Eye-Q

Sinclair User

Overall 5/5

John Gilbert 5/5

PUBLISHER: Digital Precision PRICE: £29.95 JOYSTICK/MOUSE: Any MEMORY: 128K/512K Is Eye-Q the definitive QL graphics package? It's a tall order but, looking at the comparisons between Eye-Q and the other art packages on the market DP's program wins, no problem. Eye-Q is fully menu-driven with cursor keym joystick or mouse control of drawing tools and menu options. It includes rubber-banded shapes, new character sets, multi-coloured sprites, scrolling, full paint box, Cut, Paste, and even 32 cursor sizes. Rubber-banded lines, circles, boxes and ellipses can be filled with a wide range of colours and stipples. Freehand and airbrush options are available to add detail to the shapes while x4 and x16 magnification will blow up images to make sure Fill ink doesn't bleed through on to the remainder of the screen. You can Cut and Paste areas of the screen - transferring one area of the screen to another - or manipulate the whole screen by reversing, inverting and stretching images. You can also compress screens so that they require less memory room within the machine and on cartridge - or disc. DP claims that the compression technique is unique. It's intelligent and doesn't use the normal method of compression installed on Spectrum graphics packages such as The Artist. The package can apparently compress screens by two thirds or more of Ram storage space which is ideal if you want to operate on several screens during one design session. Text and graphics can be displayed side by side on screen. There are eight sizes to text and you can use the integral character editor to create new fonts. Eye-Q always holds the default font so, if you make a mistake in the middle of the alphabet you can bring the default back into position. Eye-Q will also work on any output device. Whole screens and parts of screens can be saved to Microdrive, disc or any other mass storage device you care to mention. Screens can be saved in full colour or monochrome or automatically dumped to a dot-matrix printer through the user-definable printer driver - which is set to an Epson default. Digital Precision isn't making rash claims when it hails Eye-Q as the definitive graphics system. It's easy to work with, and the results are impressive - even from a beginner like me. A shame then Digital had to go and include, as demo screens, a suite of pictures of Playboy-type centre-folds. Inexcusable, for a professional package and Digital should have known better.