Digital BW, The Print

> From: Roger L Sopher [c]
>
>  At the risk of offending the purists, a pc is no different from
> any of the
> items of hardware such as eye one, printers, x-rite 810's etc etc etc that
> are in the chain to produce an image and which are discussed incessently.
> More mundane perhaps, but no less necessary. Not that the eternal
> mac vs pc
> argument doesn't get tedious, someone looking for ideas about gear to
> produce fine prints (to use an old but honored term) should certainly feel
> welcome to ask.

I think it's on topic, too, as long as the question is about the
appropriateness of a machine to the job of photo editing. A machine used for
photo editing will need a lot of RAM, but not need a hot 3D video card,
while a machine used for gaming will have the opposite requirements. A
machine used for photo editing will eventually need a huge hard disk, while
a machine used for most other purposes (except, say, audio or video editing)
won't. And for someone who eventually accumulates hundreds of gigs of
photos, an external hard drive is a preferred backup mechanism, since DVDs
can be pretty space consuming at that volume. A machine used for photo
editing needs a first rate monitor (and calibrator), but can use any old
crappy sound system. A machine used for photo editing can benefit from a
fast CPU (including a dual, if running PS), but doesn't need it quite as
much as one used for long computations, like the electronic and math
simulations I run. Pano stitching would be such an application, though, but
not everyone does that. And even the occasional crash (a problem I don't
have on my XP systems) isn't particularly troublesome, where it would be on
a machine that does hour-long jobs.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...