After muddling along with an old and slow (and small – 12″ screen!) Dell laptop, I broke down and used part of my bonus from work to get myself a desktop. The computer is a quad core running Windows Vista on 3GB RAM, and compared to my old laptop, it’s a speed demon. I shoot entirely in RAW and use Canon’s Digital Photo Pro for my post-processing, and in the past, I’ve actually fallen asleep while waiting for pictures to render. It’d go something like this: Click to next picture –> rendering….rendering….rendering….rendering…rendering… It’d take about 10 seconds for each picture to render, which may not sound like a long time, but when you shoot 150-300 pictures on a single outing (which is probably what I average, regardless of what I’m shooting) even when you’re deleting nine out of every ten pictures, it still takes a very long time.
Oh, and I also upgraded Digital Photo Pro (free with purchase of any Canon DSLR) to the newest version (3.5, I believe.) OMGSOAWESOME. There are some nice little things like a thumbnail viewer underneath the tools panel, but by far the best part is the noise reduction. They did some sort of technological wizardry with their noise reduction algorithm, and WOW what a difference it makes. With my old version, there were only three spots on each of two slider bars (luminance and chromiance) to set noise reduction (and one of the three spots was “none”, so I don’t really count that) and I really didn’t notice much in the way of difference between the settings. On this one, the degree of NR goes from 0-20 on each of the two bars, and the difference even between, say, a 0 and a 2 is definitely noticeable. It’s good stuff, I tell ya!
So yeah. The new computer is awesome. The new monitor, however… I have mixed feelings. It’s a 21.5″ Acer widescreen, 1920×1080, and while I love the wide screen, the color needs some serious adjustment. I’ve tried QuickGamma and the Lagom display tests, but I still feel like the color is off. What can I say–I’m picky. One of these days I’ll probably break down and get something like the Spyder2 Express, but for now I’ll just correct as best as I can. I, er, kind of spent my discretionary income on the computer.
Side note – WTF is it with Vista not having any PowerToys? Seriously?? Whose bright idea was that??? I miss my Image Resizer, dang it!! I’m using VSO Image Resizer now, and while it works well, I’m still hoping MS decides to bring back the PowerToys. Weak.
In any case, this computer really flies, and if I can get my color issues worked out, I’ll be a happy camper. :-)