imac advice?

[lindys]

Hi all!

Well I am finally getting a desktop computer. The old laptop is still soldering on but not cutting it with all of the digital photography I am doing these days.

So I have decided to get an imac! (well part of it is my birthday pressie! I have not quite figured out how to pay for the rest yet ) It is going to be weird for a while as I have only ever used a PC, but I hear great things about the Apple's in photography circles.

Does anyone have any advice regarding hard drive size, speed, software, etc? I am mainly using for photos and will be installing Photoshop CS3 one day.

TIA!
Lindy

[Tracey]

I LOVE my mac. Although it does sometimes get frustrating as some website downloads are not mac compatible such as the e-tax (online tax) software.

on my laptop right now, but will check whats in my desktop one later, I forget what speed hard drive etc. But it is handling everything I do with digital photography and editing. Essentially the more programs you want open at one time the more speed and memory (not hard drive) you need. Will tell you my specs later as they are perfect.

Software, I took mine with the standard provided stuff, and added the microsoft package (word, powerpoint excel) I use this instead of the mac word processing for compatibility with PC if I email files to people etc.

The mac provided software (iphoto) is not the greatest for photo editing, but it still does a fantastic for basic editing, I can often just use that, but for fancier work I need photoshop and sometimes illustrator as well. You can get an adobe design package that has a couple of the programs together sometimes it does not cost much more than a single program.

I hope that all makes sense

[tikki]

we're a mac family here, i'd never go back to the old ibm/pc thing I LOOOVE the mac!!!

We have a iMac and a new Macbook, I have no idea about the hard drives of either but Andy uses the iMac to do his editing for his tv show and he uses a professional editing suite. He does have two external hard drives connected to it for additional backup ... or something.

Our MacBook is really new and apparently very fast with massive hard drive ~ andy says he could run the editing suite on this one too; when you switch it on you have the option of using the Mac based programming or Windows Operating system, which is handy although I've never used it . i prefer the Mac operating system now, it's just not as clunky.
I have a microsoft package too, so use that for word stuff.

I'll ask for what the specs are when he gets home if you like

[lindys]

Thanks guys- Tik that would be great

Would renting one be a sensible option to consider? Or is buying better?

[melchpeppi]

Im not sure but we area maccers too here . Im only starting out with photography and really dont even know how to use photoshop but I know one day I will get the gist

We got ours for the recording side of things. When we get back into writing music again, with all our spare time

I will ask Kieran about ours too - Im like you Tik, I dont *really* have much of an idea about it but I wouldnt go back to PC


eta - I didnt mean that Tik had no idea!!!! Oh you know what I mean, dont you?

[Tracey]

ok I have 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (I imagine they should have newer faster of this by now) but this is definately enough for the giant photo files I edit and design with.

Memory is 2GB (I know when I got mine they only came with 1GB I had to ask for extra to help the computer run several editing programs at once with ease, and it does)

I have a 232 GB hardrive, have not even used half yet and I have thousands of photos saved on the computer.

I hope that helps

oh and the design package I got was adobe creative suite 3.

Also dont forget if you or any family is student of any kind you can get awesome discounts on macs and particularly software (huge savings on adobe stuff).

[ness]

Can't help on the techie stuff but I do WUV my Macbook