10.0760 imaging hardware and software

WILLARD MCCARTY (willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Fri, 7 Mar 1997 20:48:06 +0000 (GMT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 10, No. 760.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
Information at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: "Espen S. Ore" <Espen.Ore@hd.uib.no> (16)
Subject: Re: 10.0758 imaging hardware and software?

[2] From: Ari Kambouris <aristotl@interport.net> (24)
Subject: Re: 10.0758 imaging hardware and software?

[3] From: Glenn Everett <aaff@utm.EdU> (28)
Subject: Re: 10.0758 imaging hardware and software?

--[1]----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 18:04:56 +0100
From: "Espen S. Ore" <Espen.Ore@hd.uib.no>
Subject: Re: 10.0758 imaging hardware and software?

At 21:56 +0000 06-03-97, WILLARD MCCARTY wrote:
>
>Software. Adobe Photoshop? Is there anything better for the purposes
>mentioned? Anything else we should be thinking about?

Photoshop is in my eyes the program of choice for image manipilation but if
you are sure that the image manipulation needs will not exceed "changing
brightness and contrast, enlarging portions, excising parts, and the like"
by very much, then there are much cheaper alternatives. I must admit that I
know Mac software better than Widows software, but for so simple needs you
could probably find shareware. How are the images captured? Is there a
scanner with software involved? You could also look into HiJaak (sp).

espen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Espen Ore Persons.: 96 81 21 81 Tel: + 47 55 58 28 65
Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities Fax: + 47 55 58 94 70
Harald Haarfagresgate 31 Espen.Ore@hd.uib.no
N-5007 Bergen, NORWAY

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Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 13:13:32
From: Ari Kambouris <aristotl@interport.net>
Subject: Re: 10.0758 imaging hardware and software?

Dear Willard,

A couple of suggestions and queries about what you are trying to do.
First, I would opt for more RAM and a slower processor if you need to
adjust your budget in that direction. Photoshop loves RAM and it does
significantly speed up many of the program functions. Also, I would
partition the disk so that you allocate a significant amount of free space
exclusively as the Photoshop scratch disk. This will also help speed up
any of the processing.

You don't mention any color correcting or accuracy concerns, so is this not
an issue? From that standpoint, for a monitor, I would recommend a Radius
PressView 17 or 21, depending on your budget. We used the predeccesor at
the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Radius Intellicolor 21, with outstanding
results. Both Sony and Mitsubishi also make monitors which are fairly
color accurate.

For scanning, the Arcus II 36-bit scanner was terrific, and one of the
photographers at the museum also had a Epson 36-bit scanner at home which
he was extremely satisfied with. We calibrated the monitors to the
scanners using a Colortron system and this made color correction much easier.

All of these were used with Macs, but they exist in PC form as well. The
monitors are all multi-synch, and the scanners plug into a regular SCSI
card that you would have to install in your PC anyways. I don't know what
the availability of these components is in England, but perhaps you might
find them over the Web as well.

Best regards,

Ari Kambouris

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Date: Thu, 06 Mar 1997 18:30:45 -0600
From: Glenn Everett <aaff@utm.EdU>
Subject: Re: 10.0758 imaging hardware and software?

> [1] From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> (28)
> >
An interesting problem, but my guess is that it won't cost all that much to
get what you want.

>Hardware. My inclination would be to recommend a 200MHz Pentium system, 32MB
>RAM, with a fast video card containing at least 4 MB onboard RAM, and a
>17-inch monitor.

To handle those 1 mb graphics files, save money on the cpu if you have to,
and put the money into RAM--think 64MB rather than 32. You probably don't
need anything faster than 133-mhz (if you can still buy one). But look for
a motherboard with a 512k level 2 cache.

Are these color images? What color depth will you (meaning the people who
will be actually working with the images) be working at--256 (8-bit),
thousands (16-bit), or millions (24-bit)? For 8-bit color at 800x600 screen
size, a good video card with 1 mb Ram would be adequate; for 1600x1200 and
24-bit color, you'd certainly need the 4 mb video card. I'd stick with one
of the name brands-- ATI, Diamond, Matrox, etc.

>From your description of manipulating images, I'd guess that you will
probably wind up sharpening images and tinkering with things like
saturation. Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for this sort of thing.

This is all based on some experience helping people scan images (including
one experiment with microfilm), and my own research for my
recently-purchased computer (a 166 cyrix cpu chip, 512K cache, & a Matrox
Mystique card with 2mb memory expandable to 4, and 32 megs of RAM--but I'm
not doing any graphics work, and I may add more RAM later). I am very
interested to see where people disagree with my recommendations.

Glenn Everett
Faculty Multimedia Center (http://fmc.utm.edu/)
University of Tennessee at Martin