Customer Reviews

National Geographic: 112 Years Collector's Edition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This product works fine on Windows XP (Home Edition). (We just installed it this week.)32 CDs can cause the user to spend quite a bit of time swapping discs. Definitely could be constructed with a better interface but it is wonderful to have the entire collection available.

Good product but purchasers need to be careful about product updates. In their earlier editions NG did not maintain the updates in the market for very long. Individuals interested in keeping their collection up to date may end up needing to repurchase the entire collection to fill in a one year gap. Given the low cost of reproducing CDs this is not easily understandable.

This wonderful product will soon be extinct because of its system requirements. It can only be used on systems using the Windows 98 or Windows ME platforms. That means that someday when you upgrade your computer to work with Windows XP or some future operating system, this product will cease to run. I checked with National Geographic customer service and they said that there are absolutely no plans to upgrade this product to work with XP. So as wonderful as this product is, you will still have to store your old paper copies of the National Geographic in the attic if you wish to maintain a retrospective collection. This product will not suffice as a long term archive for users. National Geographic gave no official reason why it does not plan to update the product, but it probably has something to do with the outcome of the 2001 federal case: Greenberg v. Nat'l Geographic Soc'y, 244 F.3d 1267, (11th Cir. Fla. 2001). This was a case of copyright infringement that National Geographic lost and then was required to pay a freelance photographer for re-use of his pictures in this CD-ROM product. The economics of intellectual property involved in creating such a product may be cost-prohibitive for National Geographic in the future. Ultimately, a loss for publisher, consumers and copyright holders. So get yours while you still can!

I am a great fan of National Geographic, partly because of its outstanding quality in prints. This "digital" version was very poorly made: the text and the pictures are all fuzzy. Sometimes the words are barely legible. Reading an article of more than 10 pages is very painful. I would love to see this library completely remade.

The amount of information in this cd set is mind boggling and the way it's presented is fine, but the quality of the scans leave much to be desired when viewed on a modern system - The pictures often show jpeg artifacts, the text is sometimes hard to read and smaller pictures are often blurry. Much of the content was scanned some 4 or 5 years ago, which somewhat excuses it's not so great quality. That gripe aside this set is absolutely essential to anyone who's ever enjoyed reading a National Geographic, anyone interested in the progress of marketing and our society (The preserved ads are priceless) and for the armchair explorer - Very highly recommended. Mac users, don't forget: You are not left out! It fully works under OS8 & OS9, although it does not work under OS X or Classic mode.

What can you say about the National Geographic? It's an old standard and a wonderful reference--no well-stocked library should be without it. Having it on CD leaves a lot more room on your bookshelves for other things.

However--this is not the most user-friendly product. The quality of the imaging is the worst problem. Both pictures and text are fuzzy, almost as if they had been printed on an old dot matrix printer with a well-used ribbon. In addition, the program is less versatile than might be desired. For example, each screen consists of two pages, and there is no way to print only one of the pages, let alone a single image. Instead, you're stuck printing both pages, like it or not. (You can, however, print the entire article.)

If this were anything other than the National Geographic, I would probably give it 3 stars instead of 4.

Mine contains 31 CDs; and it's 111 years version. I use Mac and installed it from OS9. Then I rebooted back to OSX (Panther 10.3.5). The software launches fine in classic mode and I have no problem viewing it. I like how the magazine resizes itself based on the size of my window. So I can enlarge it easily just by dragging the window's bottom right corner. My monitor is an Apple Cinema HD Display 23" viewing at 1920x1200. The photographs are gorgeous and their resolutions are good even on my high resolution monitor. Types are a little fuzzy but it's legible. Overall, it's an impressive collection to have. I rated 4 star instead of 5 because of the fuzzy type. Note for Mac classic mode user: You must install QuickTime 6.0.3 in classic.

I love this thing! Every single article from 1888 til 2000. This is a really treat, being able to look back on history.

These articles provide me with a method to get anwsers to my history questions, and these articles come in handy when doing research.

The software works great on my PC, under XP, and this software works great in MacOS 9. It doesn't seem to work in X under the Classic environment.

Works great with Windows XP Pro........
Follow the instructions at the National Geographic website and it will work with Windows XP.

Zoom a page and then click enlarge button at top right to get rid of fuzzyness.

Wonderful product!
I hope more years are on the way from NGS.

Okay, if you don't love old issues of National Geographic, you don't want this. That said, I LOVE old issues of National Geographic and this is really great! The user-interface is reasonably intuitive, which is rare for such CD compilations based on printed materials (in my experience -- your milage may vary), the text is clear on the screen at large resolutions, and it is basically lovely. I will say that the cardboard folders that the CDs are stored in are somewhat awkward for long-term use, but I can't say it's a big problem.

I do have to add that I wish NG had set this up so it worked under Linux. It's troublesome to have to reboot to use this, so it gets less use than it should.