Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/08/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Doug McLernon wrote: > > The general feeling amongst the Arts faculty people seems to favour Mac over > PC for Image manipulation. I intend to purchase a Nikon LS2000 and the Epson > photo printer. Should I change the habits of the past fifteen years and go > Mac. I shall retain a 166 Pentium for any economic work I may undertake as a > consultant. > Back before Windows95 Release 2, I might've suggested the Mac. Not anymore! The Mac upgrade situation is pretty grim: During the brief Mac cloning era, it seemed that we might be able to buy ATX-standard Mac motherboards from the likes of Motorola, and thereby build and upgrade our own Macs cheaply, using parts stocked locally by thousands of small dealers. But Steve "Think Different" Jobs put a stop to that, so today, we have attractive Macs that seem largely non-upgradeable by 3rd parties. Case in point: The iMac's processor is readily replaced, but it's on a card containing the ROMs, so 3rd parties wishing to produce upgrades must be licensed by Apple to use the proprietary bits, and Apple has shown no inclination to allow this, hence, you can't upgrade. The blue G3 boxes are wonderfully easy to open for adding RAM; The iMac is a pain in the butt. The most economical-to-upgrade box is probably going to be one you build yourself, from industry-standard bits. I do favor using PCI expansion cards rather than ISA, and USB devices over PS/2, parallel, serial, and, where speed's not critical, SCSI as well. These newer standards have really removed a lot of the fuss of upgrades. For Photoshop, I really don't think that overkill CPU power is so big a deal, at least not for the relatively simple sorts of photo manipulations I'm doing: cropping, resizing, masking, dodging, burning-in. My Celeron 300a is overclocked to 450, and it has *not* been the performance bottleneck of my system. Intel goofed with this econo chip, as it's really, really good and really cheap (refer to www.tomshardware.com and www.theregister.co.uk). This chip cost me around $75. But having enough RAM is vital if you value your sanity! Buy a 128 or 256 megabyte stick of PC100 or PC133 RAM, and if your system begins to swap to disk excessively, buy another. My system currently has 64 megabytes, which actually works fairly well at 8 x 10 @ 720 dpi, but is swapping to disk rather a lot. At 1440 dpi, I'm waiting for hours for printouts as the computer swaps to disk almost nonstop. And yes, if money were no object, I'd love to go with an Ultra-Wide SCSI disk array, or any other solution which gives fast, sustained throughput. But it's not so big a deal if you have enough RAM to avoid most disk swapping, so usually, I employ these only on servers, not on desktop systems. I use a Maxtor DiamondMax 8.4G UDMA drives and have found them a very fine buy at $100-150/ea. I'll admit I've generated some Photoshop files in the 600 megabyte range, and for temporary storage, I am looking into Castlewood's Orb drive. I hope that the local labs support it, as it'd be great for bringing home drum scans too. By the way, I buy most of my computer bits from www.thechipmerchant.com; good folks. Jeff