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Multimedia tools are nothing new to Corel, a company now responsible for titles in the Ulead family and Video Studio Pro. But the particular combination of features in Corel Digital Studio 2010 (Windows) is something new. Or rather, a it's a fresh take on Corel's existing technology.

The software suite marries editing and project creation tools for photos and videos, giving the application interfaces a tinted look and rounded corners that share the philosophy of Apple's iPhoto and iMovie. Corel's goal was to provide an entry-level media manipulation package for home users that is also appealing to look at and natural to get around, and the company has largely succeeded.

Corel Digital Studio 2010 is comprised of main four applications: the photo studio, video studio, DVD burning app, and WinDVD, Corel's video player. (There's also a desktop gadget with its shortcut buttons to each of the four programs.) With them you can open media from just about anywhere, edit videos and photos, and fashion a whole lot of fun photo and video projects. The video studio, known formally as Corel VideoStudio 2010, has a built-in movie maker that looks good and is approachable for novices looking to get their feet wet. There are a few templates (but a few more wouldn't hurt), for automatically creating videos out of video clips or photos, or both of them together--you'll have an opportunity to tweak transitions and other details later.

The photo app harbors a creation workshop for collages, cards, calendars, and photo books, all of which you can print from your home computer or order from Corel online, if you'd like to turn your digital media into physical form. As with the movie maker, there are templates for getting started (the same ones, in fact.) The limited templates may get old pretty soon.

Corel Digital Studio 2010--screenshots

The other options for releasing photos and videos from your desktop include burning them to disk (with Corel DVD Factory 2010), e-mailing them, copying them to a number of devices, including the iPhone and Sony PSP, and uploading them automatically to Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. We had some trouble uploading to Flickr in our initial tests, but according to Corel, the bug we encountered is unusual.

Corel Digital Studio has a few other rough spots. We've mentioned the premade project templates, which could be more numerous. We feel the same way about the number of effects in the photo editor--there are a meager four. The software could run a little faster, and there are a few tweaks we'd make to some of the tools; for instance, if you could adjust aspects like saturation and brightness by typing a value into a blank field in addition to the current method, where you set it with a slider bar.

Each application's tool set in Corel Digital Studio 2010 is much beefier than your basic freeware apps like Google's photo manager, Picasa, and Microsoft's recent Windows Live Movie Maker. Compare the features with other multimedia suites in its price class, and the $99.99 studio falls in the middle. Part of that is intentional. By slimming down the feature offerings, casual consumers won't get lost in a morass of menus. Make the product too simple, though, and nobody will buy it. Corel has struck a fair compromise that will give the company's home user audience plenty to do to, both in terms of editing media and in terms of ultimately sharing that media with others.

(Credit: Corel)

In the end, Corel's new multimedia studio doesn't introduce any groundbreaking capabilities to the field. Comparable software suites, like Roxio Creator 2010 and Apple's iMovie/iPhoto combo, have the sharing features, automated movie makers, photo book and calendar creators, and then some. Roxio Creator 2010 also has several more audio tools, extra copying options (like to TiVo), and express burning you can jump-start from the desktop or even automatically from the DVD drive. iPhoto and iMovie include sundries such as detecting recurring faces in photos, and more advanced video editing options that take the audio track into account.

At this point, it may seem that we're a lot further away from proclaiming that Corel has largely succeeded in its mission to create a solid, user-friendly multimedia app than we were at the beginning of this review. However, we're still of that original opinion. Those folks seeking more advanced tools, like that separate audio track and finer tuning, should seek a different media suite that's more consciously geared to enthusiasts or professionals. What Corel Digital Studio 2010 offers is a navigable, eye-pleasing design for people who want one place to go that gives them beyond-the-basics tools without opening too many cans of worms. (The package is an especially fair price if you were planning to buy DVD-playing software for your computer anyway--don't forget that it includes WinDVD 2010.)

There's much more to explore in Corel's quadra-app suite, and some system requirements that you should be aware of before you download even the trial. For details, tune into the First Look video above, slide on over to the photo gallery, or read our hands-on review. If you'd like to test it for yourself, Corel Digital Studio 2010 is free-to-try for 30 days.

Try it | Full review

This week, Corel came out with a brand-new suite of office applications for XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users. Corel Home Office ($69.99) bundles in three applications: Write, the word processor, Calculate, the spreadsheet maker, and Show, the presentations builder.

Corel Home Office differs from other Corel office suites in two ways. First, it's been written with a new code base, so it's not a perfect continuation of Corel WordPerfect Office. It doesn't hurt that the suite is the near-spitting image of Microsoft Office 2007 in layout and design.

Second, it has been optimized for Netbooks, both in terms of a smaller footprint (just over 100MB) that translates into lighter features (Corel sticks to core tasks) and a couple concessions for the small screen. The best of these is the F11 button, which hides the menu bar, significantly increasing the amount of screen visible on a Netbook.

As a result of its lighter features and lighter footprint, the suite is aimed toward home users--both casual consumers and those operating home businesses. While there are strong features in this suite--like a built-in PDF maker in each of the three apps--there are detractions, too. Converting files from Microsoft Office into Corel Home Office was sometimes off, and the results from pasting data were imperfect. While it's meant for the budget-conscious, freebies like OpenOffice.org offer a full-featured suite for no cost and may be better suited for Netbook, laptop, and desktop users looking for more powerful tools. However, it may also provide casual users with more functionality than they really need.

Corel Home Office isn't for everyone, but it does hold its own as a midrange productivity suite. It has the added bonus of giving Microsoft users a very familiar workflow and feel in a smaller, cheaper, and less cluttered format. Try Corel Home Office for free for 30 days, or read more of the pros and cons in our detailed review (with images.)

Safe and dependable software old-timers WordPerfect and WinZip have been bestowed with some upgrades. WordPerfect gets a major overhaul with Version X4, while WinZip's 11.2 adds some new features to the program, the first update in a year.

WordPerfect X4 gives users a choice of interfaces and defaults at startup.

(Credit: Corel)

You can read the full CNET Reviews analysis of WordPerfect X4 here, but in short, it's a good, solid improvement on what has gone before in the suite even if it is cost-prohibitive and not quite as spiffy as one would hope. It's able to gracefully handle more than 60 document formats, including the nascent Open Document Format, a stark contrast to Microsoft Office's decision to create its own "open format" instead.

It's also useful that WordPerfect displays different interfaces for different purposes, with a different look for the main interface, for WordPerfect 5.1, for MS Word, and for Legal mode. The WordPerfect suite includes spreadsheet-creating Quattro Pro and PowerPoint analogue Presentations, both of which have improved with the times--but not dramatically so.

The two new apps in the suite are Lightning and Mail. Mail is an e-mail client comparable with Outlook, but lacks built-in configurations for handling Gmail, Yahoo, and other Web-based e-mail systems as Mozilla Thunderbird does. Lightning was somewhat disappointing for Corel's answer to Web 2.0. Online services provide 200MB of storage for free, a file navigator indexes your hard drive, and a lightweight viewer and text editor round out the package. While it offers a lot, the workflow isn't always intuitive.

Besides the price, though, other problems included difficulty managing multiple documents opened simultaneously in WordPerfect, and a lack of refinement to many of the newer features. Users who are turned off by Microsoft's changes in Office 2007 might find X4 to be a suite worth investing in. Personally, I used WordPerfect for nearly 20 years, but gave it up last year to jump to OpenOffice.org.

WinZip now supports a second interface that looks more like Explorer.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

WinZip's changes are far less extensive, but should please people who are still loyal to the program. Native LHA support has been added, so that WinZip can create and manage LHA files, and unicode support has been extended to sharing files that have names with international characters. ARC and ARJ support has been removed.

I was actually surprised, though, by some of the newer features I hadn't picked up on when versions 11 and 11.1 came out. Most interestingly, there's now a new spreadsheet-style interface that I found to be easier to use and far more pleasant to look at than the old open interface that is also still available. RAR and BZ2 extraction support was added, too, both long-overdue compatibility issues.

It's great to see both WordPerfect and WinZip still kicking around after all these years, but if news of open-source software's rising dominance is to be believed, these programs will have an even shorter lifespan than I'd thought unless they make some drastic changes.

As discs slowly succumb to the portable drive, rippers and burners have been forced to diversify. Merely ripping and burning well will lead to crashing and burning badly: customers want to see something tech-relevant. Corel's DVD Copy 6 focuses heavily on file format conversion, and for $50 it offers a wide range of source and target compatibility including iPods and PSPs.

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Corel Painter Essentials 4, available for both Windows and Mac, combines the resources of a Photoshop with the carte blanche of a art studio program, but without the attitude of either. The end result is something that's more appropriate for people looking to either paint or artistically tweak their photos and to have fun doing it.

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Corel MediaOne Plus

(Credit: Corel Corporation)

Today, multimedia software publisher Corel released Corel MediaOne Plus--a brand-new software program designed to let you organize, edit, share, and create projects with your digital photos and videos. The software provides users with an all-in-one solution for managing their digital photos, all the way from their cameras to finished projects like greeting cards or scrapbooks. It also lets users combine photos, videos, and music into what are called "shows," or video compilations.

The main MediaOnePlus interface consists of a large viewing and editing area on the right, with four-pronged navigation on the left: Home provides the organizational features; Enhance includes basic image editing and effects; Show lets you combine photos, videos, and music into your own remixed creations; and Create offers a variety of photo products like collages, albums, and magazine covers.

A photo-tray feature on the bottom of the interface lets you create on-the-fly media lists of photos and videos for easy access and editing. The trays are placed in a tabbed interface, and you can create as many sets of media as you'd like. You can also select multiple photos or videos from any photo tray and add them to a "storyboard," the playlist component that creates the Corel Shows. ... Read more