Please ignore anything I've written. My dad was so impressed with my thoughts that he went out and bought a new 4.4 megapixel camera. That's right 4.4 megapixels. At least he does own and use an A3 printer.
fobotsco: Any copy of photoshop turns to glue whether PC or Mac with these file sizes if you do anything more than sharpen or crop. The program writes huge files to swop disc as well as Ram. Can't stop the ****** doing it even with the 640 Mb of Ram I have on board.
An A4/letter image in 32 bit colour will be more than 30Mb and that's before you start playing with layers, transparency undo and history. Having a single level of undo means the file must be twice the original size for you to revert to the image prior to the last action.
Yes the extra pixels are nice as a zoom but those extra pixels alone cost as much as a decent SLR with a long zoom. Any 100 quid 35mm SLR puts the most expensive digital masterpiece to shame if you want image quality - fact!
Regarding Photoshop I absolutely guarantee it is faster on a G4 Mac despite the apparent difference in clock speeds. A 733Mhz Mac beats a 1.4gig PC due to far more efficient processor design. On the other hand you won't notice a jot of difference when you write e-mail.
I strongly recommend Photoshop Essentials for all digital snappers. Less than a quarter of the Photoshop price and everything is tuned for what the photographer needs in language they understand. If you want to remove red-eye you simply click on the red-eye button.
Totally intuitive for everything you need yet the full monstrous power of Photoshop lurks underneath for when you want to get really ambitious with layers, superimposition Etc. A snip at around 65 quid and both PC and Mac are on the same disk.
Tosh, my reference to buying from the likes of Digital Depot may not have been absolutely clear. The cameras are new, sealed and unused. I bought an Olympus 920 Zoom with a construction date 18 months ago for less than £200 including taxes, postage and packing. I could have bought a digital video camera as well and still lay out less than the new 4.4 and upwards cameras.
As ever, I know I'm peeing into wind with my comments. The truth is we love the new and sexy kit but at least I tried - harumpff (shuffles into distance muttering....)
Regards
Rob
[ 20 October 2001: Message edited by: PPRuNe Towers ]