Review of FingerPrint GSi.....by Tracy Poe
Apple II Hardware Forum Leader - America Online 

Gadget-hungry IIgs owners will find this one hard to pass up: a
card that will grab screen images, print them, save them, crop
them, rotate them, flip them horizontally and vertically, and
still have room enough for a calendar and calculator!  The
FingerPrint GSi does all of the aforementioned, and with an
ease that's breathtaking.  Some of the most obvious
applications are in education, but all types of Apple graphic
artists will find a use for the FingerPrint GSi.

The FingerPrint GSi is a graphic utility card that lets you
freeze any program at the touch of a button and capture any
image from the screen of your computer and manipulate it or
load it into your favorite paint or drawing program so that
you can create banners, or use any image in your desktop
publishing program.  The simple grabbing of frames isn't
special part, though.  Most frames found in GS programs are
found in files on disk, and can be imported into regular GS
paint programs with little difficulty.  The trick is in what
the FingerPrint GSi does beyond frame grabbing.

Say, for instance, that you want to grab the opening screen of
Mean 18, but all you want to print is the little gopher.  The
FingerPrint GSi will let you isolate on the gopher, and then
expand that small portion of the frame to fill a page on your
printer.  Likewise, you can crop only the title "MEAN 18,"
turn it sideways, and make a banner several sheets long. 
These are relatively trivial examples, but should serve to get
you thinking about the possibilities of this card.

For all the things the FingerPrint GSi does, there is one
thing that it doesn't do - act as a printer interface. It
merely controls the output of your existing printer/interface
combination.  The FingerPrint GSi prints to most available
printers, and even to a few that System 5.0 can't handle. 
Some rather striking banners were created by Thirdware
(FingerPrint's parent company) for AppleFest/Boston, using a
Hewlett-Packard PaintJet printer.  The colors in the banners
were highly saturated and created a very strong effect.  Most
users will connect via the GS printer port, but those who want
to use the more esoteric printers may need FingerPrint's
Serial or Parallel cards.  One benefit of the FingerPrint GSi
is the use of these "non-standard" printers with your paint
programs.  Load your image into your paint program, switch to
full screen image, grab the screen with the FingerPrint GSi
and print!

Disk functions are easy to handle with the FingerPrint GSi. 
From the disk functions menu, you can catalog a directory,
save a grabbed screen ($C1 format for SHR - you can also save
DHR, Hi-Res and Lo-Res screens.  You can even save screens
from ProDOS applications in DOS 3.3 format and vice versa.),
load screens into memory, rename, delete, lock and unlock
files, and check available disk space.

The documentation that comes with the FingerPrint GSi is
higher quality than average.  It fully explains how to install
the card and set dip switches to configure for your
printer/interface combination.  The card is recommended for
slot 3, but it can go in any slot.  The card merely takes
power from the slot, and so doesn't need to be declared to the
GS control panel.  Each of the menu options is explained
thoroughly, but the tutorial section could use a bit better
explanations.  That's the only drawback to the docs, and I
consider it minor.

The FingerPrint GSi is very easy to use.  A small mylar button
peeks out from under the hood of the GS.  The activating
mechanism is mysterious, because no click or other
physiological feedback is received.  When you come off of the
button, however, the FingerPrint GSi swings into motion.  Even
if the frame you want is displayed in the middle of a load
sequence, everything freezes, and the FingerPrint GSi routines
take over.  You can print the screen directly, or you can use
any of the printing options available, such as cropping,
rotating, etc.  You can even "Flip" the image, which is useful
for making T-Shirt transfers.  You have to have a special
ribbon for those, however.

One feature is extremely unique.  You can take a screen image
and blow it up to wall size.  FingerPrint GSi handles it this
way:  It prints "strips", and somehow keeps track of how much
of the complete image it has printed per strip.  It prints
alignment marks at certain intervals so your strips register
properly.  This is a very cheap way to make your own
wallpaper!  Now if I could only find a cheap paper hanger.....

When you've completed your tasks, a simple mouse click or
ESCape takes you back to what you were doing.  In my case,
after I had finished playing with the Mean 18 opening screen,
I gave the command to the FingerPrint GSi to resume, and it
continued loading, right from where it was interrupted.  Just
to make sure no hanky-panky had taken place in the interim, I
played a round of Mean 18, and there were no problems
whatsoever.

The FingerPrint GSi is available for about $75 or so from mail
order outlets.  It comes with a Slide Show demo program, and
the documentation even tells you you can make as many copies
as you want of the Slide Show.  Just don't try to sell it, and
make sure the Thirdware copyright notice remains intact.  It's
an excellent value for those who deal with computer graphics
frequently, and it's a fun gadget for those who only dabble.