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ShuttlePro
at a Glance
Maker:
Contour Design
Price: $125
URL: http://www.contourdesign.com
Overall
Impression: Slick little controller that fits cozily on a keyboard
tray along with your keyboard. It works great, and the price is
certainly right.
Key
Benefits: The controller is comfortable in the hand, and it
offers a good number of programmable buttons (13 in total) for great
customizability — even allowing application-specific customizations.
Hey, even the shuttle ring and jog wheel are programmable.
Disappointments:
The USB cable will be too short to reach a rack-mounted Mac. While
it does (surprisingly) seem to operate well in the keyboard's USB
port, if you have any dongles occupying a keyboard USB port, you'll
need to go get a USB hub.
Recommendation:
Buy
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REVIEW
• FEBRUARY
7 , 2001
Contour ShuttlePro
USB
shuttle/jog & multimedia controller
by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
[Editor's note:
This review has been updated since its original publication to include
new pricing information as of July 6, 2001. —Dave]
Shuttle/jogs are,
on the whole, a bit more pricey than they need to be. After all, they're
targeted toward the professional video market, and ... well, need I say
more? However, there's a little thing called the Macintosh desktop video
revolution going on right now. While this revolution might seem to be
dominated at the moment by dads digitizing footage of their kids running
on the beach, it does, on the whole, have some happy implications for
video pros as well. The most important of these for our purpose here are
pricing and availability. This means, in short, more stuff at better prices.
In the controller
arena, the first to address these recent realities is Contour Design,
maker of ergonomic input devices and accessories, such as mice, wrist
rests and the like. Their latest offering, which began shipping in volume
not too many days ago, is the ShuttlePro, a USB shuttle/jog and multimedia
controller selling for $125.
The good
Like other Contour products, ShuttlePro is ergonomic. It has length and
girth enough to feel solid, but it's slim enough to fit next to the keyboard
on many keyboard trays. It has an outer rubberized shuttle ring and an
inner jog wheel positioned just so you can reach its top nine buttons
with your fingertips and two of its four lower buttons with your thumb.
Quite comfy.
With
13 buttons, a jog wheel and a shuttle ring, the ShuttlePro offers a
total of 44 programmable parameters via the ShuttlePro Control Panel.
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