What hardware for photo work?

One of our readers has been complaining about how hard it is to find information on the right hardware for photo work. The letter:
Screens first

A good idea for an article... In the meantime, this information is indeed to be found on the site. True, you do have to dig a bit, and sometimes you need to have a certain amount of in-depth technical knowledge.

For screens, you'll have noted that colour reproduction is analysed and rated for all products tested. Now, graphics and photography professionals prefer monitors with PVA and IPS panels over TN ones. You get a much more homogenous display. A filter in the product survey allows you to bring up the relevant screens.

3D cards

We also cover graphics cards on the site. You'll find the graphics card product survey with the tests of all current models and those of the previous generation. Freely accessible, these tests don't include all the raw data we've gathered. For that, we refer you to the graphics card face-off. There, you'll find all our readings and you'll easily be able to compare one model to another on various points: frame rate in games, energy consumption, noise and heat. And if you want a picture of overall performance on all models tested, we refer you to our performance index.

The processor

You can also get help in choosing your processor in our product survey. Again, you'll find much more data in the face-off with, notably, results in Adobe Photoshop CS4. There's also a table summarising performance and allowing a comparison of all models at a glance.

Computers

Lastly, for computers (minis, all-in-ones or laptops), we test colour accuracy in each test. In our laptops and netbooks tests, the inset on the right is even given over to this.


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