PC for photography

AnnRo

I've posted a query in the pc building forum about replacing a win xp pc but I thought I might ask here for photographer's opinions.

What would you recommend - replace with a win 8 pc or go for an apple imac. Camera is a NIKON D800 and photoshop cs6 is what is currently used (it's my husband that is the photographer). If we went for the Win 8 option - anybody any suggestions of a good pc and what spec should we be looking at.

Thanks.

5uspect

Macs are great but you pay a bit of a premium for them. There are educational discounts and stuff available tho.

I have an iMac in work and the screen is nothing short of glorious. However Dell use the same panel in their 27" ultrasharps.

They're also very well suited to photography with native support for viewing most RAW formats. I can't speak for Win8 but you need to install third party plugins on windows 7 to do this. Nikon iirc charge for theirs.

If it were me I'd take any Mac over the horror show that is Win8 anyday, OS X is a fantastic operating system. However everyone is different.

Stay away from the new low cost iMac tho. You give up too much performance for a modest price drop. It seems geared for bulk orders such as schools.

flyingsnail

I think mac vs pc is a a personal thing, personally I prefer pc.
If you are doing the build yourself there are a few things that may be worth bearing in mind. Pick a case with some spare room in case you want to add more hard drive storage later, a built in card reader can be very handy. Also if you are spending the amount of money you are talking about in the other thread then a good monitor and colour calibrator would be nice.

Alltherage

If you're adjusting specs for photography then beefier memory and a larger/ additional ssd for editing would be where I'd dump my money. whether you go apple or not is up to yourself.

D.S.

I have a iMAC 27", use Photoshop CC and have a Nikon D800, so am in a similar boat. I have put my view below (disclaimer - am not an IT expert - just speaking for how I use the mac for my photography purposes).

Overall - I think the iMAC has a great monitor and copes well with the high res files from the D800. For the D800, you are better of going as high on spec as you can afford. You will need the extra RAM, and processor speed (particularly if you and husband does a lot of panoramas/stitching, or post processes with a lot of layers etc) - on lower spec machines it can be a bit slow which is frustrating. I personally prefer the OSX operating system to Windows, and generally speaking, there are v little fiddly issues with the MAC in comparison to Windows - it just works and does what it says. I also have a NAS system hooked up so that my photography files are backed up away from the mac. From the reading I have done on harddrives, all harddrives (whether SSD or traditional) can fail at any time so have a back up plan for your files.

That said - since the lastest OSX release, the performance of my MAC has gone down somewhat. Though that may potentially be related to something else, but just calling out it's not all sunshine and lollipops with the macs. They are also expensive, in comparison to what else is out there.

For monitors - mac monitors are v v good. However, top of the line Eizo/ Dell / Asus are rated amongst the best for photography. They should also include inbuilt calibrators to keep the colors on the monitor calibrated. If going with the mac, hopefully you guys already have a colour calibrator (e.g. spyder Elite) to keep the monitor in check.

Personally - when it comes to upgrading next time round, I'll def look at Apple again. I'll probably also have a think about building my own PC. I have looked at some Photoshop spec'd pcs and you can save a lot of processing time by building your own. It wouldn't be the cheapest option, but would be perfectly tailored to the workflow I have.

Suggest you think about the type of photography you and husband do and what type of performance you need today and over the next few years. That may help you decide on best option.

Paulw

It's one of those things really.

I have both. The iMac is great in performance, but it limited on expansion. OSX is great and products by Adobe run well on it.

But, I tend to do the majority of my editing on a PC. I have 3 monitors on it. When using Lightroom, I have the main screen for editing and the 2nd monitor to show finer detail (100% view). I have also added a lot more memory to my PC (Windows 7).

Extra storage for the PC is cheaper, since you can add in disks, while for the iMac you need external storage, which tends to be more expensive (for performance you want to use thunderbolt).

If I had the money, I'd get a Mac Pro, with at least two monitors, but that would cost a lot of money, much more than my PC setup.

Ben D Bus

A question rather than a suggestion, but would a Solid State HDD be worth including if going the self-build PC route (I'm thinking if replacing my HDD with an SDD)? Can a Mac HDD be replaced with a SSD? I know Apple can be a bit funny about things like that.

Paulw

Yep, SSD is faster than a HDD. I recently replaced the HDD in my MacBook Pro with an SSD and it works fine.

SSD is probably the fastest drive on the market right now.

AnnRo

Thank you for all your replies. We now have a lot more information to look at. Thanks again.

The Darkroom

you are best off going with a tower/pc. you can build these things from an empty shell if you so please but with a mac, apple catch you in their profit net as you can't really upgrade them unless you send them in to ...wait for it....''Apple''. Whereas with a pc you can just go on the internet and buy the parts you need to build a beast of a computer. At the moment I have 6GB of ram and it serves me fine and handles my OMD EM5 just fine. I like wins 8 and I got the tower for 449 euro without the moniter. but from that I can upgrade to a new processor and ram not to mention graphics card when I have the money.

Save your money and go with windows.

AlbertAmison

You can Build a Windows Pc by yourself. A decent graphics card a good 4th gen processor, and Win8.1 will suffice as you already have photoshop you might not need anything else.

Turquoise Hexagon Sun

I don't know if how computer literate you are or not but here's some things from someone who has intermediate knowledge of computers.

When looking around you'll want a minimum RAM of about 8gb's possibly 16gb's if you are thinking for the future. Your husband may be a photographer but maybe his camera shoots video and he may dabble in some video editing. Video editing large video files will be demanding on the computer.

Graphics card. You'll want to have a dedicated graphics card. This will allow being able to edit large files smoothly, particularly large video files.

Just some things to be mindful of when buying.

Also, Macs are great but expensive in comparison to the juice you can get from a Windows PC for much cheaper. It's really down to personal choice. I much prefer using the Mac OS, it's easier and more intuitive for me. I use Macs for video editing, Photoshop, Music Production.

However, PC's are so much cheaper. I dislike some of the Windows iterations lately and find them flimsy, software wise and physically. However, I'm looking in to buying a Asus N56VJ-DH71 which is a PC laptop often advertised as a "gaming" laptop. Gaming, like video production is heavy of graphics and a lot of moving things going on at once so it's ideal for my budget.

Keep looking, keep enquiring. Don't buy in to the Mac Vs PC bull****. You make your decision based on your needs, not what some tech-arsehole fanboy will tell you. Also, if you have friends with similar machines, you are looking at, see if you can play around with it and get a feel for the operating system and see if it suits you and your husband.

Best of luck.

M.J.M.C

If you're getting an SSD, most important thing to look out for is it's read/write speeds. The quicker the better
The differences in speeds can vary massively.
People often over look this.