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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Laptop suggestions for live transmitting?
Luke Johnson, Photographer, Student/Intern
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St.Petersburg | FL | USA | Posted: 5:09 PM on 12.07.10 |
->> I am looking for an inexpensive laptop to use for nothing more than captioning/editing/transmitting during events and I would most likely only be running Photoshop, Lightroom, PM, and a FTP client on it. So I was wondering if any of you had any suggestions on a decent laptop for this in the sub $500 price range.
Thanks. |
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Marc Browning, Photographer
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Wichita | KS | | Posted: 6:49 PM on 12.07.10 |
| ->> Try a Dell mini 9, the price is hard to beat. |
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Scott Serio, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Colora | MD | USA | Posted: 9:25 PM on 12.07.10 |
| ->> +1 on a Dell Mini....make it a Hackintosh (or not if you are a PC person) and then run Photo Mechanic on it. You could also drop Aperture on it. But, for base field stuff, Dell Mini+ PM = Success |
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Marc Browning, Photographer
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Wichita | KS | | Posted: 9:46 PM on 12.07.10 |
->> I was going to buy a mini 9, but I didn't want to mess with making it a hackintosh, & i heard the battery isn't all that great. I went with the Macbook Air 11" model, love it so far, it's faster than my Macbook with a 2.2 gig core 2 & 4 gig's of ram.
But I understand your looking for a cheeper laptop. |
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Luke Johnson, Photographer, Student/Intern
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St.Petersburg | FL | USA | Posted: 9:30 AM on 12.08.10 |
->> Thanks for the suggestion, I will have to take a look at it. Anyone else have any other suggestions possibly something with a slightly larger screen size.
Thanks! |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Denver | CO | USA | Posted: 10:05 AM on 12.08.10 |
->> If you're not afraid of Windows, you can get $500 PC laptops all day long. I've had great luck with Dell's refurb/outlet machines:
http://outlet.dell.com/
You can get an Inspiron 15 (15.6" WLED display, 2.3GHz/2Gb RAM/250Gb HD) for under $500.
If you have to have a Mac and don't want a Hackintosh, you're probably looking at a used, couple of year old machine to get it to anywhere near $500. Refurb Macs start at $1,000... |
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Luke Johnson, Photographer, Student/Intern
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St.Petersburg | FL | USA | Posted: 12:04 AM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Thanks for the help everyone. |
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Larry Lawson, Photographer
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Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 11:28 AM on 12.09.10 |
->> Luke, Keep in mind that LR is cpu intensive. Dual core was so slow under 2.x I had to change it out to a quad on the desktop. My dell studio laptop is a couple years old and needs updating, and LR runs really slow on it (not to be used for time-sensitive jobs unless there's an assistant with you to process while you shoot) PM sails along at a good clip and PS CS4 runs well also.
@david - thanks for that site for Dell... I may be Christmas shopping for myself! |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 10:52 PM on 12.09.10 |
->> This is the time of the year to buy...I got lucky and got a mis-labeled Core i5 Gateway 15.6" machine at Best Buy for $500 a little over a year ago. It was supposed to be a Core i3 but had a Core i5 in it...sometimes you get a better chip when the supply chain is new.
Here's a very good site for comparing the alphabet soup of CPUs out there. You can't go by GHz speed, it's even more misleading than megapixels.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
Quick: All else being equal, which is better? An Intel Celeron 900 at 2.2 GHz or Pentium P6100 at 2.0 GHz? Big difference, but these can often be found in systems of similar cost. |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 11:05 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Another consideration: how do you intend to get your images from the card to the computer? Almost no PC is going to have useable FireWire ports (they almost exclusively have the 4-pin port while FW readers require 6-pin) and fewer PC laptops (especially in the $500 range) have ExpressCard slots these days, either...so this means you're stuck with USB, which can be pretty slow comparatively speaking. |
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