The Studio40 claims to provide four of what it calls "standard" fonts and four "alternative" fonts. There are really only two standard fonts, including Helvetica in both 32 and 20 line sizes (in upper and lower case) and Eurobold in 32 lines (upper-case only). The fourth "font" is a set of 32 foreign characters. The alternative set of fonts includes Cooper and Pump in upper and lower case, and Times and Disclaimer in upper-case only.

Fonts can be manipulated in a number of ways. You can add edging (black only) to a line of characters or to individual characters in a line. You can also underline your text with a horizontal line in any one of the available colors. Hitting the Flash button will cause all characters you type to flash; hitting the button again returns you to normal mode.

Fonts are available in 32 colors. You can set the colors of each character individually or by line. You can also go back at any time and change the color or formatting of any or all fonts. The background page color can be any of the 32 available, or it can be transparent (color #0, used to superimpose titles over video).

There are two faders available on the Studio40 that are operated by combinations of the keyboard keys. The first one will fade characters in or out of the background picture. The second will fade the entire screen in or out to black. You can use the keyboard numbers to adjust the fading speed.

The Studio40 can display titles in one of three basic ways. You can display each page one at a time, you can display a crawl across a page from screen right to left or you can roll titles from screen bottom to top. Both the crawl and the roll may use multiple pages. You can freeze crawls or rolls and start them again at any time.

The Studio40 works quite well. All characters are sharp and well defined, and the colors are pure and fully saturated. There were certain combinations of colors that didn't look too good when placed side by side, but a little bit of practice will quickly teach you which colors work best together.

The owner's manual is only five and a half pages long. Still, the learning curve on this unit is short. As mentioned, labels on primary operations cover the top surface of the unit, and they help a lot.

There are two drawbacks to the Studio40. The first is the lack of a GPI (general purpose interface) connection. A GPI connection makes it possible to control the unit from an external piece of equipment, like an edit controller. But if you want to do this with the Studio40, you're out of luck. Knox says there are no plans to add a GPI in the future, and that they don't see the need for one. Regardless of your planned use for this unit, I think the lack of at least one GPI is inconsistent with the cost of the unit.

And that's the second problem: price. For about a third the cost of this unit, you can find consumer stand-alone titlers that will give you about the same performance, if not better. In fact, for less than the price of the Studio40, you could by a computer, a good genlock and some pretty wild titling software, and you'd still have a wallet full of money left over. Of course, with the Studio40 you're paying for rock-solid broadcast resolution within a tight RS-140A sync (the FCC's sync requirement for broadcasting).

So what do you need? The Studio40 is a straightforward titler that should appeal to public access users or prosumers looking for high-quality characters with broadcast specifications. Consumers looking to title their vacation gems or even more serious users who want digital effects in their titles might want to look elsewhere.

Knox Studio40

• Video inputs
  Composite (x2), S-video (x2)
• Video outputs
  Composite (x2), S-video (x2)
• Display modes
  Still, scroll, roll
• Text sizes
  Two
• Fonts
  Four
• Font colors
  32
• Horizontal resolution
  60 nanoseconds (average)
• Dimensions
  2 1/4 (height) x 22 1/4 (width) x 12 1/4 (depth) inches
• Weight
  8 pounds

VHS Workhorse

VM-3700A VHS Camcorder
Hitachi
3890 Steve Reynolds Blvd.
Norcross, GA 30093
($800)

Hitachi has long stood behind the standard VHS camcorder format, and now the company introduces its flagship model, the VM-3700A VHS camcorder.

This unit is no doubt being offered to several markets at once. Its fully automatic artificial intelligence feature (which controls the auto exposure) should appeal to the family camcorder market, while several other control features such as manual focus and audio/video dubbing will attract beginning videomakers.

The VM-3700A has clean lines and is fairly compact for a full-sized unit. You'll find the well placed controls over the left front and top edge of the camcorder. Two tones of gunmetal gray finish the unit.