Starting my photography course next week and iv been thinking for a while i need a new computer so with loans etc coming it seems a good time.
But should i go for a Mac or a PC? Most of the photography industry seems to be Mac equiped but given that my budget is not exactly limitless should i get a mediocre Mac or build top spec pc?
One of my mates has quoted me prices of between £200 for an alright pc and £400 for one that'll blaze. Comparing that to Mac prices it seems like the amazing pc is going to be about half the price of an okish Mac.
The college has Macs so i can learn to use them there and i beleive i could run Mac operating software on a pc if its got enough memory?
It jus seems like if i get a Mac im shelling out hundreds and hundreds of pounds that would maybe be better spent on equipment like lenses, a printer etc.

not that im a pro or anything (there are some on here.. MrSmith i think)

but i use a PC (well, Laptop these days) with Lightroom.. 2gig ram. and it works fine. it cost more than £400 tho.

im assuming ur friends quote doesnt include a screen for that price.

get a PC.. you can play games on it then

Well i already have a semi decent screen, a keyboard (the t doesnt always work right enough so maybe need a new one) and a mouse so the qoute was just for the unit. He hadnt included any graphics card i think as i said im not really into games and iv been told that for photo stuff you dont really need one. He had looked up all the stuff on ebuyer, im a bit thick with computers you see.

You can get a bit of educational discount on Macs if you're a student. You have to log in to the Apple store (specifically the link to the education store) from within your institution's network to get the best prices.

It's the other way around. If you have an Intel based Mac, you can run Windows on it. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html

Get a Mac, follow the industry and your college. Even the lowest spec current models are very good.

either will do, but work out what software you want to run and go from there. I run linux for one program only, and windows (pah) for the rest.

OS is becoming less and less important these days.

very true.

failing that, they have another educational store which anyone can access, you just have to enter the name of the college which you attend/work. the discounts there aren't as good though

If you have a screen and keyboard, get a mini mac. Pick them up or a good price on ebay or from Cancom or 2nd Chance PC and will cope with most things well. If not they are easily upgradeable.

I got a lowest spec. imac from ebay for £500, but if you have a monitor a mac mini, as recommended above, would probably be best.

Having a fairly ok PC and a pretty new macbook (2.6ghz, osx 10.5)

I can say quite simply that PC is your best option.

CS3 works extremely well on any dual core processor compared to previous versions. Its plenty fast enough even on basic entry level machines which are all now like 2ghz dual core and above.

I would reccomend you get a PC with the best processor and the most amount of good fast ram that you can afford, this will work out a hell of a lot cheaper than apple, and youll get an extremely high spec, fast fast rig.

Steel is real.






(I now use a Mac. After many years of using PCs, I hate Windows. Both will run most major photo editing packages, although Macs seem to recognise most RAW formats without having to install additional drivers. Also PCs have a nasty habit of fiddling with the headers of your picture files if you browse a memory card's contents, making them unreadable on your camera and making the card's contents prone to corruption if you try to take any more pictures on it before formatting it. Which is one of the reasons I hate Windows. Apart from that, it's a matter of personal taste).

I think this is what im going to do, iv been reading some reviews of the Mac mini and they all seem to say that its pretty slow with a small hard drive and cant really be upgraded.
To buy a mini new would be around £500 for the faster version and for this money i think i could get my mate to build me a much faster pc and get some software for it.

mac.
i don't know any professional photographer who uses a P.C. yes there are some out there i just don't know any.
when you start using different bits of specialist software the mac stuff always comes out first or P.C's aren't supported at all. the mac/design /photography thing started years ago because of the way you could allocate more ram to PS with a mac and the different way macs worked with colour profiles and the monitors look up table enabling the computer to tweak the RGB channels in a crt monitor in real time so you could see colour changes instantly.
things have moved on since then but you still can't run 2 monitors with 2 individual calibrated profiles with a PC without a resulting to a fancy graphics card and geek level software tinkering.
even my 'consumer' macbook runs an extra screen with it's correct profile and it only has inbuilt graphics no extra card.
P.C's often only have 4pin firewire which is useless for shooting tethered with digital backs that use 6pin powered firewire.

you don't actually need a fancy graphics card for photography, fast frame rates are for video/gaming.

some of these things may not be an issue now but they will be further down the line with your work.

+1

Given the rate that hardware becomes obsolete though, would i not be better getting a good pc for less money just now and upgrade to a good quality mac once iv done my course and am gainfully employed?

please please please get a mac

they may be slightly more expensive (education discounts are great though) but well worth it
and if you ran a pc and a mac with the same amount of ram the mac would run faster so you can't compare specs like that

plus your college macs
plus you won't get viruses or need to spend money of firewalls etc.
plus your mac won't go out of date in 2 years (i use a 4 year old g4 laptop and it runs fantasticilly even with the newest software)

yeah thats me done
(ps i don't work for apple)

Macs don't go obsolete very quickly - apart from the great shift over to Intel processors, of course. All the same, I know people who are running 10 year-old machines to do video editing, and while they're a bit slow, they still work. Whereas with PCs even if your hardware is still up to scratch, once Microsoft releases a new OS, you have to upgrade all of your software and your OS to keep up with all the latest drivers. It's a fucking con, really. Whereas I've plugged in memory cards from cameras that weren't even on the market when I bought my Mac and it reads the RAW files fine.

PS and it doesn't scramble the headers! grrr... I lost about 2 gig of photos because of that, was mightily pissed off. About a month's worth of street photography (I have a day job, so I accumulate slowly).

I bought a Dell dual core 2Ghz, 2Gb ram, 256Mb dual head DVI graphics card, 300Gb HD, for <£200. dell outlet store.

beat that apple mac users. Equivalent mac was £1150 (albeit with a monitor).

I'd be curious to know what software is necessary for photography that hasnt been ported to PC...

I'm not sure that Macs become obsolete as quickly. Certainly the PC owners I know seem to go through hardware more quickly.

Mac Mini... probably closer to £400 in the education store. Plus £30 at Crucial to max out your ram.

Anyway, MrSmith knows the score from what I've gathered.

thankyou so much for phrasing my point a million times better than me
+1

i can beat it - your Dell is a piece of shite.

there.

Can you tell that i wanted you all to say PC?
Guess i really should go for a Mac though. :(

If you can afford a mac (and don't play games all that much), do that.

Cancom do the mini mac for £380, dual processor, over 1gb of ram.

i'm an art director. every single photographer that i've ever worked with has used a mac. every single retoucher i've ever worked with has used a mac. get a mac.

Remember the new macs run on x86 hardware so you have another option.

If you are technically competent consider building a PC and running a patched version of OSX . As long as you pay attention to your component choice you should be ok. Loads of info here on what components to buy and what patches to download.

"I'd be curious to know what software is necessary for photography that hasnt been ported to PC..."

capture 1pro doesn't work on windows vista. phase one released it for the latest mac os because macs make up a large part of their market.
it's the most commonly used piece of software (along with cs3) amongst the photographers i know.

hassleblads Phocus software that was beta released is mac only. as this is likely to be the most used O.S. it will be available for pc's but the development isn't likely to be as rapid as for the mac.

there are some raw developers thet are pc only (breezebrowser?) but the good stuff seems to be mac ready first.

We can afford to since we haven't just taken out a mortgage to buy a Mac :P

I use it on XP. Any sensible PC user wouldn't look at that pustule Vista.

one thing though... IO on mac laptops (ok well any laptop really) sucks balls... I compare lightroom on similar speced desktop v. laptop (either in OSX or Windows) and the desktop blows laptop away. Sure, not the total deciding factor, however when I'm trying to work through 3000+ photo's it's amazingly annoying on the laptop. Or should I saw was... I abandoned that and only do it on the desktop.

Fact is if you wanna get anywhere in the creative industry you have to have a Mac Pc's are for accountants. Why would you buy something that looks like a piece of shit and put it on your desk? not to mention how shit they are to use. The only problem is after you spunked your money on a mac you have to drink cheap shitty wine like ive been doing all day. Buy a Pc and drink quality wine..............

or use your computer to make money to buy better wine.

90% of Mac users are lazy fucks, 91% of statistics are made up (information gain from PC user with Mac sticker on Laptop)