Apple iBook Key Lime Special Edition 12.1 in. (M8245LL/A) Mac Notebook

I have owned a Blueberry iBook for seven months and have tried to put it through it's paces. Each time it has performed wonderfully...even better then the Compac laptops on my fellow employees have, that is until now.

One of the weak areas is the lack of a video out port. Various companies have tried to bridge this gap by making devices for the USB port to do video out. I have tried several of them and spoke with the technical support departments of the ones I have not tried. The results were very disappointing.

I used the USB Presenter with the iBook and did not achieve the results I wanted. The biggest problem is the frame rate. They advertise that you can do video displays with them but they don't tell you that the best frame rate they deliver is about 12 frames per second. This presents major problems when using Microsoft's PowerPoint. The frame rate will not allow you to use any slide transitions or and video or animations to the slide. No matter which model you use, the best output you can expect is a basic slide show. The USB Presenter also did not give a sharp clear output. At the maximum iBook screen resolution of 800x600 the colors from the screen are difficult to duplicate on the mirroring screen because of the limitations of NTSC (the North American TV video format). At the lower screen resolution it is even worse. Usually the colors are either muddy or too bright (hot). The slow frame rate also makes it very challenging to try to adjust them.

The iBook does have more than enough horsepower to produce presentations and edit pictures. The problem comes when you try to mirror it to another TV or video projector. If your bread and butter is delivering good video presentations you should probably invest in a G3 Powerbook. While they don't have the attitude of the iBook, they can at least get it up on the screen. If you don't need the iBook to interface with the TV or projector they it would still work for you. Using a CD-R or Zip like disk you can transfer your work to another computer and deliver the presentation that way. Don't expect the iBook to function as well as the Powerbook.

I purchased the iBook for this very reason and was very disappointed. My iBook is still an excellent tool, one I find hard to live without, but as Dirty Harry would say, "Every good man must know his limitations." Direct video mirroring is on of the limits of the iBook.