I like the ease and simplicity that ACDSee offers. It is fast and stable with some basic editing features built in.

I like the advanced features of Adobe Elements 2.0. But I don't have the time or desire to become an expert to be able to use it.

I think overall, the Digital Image Suite 9 package is a nice balance. It's fast, clean, kind of intuitive, and you get a full featured package with enough advanced features to keep most people happy.

One reviewer said this product did not have 48 bit support, only 24 bit. Well guess what...no other editing packages provide support for 48 bit! Just recently, Photoshop CS is the first product to provide true 48 bit support.

I have my own business and wanted to whip up a corporate logo fast. I spent days exploring and trying to figure out Adobe Elements. I bought a beginners book, and dedicated 4 straight days to it. It got me nowhere. I took the book back and decided not to purchase a full version of Elements.
I borrowed this program from a friend, tried it and banged out a corporate logo in 2 days. I bought this program and I have been happy with it. However, I have no desire to develop my photo editing skills since my business is in computer networks, not photo editing. I do take photos of client locations so I can plan cabling and setups. I use this program for quickie editing and then I am done.

Overall, the novice/beginner will appreciate the simplicity, the tutorials and integration between all components. The price seems fair too. If your desires grow, you can always advance to something like Photoshop Elements or CS.

88 of 97 found the following review helpful:

Disappointing at best  Sep 05, 2003

Pros: Easy, attractive interface. Good integration.
Cons: Too easy to modify original photo. Too underpowered. Keyword handling has poor functionality. Resizing difficult. Red eye reduction poor.

Now for the details:
This product seriously underperforms compared to Adobe's products. The Adobe Album and Elements combination is MUCH more powerful. Digital Image Suite (DIS) doesn't even create web photo galleries. The keyword function is crazy... it's all one level, so once you add any number of keywords, you have to scroll through long lists (Album has multi-level keyword handling, but only to three levels). With Album, you double-click to edit simple things, such as red-eye reduction and cropping, or right-click for more complicated tasks. With DIS, any editing requires opening Digital Image Pro, which can be a resource drain for the average computer. Additionally, you have to make a copy of a photo to edit a copy... Adobe creates a copy automatically, which prevents you from accidentally editing your original photo. And the red-eye wizard in Album is better... eyes look more natural (note: neither program gets rid of pet "red-eyes", since they're not really red).

And something that I can't believe they did: you can't resize the image by pixels. So if I want to resize my 2492x1924 image to 640x480 image to email, I have to guess what printed size that would be at a certain resolution. With Adobe Photoelements, you can specify size in pixels or inches.. MUCH more useful.

I got this software since I thought Microsoft would put out a competitive product, but I was very disappointed. This product doesn't have a single feature that is better than Adobe Album/Photoshop elements, and most features aren't as good, if they are available at all. I wish I could return it...

19 of 21 found the following review helpful:

A real resource hog. I doubt I'm the most prolific user...  Jan 27, 2004

I've been using digital cameras for about 4 years and have roughtly 15K photos and had overgrown the freeware ACeeDSee program.

I purchased the DIS9 and Adobe PS Element/Album 2.0 at the same time and started with DIS9 since it has a 30 day money back guarantee. After installing the DIS9's Library, I was pleased to have it locate and add all of my photos in the library using the search feature.

The first thing I did was archive all my photos to three DVD's which was very simple and reasonably fast. So far, so good...

Then I tried browsing my photos in order to experiment with tags and organizing. I found, however, that many of the photo thumbnails were not showing. I did see them showing up here and there periodically added and since the CPU meter was pegged at the high 90% level, I figured it was just digesting the large input creating thumbnails. I decided to let it crank on overnight.

Next morning (11 hours later), I found it still churning away and not only that, I could not get the program to respond any faster than several seconds after clicking a photo or menu item.

I have a AMD XP2400+ with 1 GB of RAM and over 240 GB HDD space, so I don't think I am lacking resources. I removed and re-installed the program, but still high CPU usage and slow responses.

MS Tech Support suggested I try it all again in safe mode (no other programs or services dragging down performance). This made no difference. I let the program run for nearly a full day (on the theory that it was *still* in a one-time process of creating thumbnails), but it still was the same slow speed.

Seeing this was unlikely to change, I installed Adobe PS Album. I had to split up the imports into roughly 5K photos each or it would crash, but, it has all the my photos, and I can now organize them with tags and such. I don't know about it's archive abilities, but if there are no major snags, it will probably do the trick.

MS does not seem to have an answer to the problem other than suggesting I utilize the 30 return policy. Someone *must* be testing the program with a lot more photos than I have. Very strange...

29 of 34 found the following review helpful:

Digital Image Suite 9 only supports 24 bit color!  Aug 01, 2003
By Robert L. Russell
My scanner supports 48 bit color but Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9 only supports 24 bit color! If you open an image in Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9 it converts it to 24 bit color! Microsoft does not document this 24 bit color short coming on the outside of the box; you have to wait until you have opened the box and read the manual!

The pull down menus work well but the expanded selections from the pull down menus consume large amounts of the screen when they are open. The document "close" button is missing from the top right hand side of the screen? What's up with that??? The fill flash feature brightens the whole image instead of only the subject... pretty useless. I was unable to easily duplicate many of the touchup features shown on the front pages of the product box. This makes me wonder if Microsoft actually used this product to produce the box cover or if the used a more professional product like Adobe Photoshop 7.0.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9's main application is Microsoft Picture It! bundled with some additional utilities. I found this package to be not much better than its earlier version which was called Microsoft Photo Draw 2000. I am very disappointed in this "new" product.

18 of 20 found the following review helpful:

Exceeded my expectations day one  Dec 20, 2003

Floundered with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 for over one year. Finally got to the point that I was totally dissatisfied because I couldn't do a simple red eye fix easily. Decided to invest in another digital photo editing package. After reading for 2 hours choose MS Digital Image Suite 9.

The first 30 minutes that played around with the package, I could do more with it than the 1 1/2 years with Adobe. This package is very intuitive. I was accomplishing edits and special effects that I was never able to do with Adobe.

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