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How much faster are computers than a year ago?

T

Testosterone boy

New member
My main workhorse is a year old. 3.1 HT with 2 GB ram. Not bad but I use the hell out of it for Photoshop etc.

I am a very busy wedding and event photographer. So busy that I recently spent a week in bed from exhaustion. But the summer wedding crush is now over. Should I wait until next year for another model? Is now a great time to buy?

Have they changed much?

The standard models retailing around $1400 is what I buy.
 
they're not faster; they just run cooler.
 
A year is too soon to consider replacing your machine, there hasn't been that much progress.

The old rule used to be that you could get three years out of a system before applications and operating systems pass it by. I think the interval is growing, progress seems to be slowing down, and machines are remaining viable for much longer.
 
jnuts said:
BTW, how many pics do you normally shoot at a wedding?
Click to expand...

Well...I have 24 packages so the numbers vary greatly.

I tend to get big, polite, and functional 'kind of Christian' groups.

For those, I may average 900 photos taken with 450 developed. Keep in mind that I'll generally take each group shot several times so I can find one with everyone looking at the camera and smiling. Dancing photos are a pure numbers game. You almost have to take the pic before it happens. May take four for each one that I print.

The more photos that I take, the better the final batch is. Almost always. Large active groups generate large active batches.

BTW...have you figured the color temperature of incandescent bulbs with gold reflectors?
 
Testosterone boy said:
Well...I have 24 packages so the numbers vary greatly.

I tend to get big, polite, and functional 'kind of Christian' groups.

For those, I may average 900 photos taken with 450 developed. Keep in mind that I'll generally take each group shot several times so I can find one with everyone looking at the camera and smiling. Dancing photos are a pure numbers game. You almost have to take the pic before it happens. May take four for each one that I print.

The more photos that I take, the better the final batch is. Almost always. Large active groups generate large active batches.

BTW...have you figured the color temperature of incandescent bulbs with gold reflectors?
Click to expand...

Regular incandescent bulbs are about 2750 K the cool white versions run around 4100 K
 
Mr. dB said:
A year is too soon to consider replacing your machine, there hasn't been that much progress.

The old rule used to be that you could get three years out of a system before applications and operating systems pass it by. I think the interval is growing, progress seems to be slowing down, and machines are remaining viable for much longer.
Click to expand...
I concur, considering how cheap RAM and hard drive space is, which is a primary limitation with applications now, you can have a viable system much longer than five or ten years ago. :coffee:
 
mountain muscle said:
Regular incandescent bulbs are about 2750 K the cool white versions run around 4100 K
Click to expand...


The gold reflectors is what threw me yesterday. I guess well....the photos look right.

You can bounce 3000K off of blue reflectors and may end up over 6500K.
 
Testosterone boy said:
BTW...have you figured the color temperature of incandescent bulbs with gold reflectors?
Click to expand...

Haven't messed with much lighting other than flash. I've read a lot on studio lighting and am going to borrow a set of lights to mess with for taking portraits.

My lighting problems are different - arena and gyms. Horrid lighting. I need high shutter speed and the light is uneven and low to begin with.

I shot a horse show this weekend and the indoor arena drove me nuts. Outdoor went pretty good, though in and out clouds drove me to Av mode.
 
jnuts said:
Haven't messed with much lighting other than flash. I've read a lot on studio lighting and am going to borrow a set of lights to mess with for taking portraits.

My lighting problems are different - arena and gyms. Horrid lighting. I need high shutter speed and the light is uneven and low to begin with.

I shot a horse show this weekend and the indoor arena drove me nuts. Outdoor went pretty good, though in and out clouds drove me to Av mode.
Click to expand...

JNUTS,

Are you using digi or film?
 
mountain muscle said:
On another note, if you are getting paid to shoot, why not invest in a strobe for the indoor arenas?
Click to expand...

No strobes allowed at horse shows or gymnastics meets. It calls for fast glass.

An 85/1.8 is awesome for gymnastics - I can't afford that right now (nor justify it...yet)
 
jnuts said:
No strobes allowed at horse shows or gymnastics meets. It calls for fast glass.

An 85/1.8 is awesome for gymnastics - I can't afford that right now (nor justify it...yet)
Click to expand...

Canon has a nice 50 f/1.0 too.
 
Unless you can double your megahertz a cpu upgrade won't be worth it. Since there is no 6.2 gigahertz cpu you'd have to look at a dual core. Multithreading performance is about 1.5-1.6 X a single so I calculate you'd need a dual core 4.1 gigahertz cpu to justify the effort...not sure when that will hit the market.
 
mountain muscle said:
Canon has a nice 50 f/1.0 too.
Click to expand...

True, but the range is too short for in a gym - also not sure if it's USM - needs to have fast autofucus on the lense.
 
Hey DT, how do you like that Plextor DVD drive?

I need a new drive. My old CD-ROM is a 32X Panasonic, and the drawer won't open anymore. My Plextor CD-RW 4/2/20 is ancient and slow but still works perfectly, but it's a SCSI drive and my SCSI card isn't bootable, so at present I don't have a bootable CD drive. And I don't have DVD on this system. So a new drive would be killing at least three birds with one stone. I'm partial to Plextor, but I dunno if they still have the advantages over the competition that they did 6-7 years ago. And I wanna make sure that whatever drive I get comes bundled with the Roxio software, not Nero.
 
plextor only had an advantage for scsi. my burner isn't dual layer so i need another one. you can't go wrong with NEC, Pioneer, Lite-On, BenQ or sony.
 
Dial_tone said:
plextor only had an advantage for scsi. my burner isn't dual layer so i need another one. you can't go wrong with NEC, Pioneer, Lite-On, BenQ or sony.
Click to expand...

Audio guys claimed that Plextor drives create CDs with lower error-rates, compared to the competition. Like orders of magnitude lower. Supposedly it was all in the firmware, since Plextor buys their drives from other sources.
 
Mr. dB said:
Audio guys claimed that Plextor drives create CDs with lower error-rates, compared to the competition. Like orders of magnitude lower. Supposedly it was all in the firmware, since Plextor buys their drives from other sources.
Click to expand...


I read that Plextors were made by NEC or Pioneer (not sure which)...who then starting offering their own line to the public.
 
I have a P4 3Ghz, 1GB RAM with 120GB HD and Radeon 9800 Pro. That's enough for regular office tasks and gaming.
 
In January my P4 2.0GHz will be five years old. It's still doing well and I don't see that changing much in the next few months. I'm planning a major system upgrade sometime next year, depending on if I crave transparent windows enough to upgrade to Vista. :rolleyes:
 
Testosterone boy said:
I read that Plextors were made by NEC or Pioneer (not sure which)...who then starting offering their own line to the public.
Click to expand...

The difference between Plextor and whoever supplies their drives isn't the hardware, it's the firmware on the internal ROM chip. That's what makes the difference in error rates, supposedly. NEC, Pioneer, Samsung, or whoever supplied drives to Plextor did not have the same firmware technology.
 
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