Configuring Your Digital Darkroom: Your perfect Mac system, built for the way your work.
Every serious photographer has a different aesthetic, a different business philosophy, a different workflow. So it’s only fitting that you be able to configure a digital darkroom to suit your individual style. Here are a few issues to consider as you build your perfect Mac.
A Portable Darkroom
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Processor speed is generally considered the single most important aspect of a computer’s speed. The MacBook Pro can be configured with either a 2.0 or 2.16GHz dual-core Intel engine. Both pack the power of two processors inside a single chip, and the top-of-the-line model delivers up to five times the speed of any previous Mac portable. Make your decision depending on the amount of time you spend in front of your laptop and the applications you run on it. Either way, your choice is between fast — and faster.
RAM. Photographs are increasing in size with each new camera model and the amount of RAM in your computer has a big impact on how fast these photographs can be processed. The MacBook Pro comes with two SODIMM slots that can support up to 2GB of RAM. Time is everything for those on the go — RAM is a valuable asset when you’re against a deadline.
Hard drives. Storage space for your files and photos, your tools, your archives, your history — how much do you need to carry with you? MacBook Pro offers a choice of 80, 100, or a voluminous 120GB of digital storage, accessible from drives that read and write at 5400-rpm. If ultra-swift access to files is a concern, you can also opt for a 7200-rpm drive — especially useful if you often work with large files on your laptop, or with applications that require a lot of Virtual Memory.
Laptop display. Choose your MacBook Pro screen as you would the finish of your photographic paper. The matte display helps eliminate glare — important if you spend a lot of time working in bright or high-contrast conditions. The glossy display allows for a wider gamut of color and increased brightness — ideal for working on images if you have more control over the relative glare of your surroundings.
Second display. Your Mac laptop is capable of driving a second display — very useful when you’re in your studio and want more screen real estate to work in. High-resolution Apple Cinema Displays are available in 20-inch, 23-inch, and massive 30-inch models — offering a dramatic canvas for your images.
The Studio Powerhouse
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Processor speed. The Mac Pro computers are, by far, the fastest Macs ever. Every Mac Pro in the lineup features two of the newest Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. Two dual-cores: One powerful quad workstation. And you get to decide how fast it flies: 2GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3GHz.
RAM. All Mac Pro workstations support a new, fully-buffered memory standard that allows for more memory capacity, higher speed memory, and better memory reliability. You can install up to 16GB of 667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered Error-Correcting Code (ECC) memory in every Mac Pro system. Fly through your high resolution digital images by adding RAM — 4GB is a good starting point for today’s digital darkroom.
Internal storage. With four hard drive bays, the Mac Pro family can accommodate up to 2TB of storage, accessible at a swift 7200 rpm. Choose your internal storage to suit the way you organise your assets. Get two drives and you can configure one as a worry-free automated backup. Get three drives and use one as a System disk, the second as a Projects disk, and the third as a backup. Whatever configuration you choose now, it can always grow and change as your photo business does.
Graphics card. Designed to turbocharge picture-handling at the hardware level, your choice of a graphics card can influence the speed and performance of Aperture and other powerful visual applications. Three stellar graphics card options lets you choose the card that meets your specific needs. The baseline NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT card capably handles most tasks, but you’ll notice a considerable improvement with the ATI Radeon X1900 XT card or the workstation-class NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 card.
Second optical drive. Every Mac Pro comes with a 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support for burning portable data discs, including DVD+R DL, DVD-R, CD-R, CD-RW. If you need to produce a lot of CDs or DVDs — for backing up files, sending out special promotions, or mass-producing copies of your DVD-based digital portfolio — a second drive will make you more productive.
Apple Cinema Displays. Great images deserve to be displayed beautifully. Apple offers a variety of displays to meet your studio needs. The 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display offers enough real estate to review multiple images, side by side. The 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display provides the exact resolution to display widescreen HD material. And the 20-inch Apple Cinema Display is a practical solution for smaller spaces that still require perfect pixel representation.
