Photography Thailand Forum

[ThailandJohn]

I am an amateur photographer, (because I have not charged for my pictures), and I am looking to buy a new computer.

I currently use a laptop PC and use Photoshop and  Photodex CompuPic and Pro Show Gold as my picture programs.

Half of the year I am in Thailand.

When I am home in America I connect a 17" Envision monitor to my laptop.

I   want to be able to print top quality prints using photo labs like Miller's and make professional albums, slideshows and power point presentations.

I can afford getting good equipment but the way things change, I want to make sure I get something that will last for a while and not be yesterdays technology.

What are your opinions.

[murray]

Check out the Dell M90 or M65 - both have the latest duo processors and be sure to take a look at the Alienware laptops as some of them have dual graphics cards and 2 hard drives which will speed up Photoshop a lot.  Be sure to max out the ram on whatever machine you get.  Ram and a 2nd hard drive for a scratch disk are the most important speed factors with Photoshop  -- more important than the processor speed. 

Or you could get one of the new Mac Intel Powerbooks.... but I'm waiting until they are out for about a year before I get one myself.

I have both a PC and Mac G4 laptop and I always prefer using the Mac for Photoshop.

www.dell.com  www.alienware.com  www.apple.com

Steve

[ThailandJohn]

Thank you very much for the information.

I looked at the new Mac and your info has given me more to consider.

I have never used a Mac but it seems that Mac only people put the PC way down on the list.

[David Salmanowitz]

The new Macs will run Photoshop but in what is referred to as the "Rosetta" mode, as the new Macs have Intel chips. Adobe has not updated Photoshop for the new Macs as they have done previously as the rewriting of the program would be too expensive, where they were able to do it when the Macs has Power PC chips.  It will run but not quite as fast as on a Power PC Mac. When Adobe releases the new version of Photoshop next spring it will run, and extremely fast at that. All that aside I am a confirmed Mac man myself, and would get the Mac laptop. Obviously you can use a Windows computer for many things, and I know people who do--but the Mac operating system is very stable and I know a slew of photographers who use them. I know of many who have switched from Windows to Mac, but do not know anyone who switched back. :-)

[Paul Whitehead]

I am running CS2 on an intel imac at the moment and I have a few small issues with it - it keeps crashing on opening, if anyone has the same issue I have found that by opening PS through Bridge the problem seems to go away but I still have the occassioanl crash. As David has noted it is also slightly slower than the powerpc chipped mac by about 30% I would estimate bteween my imacs. Other than that I have had no issues with moving over to the intel chip at all except version cue doesnt work at all (but thats ok cos i never figured out waht it was for anyway).