Customer Reviews

Complete National Geographic- Every Issue Since 1888 (OLD VERSION)

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This is a beloved treasure of 120 years of knowledge and history, and a very valuable reference resource. There are a few points that ought to be noted:

>>The CNG has poor quality control and customer support over this product. It relies heavily on customer feedbacks to become aware of missing pages and issues, and took very long time (18 months) to address a few of the reported bugs. The Complete National Geographic will be incomplete with missing items such as:
- Jul 1942 and Feb 1992: Pages missing, causing pagination problems in the issues with double page spreads not appearing on facing pages.
- Mar 1996: Page 35 is missing.
- From 1991 to 2008, at least 30 maps are reported missing. Examples: The World War II double map supplement is missing from Dec 1991. The Sep 2000 map is missing. The "100 Years of Flight" supplement in Dec 2003 is missing. The Jerusalem's Holy Ground map is missing in Dec 2008.

>>The Complete National Geographic contains National Geographic Magazine published through Dec 2008. National Geographic announced "The Complete National Geographic" users will be able to add to their collection after purchasing the product by downloading annual updates on a subscription basis from the internet. Content updates for CNG will be available after the print editions of the previous year have been published. CNG released an updated edition of this DVD set and a 2009 annual update DVD ($14.95) in Sep 2010. The feature to purchase annual updates online wasn't ready until CNG patch 1.65 (requires Adobe Air 2.6) released in Apr 2011. Content update purchases have to be made through the CNG software interface. Stand alone archive files for the purchased content updates may not exist for archive and repeat/multicomputer installation.

>>Updates need to be installed to add missing or fix corrupted pages such as in Apr 1913, Dec 1930, Mar 1950, Apr 1953 (entirely missing), Sep 1960, Aug 1970, Jan 1977, Jul 1979, Feb 1992, Feb 1993, and Dec 2003 issues. However, updates have to be downloaded and installed through the software interface; there isn't an independent update installer for archive and repeat installation.

>>Either the digital magnifier that comes with the software or the maximum zoom needs to be used to clearly read the texts on your monitor. An ASCII text PDF resolution of the scanned pages shouldn't be expected.

>>The patch (revision 1.26) to copy DVD content to local drive was released for Windows in Jan 2010. It takes many hours to copy all 6 DVDs to the hard drive.

I loaded mine to my hard drive and love not having to take the DVDs in and out. It took over two hours per DVD to load, but was worth it. You just have to copy them from the DVD to a very specific folder on your hard drive. The directions are in the last of these FAQs in this link to the CNG FAQ page:

[...]

(If Amazon doesn't allow this link here, check one of my responses below this review -- I'll include it there too and maybe it can stay there.)

One of the biggest negatives with this set is that the sideways pictures can't rotate, making them hard to read and enjoy. And there are many such pictures. Hopefully they will come up with an upgrade soon to fix this, as they have received many queries about this.

Although there are some negatives, overall, I am very happy with this set.

The huge plus is you get every issue of National Geographic in a relatively easily readable format when you use the easy-to-use magnifying and dragging features. If you have a 24" monitor, it's pretty readable as is. With magnified reading, when you go to the next page, it resets back to zero magnification, and you have to re-magnify it. But it's fairly easy -- all you have to do is double click on the page, and it magnifies, and you can drag the text and pictures around as needed.


They even include all of the advertisements, which they could have easily decided to omit. (It's fun to look at the ads from long ago. For example, in the April 1916 issue, focusing on the national parks, there's an ad for newly established Cascade National Park, placed by Great Northern Railroad, reminiscent of the days when railroads affiliated themselves with different parks, to boost travel.)

It prints out beautifully, and there is no readability problem with printouts.

There is a handy readlist feature, where you can create your own readlists (very easily done) or look at readlists that the editors have prepared. There are approximately 33 of these already created readlists, covering such things as various editors' favorites, National Parks, The Universe, The Untamed, etc. Just scanning through these articles, it looks like these lists are pretty good and I see a lot of things I want to read.

One problem with these readlists is that they don't give the date of the article. You see something focusing on, say India, and you have no idea if it is from 1915 or 2005. That makes a big difference to me insofar as my interest. They should include the date of the issue in these readlists. When I create my own lists I plan on always including the date.

All in all, I am happy with this set, and would buy again, since it seems to be the best way to get all of national Geographic, short of buying all of the actual magazines for thousands of dollars.

I've been playing around with this latest version of the "Complete National Geographic" and have a few thoughts to share.

I own one of the previous sets on CD-ROM. That set had a couple significant problems: You couldn't read the text of the articles, and all the magazines were scanned badly.

This set has solved the readability and resolution problems, but has introduced a few of its own.

The earlier issues of the magazine have their photographs printed vertically so that the whole height of the page was used to display landscape photographs. With the magazine, and the earlier set on CD-ROM, you could rotate the pictures on their side and enjoy the whole photo blown up to full, (although limited), resolution. This set has no such feature, so you have to tip your head to view the photo and read the caption, and worse still, the photo can be displayed no wider than your monitor is tall. You can zoom in on the picture for a better look, but it would have been nice to be able to rotate the pages so you could get a full screen view.

Also, the search function is a sorry joke on this set. It uses these funky dials to select your date range, (what is wrong with pull downs I ask?), so it is more difficult to select an exact date range. Also, when you get your results they are displayed in this "carousel" format with the newest results first and the oldest rotating off into the distance. What is wrong with a simple list view and a scroll bar???

As was mentioned in an earlier review, these search results are truncated, so you know nothing about the date, or the key words, or anything about the details of the results. A good search function is kinda important for a collection spanning 120 years, and this one is close to worthless.

Ah, just remembered something else about the search function. When you search for a particular brand name in the advertisements, clicking on the result takes you to the cover of the issue the ad is in rather than the exact page. Very annoying!

So, all in all, better than the old set in one very important way, the scans seem much improved, but the interface needs some serious work.

I did notice that when I checked for updates it had already gone from version 1.12 to 1.15 in the short time since release. Maybe they will see the light and invest some effort into improving the interface. They have already got my money though, so I won't be holding my breath.

Overall, I am very impressed and pleased with this set. There are a few minor things that bother me, however, things that are not explained and given workarounds for due to there only being a 1-sheet program installation page.

1. There is no instuctions booklet provided in the box. There is an onscreen FAQ of sorts, but it doesn't begin to cover everything you need to know, making a booklet a must-have.

2. Many pages have their photographs oriented and displayed vertically onscreen. If a function exists on the installation disc to make them appear horizontally side-by-side I can't find it. Having to turn my head sideways to view these vertical pictures/read the text every so often is sure hard on my neck! LOL

2. No explanation (that I can find) is available on how to access/display the maps.

3. As was mentioned previously in this thread, each magazine page must be zoomed manually since there's no option to lock the screen at a given magnification for as long as it's needed. This is a programming oversight that should have been addressed, prior to this shipping out to retail.

All in all, owning this Nat-Geo set is proving to be a fascinating and worthwhile trip down memory lane. It's a lot of fun, revisiting all of the old Nat-Geo issues I remember reading (and used to collect) as a kid back there in the 1950s-60s.

Of all the ways to package an archive of printed material, this is one of the worst. It is either a completely amateur job or a serious attempt at the copyright holders to make it as painful as possible for anyone to access the material. The user interface is absolutely abysmal. No browser-like interface that you find on quality products like Encarta here; you can only move forward. And even on a high-end system (mine is an i7 3.6ghz with 8gb memory), the interface runs like a slug. They apparently tried to make the thumbnails work like Apple OSX's dock but with horrible results. The theme, which you can't change, is everything's black. If your eyes aren't very good then this is going to be a beast to deal with because the black buttons (on black background) are so small and the text on them not even white that they can barely be read, even with my good eyes. The buttons don't depress either, and the disabled buttons look almost identical to enabled buttons. Combined with the sluggish interface, you can't really tell if clicking is doing anything. Worse still is the search. The designers apparently felt that having a stack of magazines in front of you is the ideal interface because this search stinks. Trying to locate a map of mountains of Greece turned up a small result set of articles that had nothing to do with either Greece or mountains. But the biggest insult is the scan quality. This is where you really had to stand back and say, yes, this is truly an amateur job. Scans are not color adjusted, scanner artifacts are rife and they apparently decided not to scan high and then downsample. As a result the text is hard to read, and their stupid enhance text feature (to make up for the poor scanning job) doesn't help a whole lot. This was basically wasted money because it's so difficult to use. I've heard NG did a much worse job with earlier versions so I guess they are improving. They are still a long way off from having a good product though.

As of December 2009 there are definitely ways to copy the DVDs to a hard drive so that the DVDs are not required to use the program.

If you install the software and use the update option in Preferences to install the latest update then you get an option to specify where the DVD data is stored, and you just need to copy the contents of the disk1-6 folders from each disk to that location. Note that this copy process is rather slow (if you have more than one DVD drive you can do more than one copy at the same time) and the data are stored in inividual image files for each page so it has to copy around 34,000 files per disk. Each file copy seems to cause the DVD drive to seek back and forth across the disk once, which means 34,000 seeks per disk which slows the process significantly (to over an hour per disk) and also might result in a significant amount of wear and tear on the DVD drive (this is speculation).

Note that you'll need 50GB of available disk space if you choose to install all the data to disk!

The developers are actively updating the program and the latest Mac version has a "copy everything to disk" feature which does the work for you, and the Windows version should have this same function enabled literally any day now. The web site to follow for the latest info is COMPLETENATGEO.

This version of the Complete National Geographic is *much* improved over the one from several years ago. The viewing application is a much nicer application, it scales the images to the size of the application window nicely, and the full two-page spread images are quite readable on a 24" 1920x1200 monitor.

Our local Costco has had a huge pile of these this holiday season, so I hope this review helps out some of the new purchasers looking for information about the product. If you haven't bought it yet, it's a great deal and an amazing wealth of information and imagery. Issues through (most of?) 2008 are included, and they say there will be an option in 2010 to buy the 2009 issues to add to your existing collection.

Highly recommended.

G.

I must say that my excitement upon seeing this product, and its pricetag, was such that my wife didn't even bother arguing with me when I told her that I must get this.

After I have received it, well, I'm still happy that I own it, but it has been somewhat disappointing.

Instead of rambling, I'll just write it in bullet form, disappointments first:
1. As of Dec. 19, 2009, no HDD install
It's quite slow, and having it read from the DVD compounds this. The only way around it is to copy them on your user-specific folder, which means that if you use a computer with more than one account, you'll need 50GBs of space per user if you want all of them to access it from the HDD. The more tedious solution is to copy all the images on your harddrive and use a virtual DVD to load all the discs, but that is still awkward.

2. Slow
I can understand if the images are slow to load, or if the queries are slow due to the vast data, but I just don't understand why the geographic browser is slow on a computer that has more than one CPU.

3. Picture quality
I understand the reasoning behind loading not-so-great pictures in order to prevent some from using them outright, but the quality is hideous to somebody who enjoys photography. It's nothing like something you'd expect in this decade - you can see jagged edges, jumps in tone, and everything else that screams that quality has been compromised for storage. I would've been perfectly happy with pictures that they put on the web, resized so that it won't be usable outside of the computer, but the pics look as if they were scanned 10 years ago.

Well, that's about it for disappointments, but #1 is a big big big disappointment since it's advertised as if it can be loaded to your HDD, and NG isn't the same if it doesn't have absolutely stunning pictures.

As for the often mentioned type size in articles, if you have a 24-inch monitor, it's not a problem at all. On my 24 inch LCD, the articles are slightly larger than lifesize when viewed full screen, and it's perfectly readable without any magnification. Pictures, on the other hand, are awkward - let's just say that the bonus DVD has better still shots than the scanned pictures inside.

Still, it's nice to have 120 years worth of NG at your grasp, complete with ads and pictures, and able to search it for articles or even pictures, if you can remember at least part of its caption.

I believe that many of the bad reviews were before the update that National Geographic did. This is truly a wealth of information, and quite remarkable software. My copy installed flawlessly onto my hard drive. If you're wondering if this will work for you or not, here's what I think you need:

1) A decent computer-- If your computer can be found on on an advertisement in National Geographic from the 80s or 90s, this software probably won't run too smoothly on your system. So don't say that these CDs suck if your computer once survived Y2K.
2) Follow the instructions --([...] )Their website tell you to insert disc 1, then go to preferences and update the software. After doing that there is a button that says to install it to the hard drive. It lets you choose where you want to install it, and after about 5-7 hours with vigilance to swap out the discs (real time depend on your computer), your software will be installed. No tricks involved if you just update the software from the start. Very easy.
3) I expected there to be at least three things, but there's not. It's quite simple.

I am overwhelmingly satisfied with this purchase. I wish I could take a few days off just to catch up on some National Geographic reading, but instead I will enjoy the sparse moments with this software at random times over times over the next several years. This would make for a great gift, a great resource, a great hobby if you had all day to read.

Negatives: The only thing that would make this better in my opinion is if they could have some sort of side scroller that would show the different pages (smaller) so that you wouldn't have to clink each page one by one just to see what's on it. Also, they need to solve the problem with the pages that need to be rotated 90 degrees to see the content.

**Bonus tip: Many people have mentioned that you cannot get the images directly from the articles, however, if you have Vista or Windows 7 this problem is solved with the "snipping tool". Very easy to grab images if you would ever need to.

I own the original Complete National Geographic from 1998, so purchased this for the additional 120 issues. I am glad I did because the quality and content of the magazine is still excellent. I am also able to read some past issues, in which the text was unreadable on the original.

The new interface is ok, but the searches just do not work for me. I always end up going to the online National Geographic Magazine Index to actually find ALL the results on a search.

Deducting 1 star because it will not run from hard drive with updates as of November 1, as advertised. The National Geographic support team is now saying the update should be available in December, but will it? National Geographic abandoned updates and user support with its original CNG. Regardless, well worth purchasing.

The information contained and having all pages of the National Geographic is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone.

The Big disappointment comes from the interface used to display the magazine.
1) slow - Distractingly so slow that each page turn is excruciatingly painful and it makes me wonder will i ever get there.
2) Photographed PDF images instead of text. - this is a huge pain on an entirely new level!!!
3) Text is not searchable because of the PDF images
4) Photographs become pixelated when zooming because of the PDF images
5) Text is near impossible to read with out being fatigued because of the old source text.
6) Zooming in is difficult to do and exploring the page is another exercise in frustration.

This software could be improved by providing just the pages in PDF form without the stupid software.
The software developers could have ran the magazine through google OCR to extract the text or use higher resolution photos.

Taking the time to extract the images is a necessity!!!