The other thing that happened this weekend was the purchase of a
new computer. Ended up getting one of those nifty (but large)
laptops that are classified as "workstations". Definitely a lot
of horsepower and a bigger, higher-quality. Also picked up a
WACOM tablet while I was at it.
I went with a Gateway (7330GZ). I know, I know, but these days
no choice is safe. I've got Compaq and HP laptops here at work
and their failure rate is pretty brisk. Dell was probably my
first choice, but I wanted to do a little comparison shopping.
First went to C*mpUSA and they tried to jam a $2300 beast down
my neck. Like that was going to happen. Next, went over to
B*stBuy and looked at the shmuck that they had there. But
lo-and-behold, here sat one lonely beast of a laptop that was
priced really well. Oh, and that screen was sooooo bright and
contrasty and sharp! (it also displayed the test images from
dpreview the best too) No other laptop (except for a high-end
Mac) had a screen anywhere as good and the screen was much
better than nearly all of the desktop LCDs. Spec-wise, the
thing just blew away the T*shibas and H*Ps laying there.
Something's wrong here with the price. I checked it over and
saw that it had a built-in Compact-Flash slot as well as
FireWire.
Ended up snagging one. We took the unopened box over to the Geek
Squad (really!) and had the guy with the broken glasses,
misbuttoned shirt and greezy hair do the system checkout.
(seriously, I'm not kidding). My major concern was that I
wanted a screen with ZERO dead pixels. That seems to be a
rarity these days. Every LCD in my department has multiple dead
spots as well as my wife's laptop. So, I really wanted to make
sure that mine was as good as possible. Nadda, not a single
dead pixel. I didn't use a magnifying glass, but came pretty
close to it.
Got home and looked at the receipt. Bummer. The WACOM was
supposed to have a $25 instant rebate. I didn't catch that at
the store. Well, the next day I went back to the store and got
that taken care of. Just out of curiosity, I walked over to the
laptop displays and did a double take. The price changed on the
laptop. Overnight it went up $150. Talk about timing!
Anyway, to the important stuff...
The new laptop is a real dream for working with images. The
screen's extremely-wide viewing angle has very little gamma
change when moving your head around. The colors are quite
accurate and the depth of detail is uncanny. I'll do some
additional profiling on the screen, but from what I've seen so
far, my onscreen test images are very close to the printed
output. I only had to do very minor tweeking of the gamma. I
could stand to put in some more RAM, but this thing is easily 10
times faster than my desktop it replaces and for processor
intensive things, it's probably 20-30 times faster. Never had a
computer with 1GB of processor cache before. (Pentium P4 mobile
3GHZ something). RAW file conversion went as fast as three
seconds per file, but averaged about five seconds each. I can
live with that. This computer processor is a power-hog and I
can see that cranking through a few hundred RAW file conversions
could really toast the battery in a hurry. Probably should get
a couple more batteries...
The WACOM will take quite a bit of getting used to, but I've
wanted one of these for a long time. It also came with
Ph*toshop Elements 3.0 (I know, 4.0 is now coming out). I
didn't know that 3.0 could convert both Minolta RAW files and
Olympus RAW files. Doesn't do too bad of a job except the
colors look a little pasty in comparison to Olympus
Viewer/Studio. They are a bit sharper, though. That
shadow/highlight and noise-reduction aspect isn't bad either. I
just need to figure out how to get the colors a little snappier
and skintones back where I want them. No biggy either way as
I'm pleased with Viewer, except for the fact it won't process
Minolta files and I typically shoot events with the cameras
interchangeably.
Speaking of the Minolta A1 files, I did try Elements 3.0 at
converting a couple of my Grand Canyon shots. Very impressive!
The noise level (even with the noise-reduction turned off) is
about half that of the Minolta converter. When pixel-peeping, it
looks like the alignment of the bayer pattern is more accurate
with Adobe's converter. The colors are yucky, but the sharpness
(at least a full step on an USAF lens res chart) increase and
noise reduction are definitely a nice offset. Talk about
breathing new life into an old camera--this might delay a new
camera purchase by another year which by itself would pay for
the laptop.
Ok. I don't want to ramble and this definitely isn't a "brag"
post. I just wanted to pass on some info on a purchase that I'm
very pleased with for photographic applications. I thought it
represented an acceptable "bang for the buck". It met and
exceeded my expectations and requirements. My only beef with it
is the rather whimpy feeling case. Must be a little more
careful than with one of my old bricks.
AG
__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|