If I were just starting and truly starting from scratch, I would go for an iMac.

In my opinion its the best value in computing right now for photographers. See Scott’s advice too on this page from October 21.

So why not get a specialist 24-27inch screen colour calibrated and attach to an upgraded PC. 3+GHZ processor, 8GB Ram, Decent Graphics card, 500 GB-1TB HD and save money on the Apple ??

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=14402&prodoid=20306147&infoType=Downloads&platform=Macintosh

Hope this helps,

David

I am an avid amateur photographer (Canon 1D MkIII with lots of glass) who recently switched to a MacBook Pro from a PC. I use an Epson 2200 printer and have enjoyed making some beautiful prints over the years.

Long, long story short…that has all come to an end with my MBP. Epson doesn’t have updated drivers for the 2200 for Snow Leopard. They gave me a work around which I had the Mac store install. No go…prints are still awful.

I love the MBP but I am totally frustrated.

Can you help???

Thanks so much!

Also – I think I agree with you on: “Printing takes tweaking”

Best,

Doug

Sounds great. If you’re ordering online, you can help support this site (without costing yourself any more money) by using our banner ads or links when placing your order.

The Apple Online Store

Amazon.com

Thanks!

-Scott

For most day-to-day activities, I doubt one would be able to see a significant difference in performance between the i5 and i7. If you were working with video (as more and more photographers are these days) or rendering previews for large raw files (also something we’re doing more and more). It really depends on your needs as a photographer. If you shoot weddings and have to render hundreds or thousands of photos per shoot, then I’d recommend you go all out. On the other hand, if you’re a fine-art/landscape shooter who just has a few dozen photos from a shoot, you can probably save the money. The $200 price difference, to me, makes it worth the upgrade.

Regarding the RAM, that’s typically what I do. Take out the Apple RAM and sell it back to OWC. You’ll see a huge difference at 12GB and could probably hold off on the full 16GB for a while.

You can partition a drive, but I see no benefit in doing that. The drive in the computer will be the fastest. If you go with the 2 TB internal drive, you’ll be able to keep lots of images on that drive. Keep in mind that you’ll want at least a 2 TB external drive dedicated solely to Time Machine backups, anyway. It doesn’t need to be speedy or super-reliable, though, since it’s just a backup.

These Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drives are, in my experience, some of the least-reliable drives out there, but they can be fairly cheap. If you’re a Costco member, I’ve found some good deals on large, crappy hard drives there.

As far as the display goes, I’m not the person to ask about color profiling and getting accurate prints, apparently. I’ve always been more than happy with the level of quality I get from do-it-yourself printing on mid-range and high-end printers as well as most outsourcing locations. I have colleagues, however, that just never seem satisfied with their results and spend days staring at three different prints that look exactly the same to me. So, my answer (which you should take with a grain of salt) is that you’ll be just fine. I’ve profiled Apple Cinema Displays, iMacs, and third-party displays all attached to Macs on a personal, business, and education level and achieved results that I’ve been happy with. Printing takes tweaking. That’s the deal. There’s no perfect profile/right the first time solution out there. End of story.

Enjoy,
Scott