Using Mac or PC?

Hey all!

I am new to UW Photography and have been reading your forums for a while now. Just want to get to know you all a little better....

I've read your previous post and have a general idea what setup most of you use, but I am curious as to if you are currently using a MAC or a PC for your digital manipulation. Also, what is the config of those digital photo beasties??!!

I am using an Apple iBook (2001 Dual USB)

PPC G3 500mhz

384mb RAM

10GB Hdd

40GB RAID ARRAY (using a SCSI to Firewire adapter)

OS X

I look forward to your replies. I will be diving this weekend with the hopes that mother ocean will give me the gift of clear water, calm seas and cooperative subjects!

Later...

Lucky

Hello Lucky,

I initially was using an iMac g3 with the bundles softeare package that came with my coolpix 995. I was very happy with the software, particularly the album software...the name of which escapes me for the moment.

I've recently moved and have not hada chance to setup my mac yet and i have been using an IBm laptop for the time being. The software for the IBM stinks compared to the Mac. Much more difficult to use. Anyway, I look forward to getting my Mac running again.

cheers

jed

I have both a G4 desktop and an iBook. I use the iBook and iPhoto to download my iBook. But I still use the desk top for any serious manipulation. The monitor calibrates more accutately (I think, haven't really worked on the iBook yet) and it is hooked up to my printer. Somewhere in a closet I have a Toshiba with W95. The iBook is great for taking on trips and reviewing the days "takes".

But 100% of the responses here?

Home: G3 iMac DVSE 400Mhz

Office: G4 iMac Flat Panel

Road: 14" iBook 600Mhz

We have 2 Mac desktops at home - a 6-year old G3-upgraded 7300 that my wife uses and a 2-year old G4 desktop that I use. I also have a Toshiba notebook that I rarely use at home but which I use for downloading photos to when I go diving. My wife has been bugging me to get myself a TiBook but I'd rather wait until the next Powerbook release which I hope will come soon... For the meantime, maybe we'll just replace my wife's machine with the recently released 17 inch flatpanel iMacs.

Cheers,

- Nico

PC or Mac will make no difference if you are just doing basic image manipulation or color correction. I personally know little or nothing about Macs but you can buy 2Ghz P4s with 512Mb ram and 40Gb Hd for $750 making Photoshop purrrr.

(someone's gotta stick up for PCs!)

This may be the ultimate mobile storage device. Features I like about it:

733 mhz Crusoe

256 megs ram possible

Built in Firewire Port!!

Windows 2000

Has anyone used it?

Cheers

James Wiseman

This may be the ultimate mobile storage device. Features I like about it:

733 mhz Crusoe

256 megs ram possible

Built in Firewire Port!!

Windows 2000

Has anyone used it?

Cheers

James Wiseman

The spec looks good on the C1. We got one at work. Or it may be one eralier version I will check and take it for a spin. In fact, noone is using it. Slow processor (?) and small screen. The built-in camera is useless. ...and its Windows.

You can get a 12.1 inch iBook for half the price (and twice the weight) with most software you need pre-installed, and the worlds best OS.

The Sony PictureBook looks pretty neat, but personally, I have never seen a sensible reason to buy a sub-notebook. For the same price you can get a PC or Mac that will (most of the time) out perform the sub. Plus you could get a cd-rw and a pcmcia card port. However, just as TJO stated, you double up on the weight and size. The small size would certainly help out when space is limited on a live aboard or if you travel alot.

But I am sure if Apple put out a similar product, us Mac heads would be raving about it!

On the road, I use a Home Panasonic R1W , which is 2.1 pounds and has a PIII 700 Mhz processor, with 20 gig hard disk. It's suitable, except that the graphics card is really slow.

It's tiny, though. TINY. And it has built-in wireless networking. I can cram it into any bag I have with me. I'm not going to do hardcore editing in the field, anyway, and doing things to 6MP images on a notebook can be painful.

At home, I have a dual-Athlon desktop with lots of RAM and huge hard disks (2 GB RAM, 2x120GB IDE RAID striped, 1x120GB extra drive). It's very fast.

The Mac people I know have to import their images into various image viewers and archiving programs (like Portfolio), and I am typically looking at my images 10-20 minutes before they are. Can someone point me to a Mac image viewer that thumbnails in real-time? I hate the explicit thumbnail creation process I've seen on most Mac-based image viewers. I would love to carry around the installer for a better program and force my Mac friends to use it.

I have been using iPhoto (OS X) to get my images up and running on either CDRom media or my webpage. It works pretty well, and interesting enough in actually imports the stats of the photo taken right from my camera (like shutter speed, flash power setting, date taken, image size, aperture, etc...)

Check out Photoshop 7 too! It has that new file browser built in and that helps with file management.

Pretty nifty!

By the way, your Athlon machine sounds pretty friggin' nice! (understatement of the day)

I would have to say if I were to invest in a PC again, it would have to be an Athlon chip!

Well let's see...what would one want in a laptop for mobile imaging use? Here's a list of my functional requirements:

Eric's "import" laptop is the absolute cadillac but at ~2,500 the Image Tank is looking better and better. A small Sony Vaio at $1,200 - $1,500 might do the trick though.

Cheers

James

PS7 has a tool to build web pages complete with thumbnails for your images. I have not used it myself.

I used to do it all with a PHP script, but now, Breezebrowser is what I use for all of my image collections (for the web, I mean).

Here's an example:

Dolphins Slideshow

It's great! The thumbs page links to a slideshow complete with EXIF data, and the templates are fully customizable.

I've used photoshop for web galleries before, but I like Breezebrowser more.

Also... here's a shot of my computer. It's a little dim, but you get the idea.

for the PC, ACDSee is the absolute king of image browsers. Worth every penny.

The native XP browser is ok, but it won't do full screen slideshows, right? It also stores the thumbnails themselves in a hidden file in the directory itself, which I HATE.

My notebook computer is actually less than $2000, once you get them quote you a "real" price. I'm not sure why they list prices higher than they actually sell them for. Strange.

Another Mac user weighing in. I've been doing scuba for awhile and I'm just starting out in uw photography. I can't wait to start loading up iPhoto with my dive pix.

In response to James' question; I had two picturebooks, the first and second models released. I quite liked them, as I used them for scuba travel, and for lugging between work and home. Very small, extreme portability. Since I have a fully decked desktop machine for "serious" computing, a device like this made sense for me.

The weird screen ratio was a pain and one of the reasons I eventually sold them, but they've improved the resolution to something more usable (I think it's 1280x600 now). The short height sucks if you're dealing with portrait-oriented photos, so stick to shooting landscape!

I'd consider getting one of these again, but with the downturn in the bay area computer geek economy I'm trying to watch my toy budget! It's nice to have a real computer on the road, but I think I'm going to get something like the Archos mp3 player/image backup device that's supposed to ship any day now. No photoshop-ing with that, but it's only $500-ish.

i do (C1VE) and i'm rather happy with it, although you have to get used to the screen size.

The screen is ok to sort out bad pics and burn the good ones, but it is simply too small for image processing and you have to zoom in a lot to be able to see details.

Sabine

Only experience I had with a mac was awful so I stay well away from them.

Home PC is (currently) 2,27 GHz P4, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB + 30 GB Hard Drives, firewire, USB 2.0, a3+ printer, CDRW 40x - Photoshop 6, ACDSee, PIEStudio and Windows XP Professional.

Mobile PC is P3 450, 6GB hard drive, 64 MB RAM, fire wire, same software except Win 98SE.

Allows me to do all I need on a 3 week trip. Back up onto CD via Cyclone CDRW external firewire drive.

For you lucky people in the US - check out www.exchange-usa.com as they were selling Archos mp3 for $150.

Anybody willing to post me one here?

Computing gives another pull your hair out frustrating hobby too :-).

The DVD ROM drive on the laptop is pure gold for those long airport waits, etc!