Which hardware for photo editing ?

[Jehu]

Without considering price, Mac... hands down.

For about $700, you could build up a PC that will perform better than just about any single processor Mac I've ever used. I have CS4 on an Intel iMac. When I bought CS5, I went with the PC version and I'm running it on a 3 year old PC that I built for about $900 with both monitors. It's a bit glitchy at times but it performs well overall.

Nobody addressed the issue of the monitor. I was told by a professional in the field that CRTs are still the standard for accurate editing. It's the first time I've heard that but it makes sense. Every time that I calibrate my LCD monitor it ends up very dark.

[paulr]

I got by with very old Mac hardware for years. I was working on 500MB photoshop files on an imac g3, if you can believe it. 1gb memory, 13gb hard drive and an external firewire drive. I'd hit GO and then make a sandwich and come back to see how the file looks. Not ideal, but never once crashed. The crappy built-in monitor was the actually the most serious limitation.

So you can slum with just about anything, at least on the mac side. But if you can afford better you'll be happier.

I recently upgraded to a 3 year old mac pro from a 9 year old g4. The difference is staggering. The machine is so good that I can wholeheartedly recommend getting a slightly used mac pro over a new one for anything but the most time-critical work. The hundreds of dollars you save can go to a good monitor, lots of ram, big hard drives, and a serious backup strategy.

All these added elements are easier with a mac pro than with an imac. You have basically unlimited memory capacity, room for five internal hard drives, unlimited external expansion (through esata cards, etc.). The beautiful ease of upgrading and replacing hard drives makes the machine especially comforting.

I find that photoshop cs5 makes very good use of multiple cores for most operations. There are a few operations that are perversely single threaded (saving and opening .PSD files, which entail extensive compression/decompression, all falls on a single core ... so this is processor limited rather than disk limited). But most operations, like resizing, rotating, unsharp masking, etc, use my 8 cores fairly efficiently.

Benchmarks I've seen show that currently, the 6-core mac at the highest possible clock speed, is the best photoshop performer. Lots of cores are nice if you multitask like a short-attention-span teenager, as I do. I run photoshop in the foreground while big indesign files are open, along two dozen browser tabs, itunes playing, and a feature film ripping or transcoding in the background. The OS does a great job of using the cores to keep you from feeling any slowdown.

There's very little difference between a mac and a pc once you're in photoshop, but I think the industrial design of the mac hardware is worth a couple of hundred bucks easy, and the elegance of OS is worth many hundreds of bucks. Windows makes me hate the world.

As far as monitors go, the best CRTs are fantastic, but are a dying breed (literally ... they haven't been made in years, and they have limited lifespans). The best LCDs are actually better than the best CRTs now, but are very, very expensive. I'm not sure where the price / performance sweet spot is right now. I'll have to find out when my current CRT dies.