Computer suggestions

Can any of you recommend a computer or at least provide system requirements for doing post-processing at home? At the most basic level is the Mac vs. PC question. Also, are laptops any good? I can see their mobility being a huge plus but they tend to have less "horses". After those decisions, I guess my biggest question is how much RAM is really necessary.

While money is an object (duh!), I'm open to all suggestions.

Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks

cdhender wrote:
Can any of you recommend a computer or at least provide system requirements for doing post-processing at home? At the most basic level is the Mac vs. PC question. Also, are laptops any good? I can see their mobility being a huge plus but they tend to have less "horses". After those decisions, I guess my biggest question is how much RAM is really necessary.

While money is an object (duh!), I'm open to all suggestions.

Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks

I will venture out into religious grounds and make the statement that you get more for your money with a PC with Windows than with a Mac.

It is easy to state that you get more for your money with a desktop machine than with a laptop computer. On the other hand, laptops are highly portable, so if portability is a priority for you, there's your answer.

For a typical photographer's computer, I would expect to see a Windows XP machine running at 2.5 GHz or higher with 512MB to 1GB of RAM, and with lots of hard disk, CD and DVD recorder drives, and lots of peripheral ports in USB and/or Firewire. I would also expect to see a large monitor of at least 17". All of this was fairly expensive just a few years ago, but they have gotten a lot cheaper in the last year.

I mentioned ports since often photographers will be plugging in flatbed scanners, film scanners, extra printers, and all sorts of stuff like that.

---Bob Gross---

robertwgross wrote:

cdhender wrote:
Can any of you recommend a computer or at least provide system requirements for doing post-processing at home? At the most basic level is the Mac vs. PC question. Also, are laptops any good? I can see their mobility being a huge plus but they tend to have less "horses". After those decisions, I guess my biggest question is how much RAM is really necessary.

While money is an object (duh!), I'm open to all suggestions.

Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks

I will venture out into religious grounds and make the statement that you get more for your money with a PC with Windows than with a Mac.

It is easy to state that you get more for your money with a desktop machine than with a laptop computer. On the other hand, laptops are highly portable, so if portability is a priority for you, there's your answer.

For a typical photographer's computer, I would expect to see a Windows XP machine running at 2.5 GHz or higher with 512MB to 1GB of RAM, and with lots of hard disk, CD and DVD recorder drives, and lots of peripheral ports in USB and/or Firewire. I would also expect to see a large monitor of at least 17". All of this was fairly expensive just a few years ago, but they have gotten a lot cheaper in the last year.

I mentioned ports since often photographers will be plugging in flatbed scanners, film scanners, extra printers, and all sorts of stuff like that.

---Bob Gross---

I would agree with most everything he said.

You ought to look into building your own computer, it's rather easy and at times much cheaper and in the end more often then not you'll have a higher quality peice of equipment.

That said, it's not for everyone...i cant stress that enough.

As for what you need. I run an AMD Athlon xp1700. These come stock at 1.4ghz but mine is running at 2ghz (2 years now). For a very long time i only had 512mb of ram, and it got me by but even now at a gig i'm thinking of buying more when i decide to upgrade my CPU/motherboard.

As for hard drive space, get as much as you can (this is another area where building your own saves you ALOT of cash).

I just got my new 250gig hard drive today because my 120 was filled to the brim. 40gigs of which has a years worth of photos. So, if you shoot a lot and dont like deleting original photographs then you'll either need to invest in a DVD burner or hard drive space (or both).


As for the PC vs Mac debate, it's just that: a debate.

I'd say for the average home user though, at the costs involved in that a PC at $1000 will out perform any mac at $1000. The things apple makes look nice, hip, stylish etc. People can accept that or not, but the truth is you pay a price for that. Look at the ipod.

There is a reason however that most pro's use macs, they can afford the new dual CPU macs and i'm sure they perform a little better then todays Intel based CPU's (and athlons 64 based cpu's which i hear are quiet fast).

The same rule kind of applies to lap tops i think. A really good worthwhile lap top is going to cost a few pennies, so unless you really need it i'd just stick with a desk top.

Ar eyou building your own?

If not it bils down to Mac Vs. Dell imho...

I can't stand the prebuilt PCs like HP/Compaq etc...

Dell is the lesser of most Evils.. also if you ready to apy for premium componenets.. then AlienWare is a very good product.

Some specs you should require.

1GB of system RAM.
A good Graphics card for Photoshop .. Matrox is still the best.
TWO hard drives! Keep data on a seperate drive from the OS.. or even better.. keep two copies.. one on each hard drive.

The second drive can be internal or external.

A Wacom Graphire tablet for photoshop.

With new computers, I would say get 1GB of RAM minimum. Like many said, Mac vs. Windows based PC is up for debate. The top of the line Macs are highly regarded for video and graphics editing... but you pay a price for that. A 3+ gHz processor should treat you very well though on the Intel or AMD side.

For the Laptop vs. Desktop debate, the main thing there with exception to portability, is color reproduction. Laptop screens have gotten pretty good, but still don't measure up to a monitor. That's not to say you coudln't get a laptop and hook it up to a monitor at home.

When I purchased my current HP desktop computer two years ago, it came with 512MB of RAM, and that seemed like plenty at the time.

Then I plugged in a film scanner for slides, and I noticed that the batch scanning was taking a long time. I noticed all of the disk activity, and then figured out that it was running out of RAM. I increased the RAM to 1GB, and batch scanning was noticeably sped up. RAM is cheap, time is not.

---Bob Gross---

I honestly believe that photo editing computers just can't have too much RAM. A guy on another message board that I frequent posted a screenshot of his performance monitor while running Image Ready. He was using 1.8GB of page file, and I would assume that he has at least 1GB of physical RAM.

IMO, for a truly state of the art photo editing machine, I would say that a minimum of 2GB of RAM is necessary...3GB if you can afford it. I already have proof (in that aforementioned screenshot) that photo editing can eat up 3GB easy.

FlipsidE