National Geographic is a magazine that garners respect whenever, and wherever it is read. Covering a gamut of topics, the magazine typically runs nature conservational pieces, sociological profiles of countries, histories of ancient civilizations, pieces on scientific discoveries and natural occurrences such as earthquakes and weather phenomena. Whatever the topic, the articles are well written and the accompanying pictures exceptionally good.

First published as a single issue in 1888, the magazine gradually grew in issues per year until 1896 when it went monthly. 112 years on, the magazine is still going strong. The Complete National Geographic boxed set comprises every single issue, digitised on 32 CD-ROMs.

The packaging lists some interesting facts, and theyre worth repeating here: there are 1,285 issues on these discs containing more than 9,500 articles, over 185,000 photographs and illustrations, and over 196,000 individual pages. Even the advertising pages have been included, and its interesting to look at the evolution of advertising over the decades.

There is a minimal installation requirement for viewing the CD-ROMs, including QuickTime 5.0, which adds little aside from playing National Geographic intros and outros to the program. The main software interface is extremely simple, but is a hit and miss affair with some good inclusions and some annoying exclusions. For instance you can easily skip from page to page, or from article to article, with the buttons arranged across the bottom, but after youve skipped through a few issues theres nothing to indicate which month of what year youre currently browsing. Trying to guesstimate more often than not brings up a dialog box asking you to insert another CD.

The handiest inclusion is an advanced search function, so you can find articles across the years. Search results can appear with small synopses, and relevant articles can be bookmarked. No matter how interesting searching for topics is from a research point of view, its fascinating to just casually dig back through the decades and see the gradual progression of ideas, the discoveries of nature and the changes in society.

Each page has been scanned digitally as an image, and you view them almost like an Adobe PDF as seen in Acrobat. Depending on your screen resolution you can shift the pages around and zoom in on the text to read. Even at 1,024 x 768 this is annoying though, as zooming in to read the text and then zooming out to look at pictures is a pain. An HTML-like format would have served the products purpose much better.

You can easily resize individual pages of double-page spreads to fit your screen height, width, or both, but it highlights the greatest flaw in this awesome collection. The resolution of the scans is awfully low, and each page is a 40-60KB JPG. Thats not a big filesize, and leaves very little overhead for quality. This appallingly low scanning resolution has had a shocking, and disappointing, effect on some of the images. There are obvious colour gradations, jaggies and artifacts, and even the text is fuzzy. Increasing the resolution may have blown this product out to around 50 discs, and this is a pity as it mars what would have been a perfect collection.

As a research tool or library for the collector this boxed set is indispensable. However the image quality is such a let down that what would have been a near-perfect product is merely an average one.