Powerbook good enough as standalone?

[John_van_Rosendaal]

I'm moving to Europe later this year and want to buy a good computer to do my post-processing before I leave the USA. I plan to do stock and model photography while in Europe and need a portable computer solution. I currently work on a PC.

The options I seem to have are as follows:

- two PCs (one for home, one for the studio)
- one portable (either a laptop or the Mini Mac)

I doubt any PC laptop is good enough to use as a standalone computer for photo editing, but I've heard good things about the Apple Powerbooks/Powermacs. Would they indeed be good enough as a standalone solution? If not, is the Mini a good solution?

Thanks for your help.

[RogerMonroe]

John,

You may find the current Powerbooks speed lacking (compared to Pc laptops)- maybe not. If possible wait for the Macintel books to come out- much much faster. That being said, swapping out a 7200 drive for the stock drive and maxing the ram out can make quite a difference.

I have a 12 inch 133mhz with a 7200rpm drive and 1.5 gigs of ram. I use it to archive on location, but I'd go nutty using it as a heavy editing platform.

The Macbook pro would be a great solution if you can wait.

[Ken_Bennett]

The Powerbooks are really nice, but strictly from a speed-of-processing point of view, they are much slower than PC laptops. That said, I used a 1.25gHz G-4 Powerbook for almost 3 years for everything -- and I only recently added a G-5 dual tower at the studio as an image processing work station. I still use the PB on location, but it was just getting too slow with the larger files from my Mark II bodies.

If you are already a PC user, you will probably find that a PC laptop is your best bet. I'm not bright enough to figure out how to use a PC, so in your situation I would use my Powerbook as my only computer.

You might look at the laptop story on the news page of this website.

Ken

[Josh_Hawkins]

I'm currently using a g4 1.67mhz powermac as my only computer. Works well enough, though it is does drag a little when batching a bunch of 5D raws. I'll edit off an attached monitor or the laptop monitor (both are calibrated). I think it's good enough for a stand alone, but I'd take a serious look at the new intel macs because while you may not get the advantages now, you will in a few months when everybody starts releasing the universal binary software. Also figure that at some point down the road you'll add another desktop machine just for processing speed. My 2 cents.

[Paul_Graham]

[ QUOTE ]
I doubt any PC laptop is good enough to use as a standalone computer for photo editing, but I've heard good things about the Apple Powerbooks/Powermacs.

[/ QUOTE ]

nope - its the other way around actually

PC notebooks are the ones that are totally powerful enough to use as stand alone (and all the apps work in native form - Photoshop, Raw processors, etc)

Mac notebooks are woefully underpowered and poor performers when it comes to pro photo needs.
Apple is desperately trying to update them at present, but the software isn't ready, so avoid for now.

try a Pentium M machine 2Ghz or so - it is astonishingly quick. You can get them with DVD burners, dual 120Gb hard drives, firewire, 17" wide displays - whatever you want, and cheaper too... as you say you work on a PC already and must have PC software, then this is a no brainer.

[Johan_Elzenga]

It's not only the power, it's also the screen. What good is all that processing power if you have a lousy screen so you can only guess the colors?

[Paul_Graham]

the screen range across PC laptops is probably superior right now also. there's a whole host of to choose from, x-bright, clear-vue, IBM's best and the top ones by Sharp are quite astonishing.

however for critical work you can of course always buy a stand alone external screen wherever you are and calibrate + use that for editing work.