Will I need a new computer if I get a D800

[AlephNull]

My husband just doesn't "get" my photography hobby. I'm not a professional but I have done senior sessions for friends and family. I mainly enjoy taking photos for myself....mainly landscape, nature, and family. I also love action/sports photography but will keep using my D300 for that with a grip.

I just got on a list for a D800 but now see on this forum that I might need a new computer to be able to upload my images. I use PSE10 for editing and below is my computer. I also have a newer laptop but it still is not Leopard.

Mac OS X
Version 10.5.8
Processor 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory 4GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

That's not a very fast Mac, and it doesn't have a lot of RAM. It's running a back-level operating system, too.

I have pretty much that configuration in the laptop I'm using for email, in fact. I would not attempt to process RAWs from a D800 on this machine, but I can tell you that it can open the files.

If you can stand it running rather slowly, it should work. I'd suggest to start saving now - there's a new range of Macs due very soon, and that might be a good time for an upgrade (you may find discounts on newly obsolete models, too).

 

[JStachowski]

Hi---

You may want to bump the RAM up, but your computer should be fine. My iMac has the same processor, and I use 12 GB RAM. Like other posters recommend, having more external hard disk is useful as well.

Take Care---
Jerry

 

[Fotoloco]

Agree with other response. Do not need new computer. Will just be slower. Since it is apple, it will not crash, so it is all good.

 

[Robin Casady]

Try it out. If you find it is too slow, or you don't have enough storage, you can add RAM & hard drive space fairly inexpensively. Photoshop likes lots of memory. If it doesn't have enough, it starts using hard drive space as virtual memory. So, sluggish processing can be improved by adding more RAM.

I increased my Mac Pro to 16 GB RAM for $125.00
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/apple/memory/

You can get a 2 TB external hard drive for less than $200.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=nikon+el-en15&sprefix=nikon+el%2Caps%2C299#/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Firewire+hard+drive&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AFirewire+hard+drive

--
Robin Casady
http://www.robincasady.com/Photo/index.html

 

[Debbie]

Thank you so much everyone for the info. And double thank you since you have my same set-up.

 

[Debbie]

I have one 1TB external hard-drive.

 

[Debbie]

I will get my camera in hopefully a few weeks. I will be patient for a while and store my images on my external hard-drive. Then hopefully when something tempting from Apple comes along I will purchase a new one.

I find I don't like doing photo editing on my Apple laptop because the screen has different levels of brightness depending on how far open you put the lid.

 

[gonzalu]

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 with upgraded CPUs

Dual Quad Core Xeon X5355
32GB RAM
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (BOOTCAMP)

D3 and D2Xs files were fine. D800, Lightroom crawls!!

In my opinion, An i7 2600K should be minimum with 8GB RAM for good performance.

Oh, 7200RPM minimum single SATA ... but would rather SATA 6Gb/s SSDs or RAID0 10K RPM spinning media.
--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.thrustimages.com/
FCAS Member - http://fcasmembers.com/

 

[Paul Takeuchi]

I'm the author of the Nikon Capture NX2 speed test. The goal in creating the test was to find out how fast NX2 processed RAW NEF files on different hardware (Mac, PC, SSD, HD, RAM, etc.). Originally the test was done with 12MP Nikon D3 files; now the test has been reconfigured to run with 36MP Nikon D800 files. With the D800's 40Mb NEF files and 215Mb 16bTiff files, your hard drives will quickly fill up--25 NEFs per GB, 25000 per TB. While it's universally acknowledged that NX2 is definitely not the fastest RAW processor, it is one of the best. With it, expect to spend about 10-15 seconds to convert each RAW file to a 16 bit tiff on the best hardware. And don't forget that if you move on to photoshop to continue editing, you will have layered files which will greatly increase your disk storage needs.

You can read more about the current test here:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1021&message=41432306&changemode=1

The original test has a lot more information because it's been running for 3 years:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1007&message=32800349&changemode=1

The bottom-line is the more you shoot, the more you have to edit, the more you will appreciate fast, reliable hardware. And don't forget to invest in extra drives for backups.

 

[camerosity]

Debbie, you have a good computer with plenty of CPU power. I would highly recommend upgrading your RAM to 8GB though. That will speed it up and won't cost much more than $50.

 

[Myallegro31]

Just max out your computer's RAM and you should be fine. http://crucial.com . Added 14GB to my iMac and it made a world of difference!

My husband just doesn't "get" my photography hobby. I'm not a professional but I have done senior sessions for friends and family. I mainly enjoy taking photos for myself....mainly landscape, nature, and family. I also love action/sports photography but will keep using my D300 for that with a grip.

I just got on a list for a D800 but now see on this forum that I might need a new computer to be able to upload my images. I use PSE10 for editing and below is my computer. I also have a newer laptop but it still is not Leopard.

Mac OS X
Version 10.5.8
Processor 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory 4GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

--
Adam Allegro
http://catchthejiffy.com

 

[gonzalu]

to get the highest PER CORE performance than multiple cores.

For instance, for rendering and ray tracing, having a lot of cores helps a lot. But for using the healing tool in Lightroom, a single core with lots of power will win over 100 cores
--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.thrustimages.com/
FCAS Member - http://fcasmembers.com/

 

[calson]

With the D800 the file size when opened is 3x as big as with your D300 and to do any amount of editing in Photoshop RAM gets rapidly consumed and when the application has to use the scratch disk the performance slows dramatically.

DDR3 is the latest type of memory and it can use 3 channels for faster performance with multi-core multi-processor computers - theoretically.

A USB 3.0 card provides a 800% performance boost over a USB 2.0 card reader and I added PCI cards to both my Windows 7 tower and my Mac Pro tower to add these ports and add Lexar USB 3.0 card readers.

With laptops the ability to add RAM, even with the newest ones for Apple or Windows is severely constrained at 8GB RAM. Very few Windows laptops are shipping even now with USB 3 ports which is a big oversight on the part of the manufacturers. With a laptop a SSD solid state drive is one way to improve performance when all these demands are placed on a single data device.

Hard drives are slower on laptops to minimize battery power consumption when not plugged into a wall outlet. With only one hard drive containing the editing application, the data files, and the scratch disk, performance is at its worst. With Windows 7 with its DLL structure the performance is even impacted more. Put together the maximum RAM limitation and the hard drive limitations (speed and no separate scratch drive), and often the lack of a dedicated graphics processor card, and laptops become a computer better suited to use when traveling than for heads down processing of files in an efficient manner.

The advantages of the later OS X releases from 10.5 is that they provide a 64-bit architecture which removed the old 3GB RAM maximum that could be actually accessed by Photoshop CS. OS X was superior to Windows in that in 32-bit mode it could make the extra RAM in the computer available as a super fast scratch disk space for Photoshop. If you are running 10.5.8 then you have a 64-bit operating system and will greatly benefit from the addition of more RAM.

Multi-threading applications that truly utilize multiple core processors are mostly in the video editing space. Very little code in Photoshop is multi-threaded. Better performance is achieved by having a faster CPU as opposed to more CPU's.

With the Mac Pro I have 6 hard drives installed and two of them are mirrored so that all data is automatically written to both drives. If one fails I can continue to use the second drive until the first one is replaced. Total cost was less than $200 and with the Mac OS X it took 5 minutes to format and mirror the two physical hard drives as a single logical drive.

External drives are good for backing up data but terrible for working with active files. With active batch processing where there are usually a couple thousand files I get a very noticeable performance improvement by having the source files on one drive and saving the processed files to a second hard drive. These are in addition to my OS drive with the applications and my scratch hard drive. So four drives for working with files and two mirrored hard drives that are where I backup my data during the day. This setup was great with the D3 files and will be critical to being able to work efficiently with the D800 files.

For those who have not worked with D800 files, one saved without layers as a PSD file is over 200MB in size. Working with files that size any I/O performance bottlenecks with USB or even Ethernet movement of files is very much a problem. My 1GB Ethernet setup was fine with the D3 files but stressed now with the D800 files.

RAM is cheap (unless you buy it from the computer manufacturer) and hard drives are cheap (1TB drives selling for $70), so the overall cost to work with digital files has dropped dramatically over the past 10 years and more than kept up with DSLR's image file processing requirements.

 

[gonzalu]

for USB 3.0? And is Lion already updated to natively support the cards/usb3? I thought they still had not gotten native support.

maybe with the new 11, 13, 15 MCP and new Airs coming with USB3, the OS will get an interim update before Mountain Lion.

Cheers

--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.thrustimages.com/
FCAS Member - http://fcasmembers.com/

 

[northernpenguin]

I have an early 2011 Macbook Pro, 2 GHz i7 with 8GB RAM.

Can't even notice a difference at all processing FX size RAW/JPG images in Aperture. Newest Aperture even uses the RAW thumbnails rather then generating it's own if you want.

Only issue I have is the USB 2.0 isn't as fast as USB 3.0 would be but I could solve that with one of the upcoming Thunderbolt Docks coming later this year (i.e. Belkin). My interim solution is to use the SD slot in the camera and the SD slot on my MBP for downloading but really the USB 2.0 download speed isn't that bad.

Once the image is on board it's the same as it ever was with my D200 images. No beach balls, no waiting for edits that I can see.

 

[Dennis DH]

What some of you do not realize is that a lot of I-Macs can not accept more ram or a usb3 port.

I have a 24 inch 2008 I-Mac with 4 Gb ram and you can not add more ram. My wife 24 inch I-Mac is a 2009 and it can be updated to 8 GB ram.

You need to check your serial number to find out when the computer was build and if, or how much Ram you can add.
People on the forum can be very misleading even if they don’t mean to be.
Dennis

 

[Biological_Viewfinder]

My husband just doesn't "get" my photography hobby.

This is typically the other way around with technology hobbies. And it's generally a lot harder for men than women, because most women don't care about expensive hobbies. So I think you're in luck. Just find out how much his golf clubs cost him, or whatever else he's into, because cutting edge technology is always expensive, and it sounds like you guys have a fair bit of money, so chances are good that there is something for you to compare it with for him to understand better.

--

There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

 

[Plazmodeus]

I'm a bit of a computer hog, so I tend to keep mine cutting edge. My editing rig is thus:

i2600k @4.8ghz
16gb RAM
HD6950 2gb
2xWD Black 2tb (for RAW file storage)
2xOCZ Vertex3 120gb on SATA3 6gbs controller
Dell U2711
Lightroom 4.1

My system throws D800 Raw files around in near-realtime. Its crazy how fast it is. USB 3.0 is a MUST! Now here is the secret, I have made one of my SSD's a dedicated Lightroom cache/preview drive. Once your files have been xferred and previews rendered, the previews are all on the SSD and this speeds things up immensely.

Also note, that minus the Dell Monitor, this system can be had for around $1100.

Also, if you can find them, the Hitachii 7k drives are even better than the WD ones.

I feel sorry for the Mac people, you're stuck with whatever Apple deems to give you. My system would absoluetly murder the new Mac Pros, even though the latter is about 3x as expensive.
-----------
I'd rather be leading a cavalry charge.

 

[David H Dennis]

Apple introduced a stunning new dream machine a couple of days ago, the Retina Display MacBook Pro. It's possible that you're pretty impressed by it and would consider buying it. The screen is completely awesome and processing power is excellent.

But you should be aware that these machines are very constrained in terms of available storage. The "affordable" $2,199 model has only 250 gb of disk space. About 130gb are available when you first turn on the machine. This means that you will very quickly run out of space if you are processing D800 raw files.

So if you buy one, expect to have to frequently offload your photos to another system or an external disk drive.

I'm really disappointed this machine doesn't have better storage options. To upgrade your machine to 750GB will cost you about $1,000 because of the high-performance solid state drives they use!

If you want to get a cheaper machine that lets you really show off the pictures, consider a 27" iMac. You will get a much better view of your photos and I think you'll find the machine well worth the money. However, you might want to hold off since the line is usually updated annually and it's overdue for change.

Hope that helps.

D

 

[northernpenguin]

Um right. And neither can a TRS-80.
When did I mention iMac?

What I DID mention is that USB3 is not required to use the camera at all. Neither is USB technically required at all if you can get a card reader for your Firewire port, or RS-232 port or whatever you happen to be using that's not a MacBook Pro.