Our Picks

by Yuh Nagano

Pasocon Hihyo (Personal Computer Review) is one such on-the-shelf magazine -- the least conspicuous of all PC magazines, I might even say, given its small size and pages of recycled paper. At \880, Pasocon Hihyo is expensive for its size, but there is a reason behind it: The magazine does not take any ads, and thus can serve up a number of very honest and often biting opinions. The April issue of Pasocon Hihyo covers a number of topics, including why the PC market in Japan is stagnant. According to the writer's analysis, the number of users in Japan needing to communicate frequently with persons overseas remains relatively low, in part because of the language barrier. And for domestic communication, phone calls are preferred, and confidential documents are exchanged by fax and post, not e-mail.

Price is also a contributing factor. In the US, 40% of PCs are now purchased for less than $1,000, and are commonly used for personal applications such as completing income tax forms. The average PC price in Japan, however, remains around \200,000, with no compelling home-use purposes. The article concludes that Japanese PC vendors must provide better consumer guidance about how and why PCs are useful. It suggests that production of more purpose-oriented machines, rather than focusing on selling high-spec computers to everyone, might be the key to revitalizing Japan's personal PC market.

If you are looking to change your ISP (Internet service provider), the April issue of Internet ASCII 98 is a good buy. The best bit of this issue is the 82-page listing of 854 ISPs in Japan, with a comprehensive, easy-to-follow map of ISPs in each geographical area. The April issue comes with a free CD-ROM of Netscape Navigator 4.04, a detailed guide to its use, and an interview with Itsuro Sugiyama, president of Japan Netscape Communications. Sugiyama predicts that Communicator 5.0 will go on sale in Japan at the same time as in the US. He notes that the "cost" of free distribution of Communicator has fallen heavily, financially, on the Japanese branch of Netscape in the first quarter of this year; he expects the investment to show good return from the third to fourth quarters, however.

The April Internet ASCII 98 also features an interview with Hidemaru Sato, president of AOL Japan. AOL is the world's largest ISP, with more than 1,300 access points in 90 countries and some 10 million members. Sato forecasts that in Japan, contrary to the present situation in which more than 95% of home PCs belong to adult men, more and more women and children will be using PCs within the next five years. Asked whether the "closed contents" of AOL (content accessible only by AOL members) will eventually be dropped, Sato responds that user-friendly access to AOL content will help push up AOL's market share, and that its consumer-oriented approach will make AOL Japan's largest online service within three to five years.

The magazine also covers some useful Windows freeware/shareware products, such as sound tools, multimedia viewers, MIDI sequencer software, and animation GIF production tools, and sites from which they can be downloaded.

MdN (Macintosh Designers' Network) is a magazine for "digital creators." The April issue includes a listing of DTP/design schools in Tokyo and information about creating DTP manga (comics). One article shows, strip-by-strip, how manga artist Katsuya Terada's beautiful pencil drawings are scanned and modified into a gloriously colored, full-bodied mural.

Though it claims to be a Macintosh magazine, MdN cannot avoid talking about Windows entirely. The April issue has six pages of coverage about Windows DTP, and discusses the differences between Mac/Win Photoshop and how to successfully exchange data between the two.

An interesting article entitled "Computer Graphics of the Future" looks at Tour Into the Picture (TIP,) an image-based rendering technology developed by Kenichi Anjyo, technical director of visualware at Hitachi. Anjyo says that Jurassic Park in 1993 marked the perfection of photo-realistic computer graphics, and the next goal is to create a more human-oriented reality (rather than reality derived by mathematical formulas). Physical photo-realism differs from the realism perceived by the human eyes, which focus only on a part of the view.

With TIP, animation can be created from a scanned-in still image through a simple pseudo-3D structure. A Hokusai ukiyoe print of the ocean can be scanned in and transformed into an animation of moving waves, for example, or Degas' ballet dancers can begin to pirouette. Research on TIP focuses on how much 3D information can be extracted from a single 2D picture. TIP was presented at SIGGRAPH '97.

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