at 500 MHz with 256MB of GDDR-3 memory. When they're done plowing through Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, the video editors and home theater enthusiasts will come out to play.

This card represents the first time ATI has ever incorporated a DVI- and VGA-output on an All-in-Wonder card, giving it some legs in the multi-display desktop market. A proprietary dongle also enables myriad more outputs, such as component video (for HDTV), S-Video, and composite video. RCA audio outputs come standard, too.

Then there's the TV tuner. Although it's an analog design, incapable of over-the-air HD reception, ATI offers some of the best picture quality. Unfortunately, you don't get official Microsoft Windows Media Center support, either. But ATI's own Multimedia Center suite stands well on its own. You even get the Remote Wonder II IR controller and an IR blaster for changing channels on a cable box.

Expensive as it may seem, the All in Wonder X800 XT is a tremendous buy. Comparable 3D performance sells for $450 and the Remote Wonder II is $50. Add up the accessories and you're easily over $650. If you can utilize its power, this All in Wonder just rocks.