Laptops for your digital photography

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2/17/2004 11:55:26 AM

Hmm... well, offhand, any decent laptop with good ram and processing power will serve well as a photography laptop.

Some thoughts:

USB and Firewire ports on a laptop for interfacing with scanners and card readers.

USB 1.0/2.0 ports are typically powered if you connect a USB device directly to the port on the laptop. This works great for card readers and USB powered scanners.

Firewire ports are powered ports only if they are the full sized connectors. The mini-firewire connectors are not powered. This is important if you plan on hooking up a firewire card reader, external drive which uses laptop power, or a cd/dvd burner.

Windows based laptopss will have PCMCIA/PCCARD slots for reading memory cards or for attaching external devices. This is often in addition to USB ports and micro-firewire ports.

Apple based laptops will typically not have a PCMCIA/PCCARD slot and favor a USB and full sized Firewire port.

Both types of laptops will have CD burners and the Apple Powerbooks will have DVD/CD burners.

For things like Scanning, Raw file conversion, Photoshop, web, email, etc. Both laptops types are comparable as the same programs tend to be available on both. The only issue with the Windows based ones are virii, worms, and freqeuent security issues.

So from a functionality point of view, you have about the same regardless of whether you go with a Windows based laptop or a MacOSX based laptop.

The real difference is price. Apple based products will tend to be more expensive, but the form and function of the laptop will be simpler and more minimalistic. Windows based laptops are cheaper in price, but the form of the laptop is what I would call confused: doesn't know if it should be a big walkman/cd player/movie player/laptop.

If you're looking for a simple and concise piece of equipment you can use, I'd go with the Apple iBook or Powerbooks. You will pay more and if you are not familiar with Mac OSX, you will have a sharp learning curve. However, you will also not have the hassle of viruses.

I own an Apple G3 900Mhz iBook and use it with Photoshop elements and iPhoto to do my albuming and basic editing of my photos. I have VirtualPC running on my iBook to run windows and a program called NeatImage to handle noise filtering(until they come up with a Mac based version of their software). My programming, web development, photography, and workprocessing are all done from this iBook. Current iBooks on the market are G4 based systems and have more processing power. A Powerbook would have even more processing power.

Regardless of whichever system you buy, however, make sure that it will have enough memory(256MB at least! 512MB or more if you can get it) and enough disk space. I have a 40GB hard drive and I am constantly deleting stuff I downloaded to make room for more images and image work. :

The biggest hard drives available for laptops is topping out at around 60-80GB. A good reason for an external hard drive. With a full sized firewire port, you won't need to cary around extra power cables and/or power adapters. The power would come from the laptop. A big plus for Apple laptops. ;)

For the Windows systems, Sony's laptops have built-in sony memory stick readers, so are a boon to those who use memory sticks for their cameras. Dell and Fujitsu make great laptops for a great price. Sager makes multimedia laptops which provide a good bang for the buck.

Good luck with your decision. I went with the iBook because it gave me the most functionality. It wasn't the cheapest solution though. :)

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2/17/2004 1:46:43 PM

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2/17/2004 5:35:37 PM

A firewire port is for connecting high speed devices to your laptop or computer. Hard drives, high res scanners, and cd/dvd burners come to mind.

Firewire ports come in 2 major styles: "big" 6-pin connectors which will supply power and data to the external device from the computer's internal power supply.

"small" 4-pin connectors which only serve to supply data, but no power to the external device. Devices which use the 4-pin connector will need their own power either through batteries on the device itself or through an AC power cord.

Examples:

Firewire "web" cameras will often use a 6-pin firewire connector because the camera is expecting to get power from the computer it is connected to. When a computer only has a 4-pin firewire port, an AC powered firewire hub is needed between the device and the computer.

Super portable external hard drives(2.5") will often use a 6-pin firewire connector plug since it can pull power from the computer instead of from a seperate AC power cable. Thus making it more portable.

Bigger external drives(3.5") will typically work with either 6-pin or 4-pin ports and will have an AC power plug for wall/outlet power.

Short answer:

Firewire ports are data ports. Computer to device communication. Firewire ports on a computer with 6-pins(pentagon shaped port) are what they call "bus powered", power and data flow on the cable. 4-pin ports were created to save space and to take the burden of power regulating out of the computer and into the external device.

Some devices expect power from the cable and will not function when plugged into a 4-pin port even with an adapter cable. Hence the suggestion to go with a laptop which offers the 6-pin port for the greatest level of compatibility.

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2/18/2004 4:37:15 AM

Personally, I am not a fan of laptops for photo editing. Plenty of people use them all the same.
I find that the limiting factor for laptops (for me) is the LCD screen - it does not go up to the resolution that I like to work in (1600 x 1200). I also find that my eyes become more tired, alot quicker looking at a laptop screen when photo editing. It is also harder to calibrate the screen for printing - due to the uneven light sources being emitied by the LCD.
I have spoken to some of the printers at my local lab about using the LCD Desktop monitors - they have informed me that they do not use them for any printing equipment due to the problems with colour calibration.
The other disadvantage with laptops - they cannot be upgraded - much beyond a bigger harddrive and more ram, maybe a dvd burner if it is not included - you can only hang out so many PCMCIA cards out of the side of the thing at one time - lol.
My only suggestion for you laptop, if you buy it - is to also buy a Normal (good quality .25 pitch or lower) CRT Monitior to plug into it - you can always do that later if the laptop monitor is not up to your requirements.
My only other advise - if you do not need it right now - don't buy it - in 6 months time you will be able to buy a better laptop for the same price (based on current market trends in Australia).
Another option maybe to upgrade your current Desktop (depending upon its specs) - DVD burners (also burn CD's) in australia are available now for under $200-00AUD

Regards,
Davin
www.davin-photography.com

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2/18/2004 4:38:28 PM

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2/18/2004 5:44:48 PM

Now my son has a Mac which he loves(it does take a learning curve). I notice many professional photographers use Macs in the field. I think the reason is they are somewhat lighter and can be smaller than a PC dependent on hardware you get. But that to me is also a drawback because a smaller screen also means more difficult to see for my old eyes. They are considerably more expensive than PC.
You wont get many popups w/mac because there are generally not enough mac users to warrant creating popup ads in mac format.
My suspicion is that most photographers download images into laptop in field to clear their discs or to quickly see how some pics look and then edit on larger screen later either using laptop or desktop. I may be wrong.
I would highly recommend a laptop from the standpoint that you can play with it at locations other than on desk. I am continually playing games, writing, editing on my laptop while watching tv or in my case I have mine sitting on back of couch at a window looking out at the 9 bird feeders in my backyard. So technically I can just take bird pic and turn around and download. So just how much enjoyment do you think I can endure? Good luck!
Mike
email:mhutchinson15@comcast.net

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2/18/2004 6:27:30 PM

nickmiltonphoto.

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2/19/2004 2:46:52 AM

Btw, popup ads are not OS specific. They are typically browser specific and employ javascript/java to perform the popup. Macs experience popups, but Safari, the default Mac Web browser, supports pop-up ad suppression. As does Mozilla.

All Apple laptops and most Windows laptops support a video out feature for TV output or CRT/external LCD output. I regularly hook up my laptop to a 21" Sun CRT while at work and to a 19" Sony CRT while at home.

I cannot speak for other Mac users out there, but I went with a Mac for all of the reasons I listed in previous posts and for the following reasons:
- Ease of use
- reliability
- virus free
- unix based OS
- location profiles to switch from home LAN, wireless, work lan, etc in seconds.
- click-drag-drop installation of most applications.
- quality color accurate/calibrated displays by default.

It comes down to your needs. I needed a reliable Unix based laptop for work and for play. The Apple iBook fit the bill. The price was more than I wanted to pay, but in the end, I'm glad I went with it as I've had coworkers complain and bemoan problem after problem with their laptops and virii and needing to re-install.

Getting a laptop doesn't mean small screen. If you want a bigger screen, get the 14", 15" or the 17" laptops from Apple. Get a 24" external LCD panel to hook up to it if 17" isn't enough. They will both be color calibrated within seconds and both work and look great.

Okay, that was a bit of ranting. *grins*

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2/19/2004 3:53:50 PM

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2/21/2004 5:59:47 AM

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2/21/2004 6:02:15 PM

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2/22/2004 6:42:42 AM

On the Apple, there is a program called iPhoto which is used to handle the organization, rotation, searching, etc of images. iPhoto sucks in pictures from a hard drive, cd, dvd, digital camera, or memory card. It can also export the images onto CD/DVD.

It is very easy to use and you can even order prints only through iPhoto via a Apple/Kodak partnership. Here are some peoples' experiences with their printing:

http://www.macintouch.com/iphoto4.html

As for transferring files between Apple and a Windows PC, they both support SMB or Windows file sharing. Share a folder on your Windows machine and share a folder on your Apple and they can now see each other's folders on the network. Click and drag copying between systems is pretty easy and works in both directions.

I have a Mac ibook, Windows XP Pro system, and a Linux box at home and I share images between systems through the network in such a manner. I also have a external Firewire/USB hard drive I use for archiving my images and for easy access between systems. I just format it to a FAT32 filesystem in Windows, Linux, or Apple(select DOS format). That way, it is accessible by all three operating systems.

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2/22/2004 11:27:27 AM