NBW

I'm looking at buying a Digital SLR camera (Fuji S2 Pro) in the near future, and one of the problems is going to be capacity - at the highest resolution a 1GB Microdrive will store only about 29 pictures.

I'm considering buying a laptop to allow me to download pictures from the camera and then burning to CD. Thing is, I want to keep the price down (£500-600), and the laptop will not be used for Photoshop or anything like that, I'll just plug the camera in, go and do something else and then come back and kick off the burn to CD. So I wondered what people's opinion's would be on:

1. A pretty low spec processor - AMD K6-2 400Mhz or Celeron 500Mhz.

2. Camera has USB & Firewire, laptop is likely to have USB only, so would it be worth getting a PCMCIA Firewire adapter?

3. For an external CD Writer, would Firewire be worth it? Just how slow are USB CD Writers?

Cheers
Tim

suba

consider a small lightweight laptop coz if you travel, you dont wanna lug all the equipments!

get pc card adaptor for your CF or SM to transfer to the laptop. if you gonna be getting a small lightweight laptop, will probably need a portable external cdrw. i got a freecom traveller which can connect up via pc card, usb and firewire. all i need is buy the cables.

S55 HOT

I'm sure I saw somewhere recently some (20gb or so) disk drives that you could plug a SM/CF card into to download directly. You then unloaded the disk onto your regular PC when you got home. Can't remeber what it was called though so not much help really

ChrisB

S55, you mean a Digital Wallet I think?

http://www.mindsatwork.net/products.htm

Review @ http://www.steves-digicams.com/digital_wallet.html

Great alternative if the CD-RW function is not critical.

MartinM

Whilst a bit OT, here's some other related thoughts based on 12 months DSLR (Cannon D30) ownership:

The D30 also has a RAW mode where each image takes about 3Mb on the CF card. RAW is the ultimate quality (ie straight from the sensor) but requires post-processing. For the D30, the first post-processing is to convert the 3MB file into a 18Mb TIFF file. This means >>> storage space required on your PC and a high speed CPU if you want to avoid making and drinking a cup of tea while the subsequent image manipulations take place. I have a 80GB disc and a 1700Mhz processor and wouldn't want anything less!

I convinced myself I would only ever take RAW pictures, but have found in practice that:
- unless you're doing pro photography (proper dye sub printers, absolutely faithful colour reproduction required etc), the difference in quality is marginal
- when you do multiple shots (I see the S2 does 2fps for 7 images - the D30 does 3fps for 8), the 'recovery time' whilst the camera's internal buffers txfr to the storage card is unacceptable (over 1 minute when I shoot in RAW)
- I very rarely use it now. I have printed my lowly 3mp JPG images at A4 size and you can rarely see any JPG artefacts

I do get fantastic pictures (far in excess of P&S cameras) from my D30 even tho' its only 3mp. The reason is the ability of each pixel to produce a low noise accurate representation of the light incident upon it. I can always resize upwards if required, and since the initial pixels are so accurate, even 200% re-sizes show little or no unwanted artefacts.

If you're doing studio shots, then I expect you'll have the PC connected drectly to the camera, so you won't need 'on-camera storage' anyway

As far as I can see, the only main the benefit of >3mp cameras is to allow cropping of the images such that you still have a resonable number of pixels left....but most advanced amateurs/pros say that you should be good enough to frame the image properly if you're using high end gear I am starting to come to that conclusion as well, even for motorsports...it just takes a lot of practice.

I'm typing too much here, so I'll be brief now
- microdrives have mixed press. Some people swear by them, some swear at them. I don't have one as I don't believe I should put trust several hundred images to one device that's got moving parts in it. Wedding shoot pros use multiple small (128 or 256mb) CF cards so they don't have all their 'egss in one basket'
- think carefully about lenses. A £3k DSLR with a 6mp sensor generally needs expensive lenses on it. Cheap ones just don't have the resolving power to accurately put the light onto the 6mp in the sensor. I've spent £1K on lenses, and most of that was on one lens (a big FO grey/white zoom like what the pro's use), which was 2nd hand on ebay!
- ..so if you have a collection of, say, Canon EF then look at the D60 or even the D1 (but if you have Nikkor, then the S2 is fine)
- as I'm sure you do, be an avid consumer of www.dpreview.com information - the discussion boards are almost as addictive as Scoobynet and there's a very healthy 'community' atmosphere
- be prepared for sitting at your 'digital darkroom' (the PC) for hours on end and prepare yourself for wanting Photoshop 7. Then be be prepared to spend a significant amount of time learning how to use it

If only DSLRs were cheaper...

If you have any questions, please ask - I've learnt too much to write down in one go

NBW

The desire to shoot RAW is that I want to print up to A3+, my lenses are all fast primes, mainly Nikkor.

But, the laptop is only to download the images off the camera, all post-processing will be done on the desktop at home. Hence why I don't want to spend much money on it.

Don't fancy a digital wallet, I really want to have a backup copy on CD ASAP after shooting.

[Edited by NBW - 8/23/2002 5:42:43 PM]