OK here's my situation:

I plan on building a digital darkroom for my fiance who is a photographer who for health reasons can no longer do her own printing. She just got her first digital camera (an Olympus 340R) but has no computer of her own to use it with and still wants to be able to use her non-digital cameras (a 35mm and a medium format) for manual focus, etc.

The digital darkroom will need a computer to process the photos, a good printer to output them (I like what I've heard about the Olympus 330), and a film scanner.

Really this brings out my two hardware related questions:

1. For the computer to handle Photoshop without coughing all over itself what do I need? Obviously I would like a lot of RAM. Can anyone comment on Potoshop with a PIII vs. Photoshop with a Celeron? I know they're both fast chips but I just want to find out how much of a difference the SSE optimization makes. How about video memory? The new Celeron chipset has 4 MB of graphics memory onboard. Is this enough for its use as an image editor on a 17" monitor? How about on a 19"? If not, how much do I need? I'm listening to all reccomendations...

2. Film scanner advice? Because she uses a 35mm camera and a medium format camera I have been tempted by the Minolta Dimage Multi for both. However the price of this camera is super-high and I just wanted to hear more feedback on it. Comments on this and other film scanners that may fit my needs would be welcome.

I know this is a long post. Appreciate the advice!

-- Rafi Kam (rafikam@yahoo.com), July 28, 1999

Answers

celeron is plenty good enough, I think money is better spent on more ram than PIII. Get tons of ram (128+). 4mb is enough to 1152 X 864 at true color. you want 8mb above that. If you're viewing 1600 X 1200 images you probably want a 21" monitor that can do 75hz+ at this resolution, you'd also want the 8mb video ram, and a video card with a really fast DAC (300mhz+). The voodoo 2000 fits the bill and is about $100. Get a short bnc cable to the monitor. I suggest triniton/diamondtron over shadow mask for more vivid colors and a little brighter display. I think the viewsonic pt815 is a good value.

If you're just doing 1152 X 768 or less you could get by with 4mb ram, a good 17 or 19" monitor that can do 75hz+ at this resolution.

oly 330 printer sure looks good.

For film scanner, I know there aren't a lot of them that handle medium format, so be extra careful that the model you get supports it. Some friends of mine are enthusiastic about the nikon model that filters out dust with an IR scan, I don't know much about it.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), July 28, 1999.

Rafi:

I concur with benoit's assertion that you need to focus more on RAM than you do processor. However, I am less comfortable recommending a Celeron processor over another processor that specifically handles multimedia extensions. There are some excellent Pentium II (2) bargains out there at the moment. If you outfit a Pentium II with 128 megs of RAM, your system will be more than sufficient. Please keep in mind however that going with 128 MB RAM means you HAVE to have Windows 98, preferably the Second Edition. Win95 tends to slow down when you install more than 64MB RAM, or so the rumor goes.

Video memory is not as critical. Just make sure the card can display 24-bit color at least and you'll be fine. Benoit made very good points about the monitor and its refresh rate however. Pay close attention when considering 19"+ monitors. They should refresh at a rate higher than 75Hz (unless you want to induce epileptic siezures or something ). High res is very important in photo processing.

If your fiancee was not in need of medium format, there are some very very good 35mm scanners out there that would be worth considering. Medium format capability however will exponentially increase the prices you find for scanners. A good one will be better than $2,000 as my experience goes. This is another reason to consider a PII over a PIII. I personally am not impressed with the Minolta scanners, although I use a Minolta 35mm rig for my photography. However, my experience is not with the Dimage Multi.

Good luck...

-- Jeffrey Sevier (jsevier@one.net), July 29, 1999.

Jeffrey recommends PII over celeron because he thinks PII has greater support for multimedia extensions. bzzt. The reality is that they have exactly the same level of MMX support.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), August 03, 1999.

I think he's warning against the Celeron because of the cache size. Yes the Celeron's accesses its cache faster but I've been reading that it still loses out on performance in applications that use large files. Really there's no way in hell I'd buy a PII considering the superior performance of the cheaper Celeron. But the question is are the performance benefits of the PIII, especially in an optimized app like Photoshop, worth the price?

-- Rafi Kam (rafikam@yahoo.com), August 03, 1999.

The celeron has 128K cache vs PII's 512K, but here's the trick -- The celeron's cache is twice as fast as the PII's. Go figure. As a result in real world apps, the performance consistently benchmarks remarkably similar. One thing in PII's favor is the memory bus typically runs at 100mhz vs celeron's 66mhz, but surprisingly it doesn't make much real world app difference.

PIII's support for mmx2 is nice, offering maybe a 10% boost for some photoshop filter things. That's barely in the realm of perceptability. If your processor speed is in the ballpark, the main thing is having enough ram, that will make orders of magnitude difference. Photoshop luvs all the ram you can throw at it.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), August 04, 1999.

one more thing.. Photoshop is one notable area where macintosh shines, if you're inclined that way. :)

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), August 04, 1999.

Macintosh would work, including iMac. I bought a Mac in 1985, 1988, 1993, 1996, and 1998. I been using Photoshop since 1989.

-- Christopher J Batdorf (chrisbat@xnet.com), August 07, 1999.