Why Mac for high end photo editing?
For years you see professional photographers claim that Macs are better for photography then PC. As a photographer who has had my works published world wide and I teach photoshop and I have written course work sold nation wide I beg to differ and here is why.
1. PhotoShop is PhotoShop is PhotoShop. PhotoShop is exactly the same on a Mac as a PC with absolutly no difference whatsoever period.
2. The PC is faster at photo editing task then even the G5. Look at this benchmark http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...id=7-6451-6410
That was compareing high end with high end but most photographers including pro can not afford or justify that expense so lets look at mid price around $1200 to $1800.
I built a computer for a professional wedding photographer who is 100% digital. I built him a P4 2.8E, 1 gig of ram, 160 gig hd, 8x dvd burner, asus motherboard with 8 usb ports and 2 firewire ports. He got a Mitsubishi 19" flat screen apeture grill CRT moniter. ATI 9200 128 meg graphics card. Now I know this forum you are all probably thinking why not a 9800. Because he is using PhotoShop and has zero interest in gaming. The 9200 for PhotoShop which is 2D not 3D has just as good and just as fast display for PhotoShop. All of that for $1100. That computer can do everysingle last thing in PhotoShop and run all RAW conversion, DB or sorting apps with good speed. You want to work with a 100meg image with 100 layers you can do it with that machine and do it at a good speed.
Now what does Mac offer for that price? Forget a G5. Closest thing is an iMac. The cheapest they have is $1300. Here is what you get for $1300 which is $200 more. You get a 15" LCD display which is way smaller and not as good as even a cheap CRT. But not my friend didn't get a **** CRT. The CPU is 1ghz G4 which according to benchmarks including PhotoShop that CPU is a third of the speed. You get a geforce4 MX 32 meg card. For PhotoShop there is no performace difference in the 2 cards but ATI has a slightly better 2D display quality then Nvidia and that is why ATI is widely used in photo design circles. You get 256 megs of ram. Now in Photo editing circles where we work with Photos that are 50 megs in size with lots of layers 512 is bare minimum and 1 gig is suggested. It comes with an 80 gig hd which is half the size. A combo drive which is dvd read only and cd burner.
The Mac is too under powered to be a suitable computer for the digital photographer. You can edit a few small photos and it is good enough to display your photos on the web but for prints forget it. The computer will either be bogged down bad or will not be able to do the function at all.
As ignorant Mac users put it. PC gets viruses every nano second and crash about as often. BULL! It is true Windows XP has more viruses that can harm it. It isn't because Windows is **** and Mac OS X is groovy. It is because Mac has 2.5% of the market and Windows has 95% of the market. If one gets good virus protection software like the free AVG and good firewall coupled with common since you will have a trouble free computer. I haven't been affected by a virus in 10 years. Windows XP is just as stable. It will run months at a time and it won't crash in the middle of photo editing.
Mac is so 10 years ago the PC rules today. The Mac has zero advantage period. So when you choose a photo lab choose one that uses a PC. Instead of being mindless lemmings following tradition they did thier research and learned the PC not only has caught up with Mac in photo editing it flat out blows it away. They will pass the savings onto you the customer. Please be sure to thank them.