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Choosing a Computer System for Digital Imaging
The high end Nikon 8000 desktop scanner can scan Medium format and costs
around $3000. The quality is probably good enough for most purposes.
If you use a digital SLR be aware that Kodak seems to favour the Apple platform
somewhat and if you shoot with a Canon and want to use RAW files, a Windows
PC will offer you many more options. Canon's own software is poor but they make
an SDK for the PC platform only which has resulted in several excellent third party
applications.
-- Andrew Grant, January 16, 2002
About the different kinds of drives, I think deciphering the family of DVD drives is
probably one of the most confusing decisions when building a computer system
nowadays. This is a good link from CNET if anybody wants to learn about the
different types.
http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1091-8-6270835-5.html?tag=st.co.1091-8-
6270835-1.txt.1091-8-6270835-5
IMO, I disagree with the article that DVD-RAMs are more versatile than DVD-R/
RWs. I think it depends on whether you find use for DVD-RAM's double sided
disks or not. Unlike DVD-RAMs, DVD-R/RWs can author movie disks(using
DVD-R disks) which may be important to some, and they are generally faster than
DVD-RAMs. DVD-R/RW seems like the most popular format right now (I think
this is what Apple's Superdrive basically is), but the DVD+RW (not mentioned
here) is also popular since it allows you to use the drive like a hard drive, but it
may not be as economical as the DVD-R/RW, depending on your usage. Confused?
So am I;)
As far as the different types of CD-R/RWs to get and some other good information
on them, here's another good article.
http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1091-8-8020643-1.html?tag=st.co.1091-8-
8020643-4.subnav.1091-8-8020643-1
I thought it was interesting that budget Comp/USA disks had a lower BLER
(BLock Error Rate)than the pricey Sony disks. The Yamaha disks though
outperformed them all. However, as the article mentions, you should not expect any
consistency from budget CD-R/RWs like the CompUSA ones, because they may
use different OEMs for different batches.
About striping your disks, if you're planning to do this, it's worth mentioning that
http://www.photo.net/photo/computers (11 of 33)7/3/2005 2:19:07 AM