wogears

A very high quality 35mm slide film can give you up to 24 MP of resolution. This applies to Velvia 50, for example. For most purposes, however, this is overkill unless the chromes were shot with a very good lens on a solid tripod.

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I like this a lot. There are different textures from bottom to top, and the strange "message" of the neon. I might like to see a tiny bit more of the building(?) behind the fence. As it is, I find myself straining to pick up details.

Don't forget one of our own!

Machine up and running. PCIe SSD lives up to its hype--super fast boot, app launches, etc. PS and LR normal operations are very fast. No more lag with the spotting brush on very large (80MP) scans. Had one moment of panic when the thing wouldn't boot due to "disk read error". Turned out to be the USB flash drive I left connected. As far as Topaz AI software is concerned. It is much faster with 24MP digital files. Two or three minutes to process rather than previous fifteen minutes or more. Preview now updates quickly, but not quite in real time. According to GPU-Z, the graphics card is at 100% while processing, fan speed is high and temp is 60 deg. C. According to Reliable Sources, I can put a GTX 1070 8GB card in there with the existing PSP. Sometime in the future, I'll do that.

You can run virtually every scanner made on Win 10 or Mac OS whatever using Vuescan.

The more I look at these, the more I like the original best. It has mood, which a lot of the "corrected" ones do not. The guy on the extreme right does pull my eye to where I don't think it should go.

I will have lots of fun moving the data on the current HD to the new machine. ("Pointing" apps to the data on the HD from the SSD, etc.)

I will. I'm really interested in the boot time with the PCIe SSD.

I bought one. HP Z230, Core i7 4790, 32GB DDR3, Nvidia Quadro K620 2GB, 256GB SSD, 4TB 7.2K HDD. Price was excellent, eBay seller had 99% and several thousand feedback items.

I am patiently doing my research. I expect anything I buy will kick the current mess down the road. The Topaz software will certainly improve, given the reactions of early acquirers. I will eventually hit the right price/performance ratio. Thanks to all, and if you have any better ideas, I am open to listen.

"Topaz AI" is a new series of software (plugin and standalone) just introduced a few months ago. They are incredibly GPU-intensive. Topaz Denoise 6 takes about one minute to process a 24 MP TIFF. Topaz Denoise AI needs at least fifteen minutes, and often longer. They work incredibly well when they don't hang the GPU completely.

Except that the older "workstation" machines are about 200-300 USD--maybe cheaper, since current wisdom is that dual-CPU machines don't really help with Photoshop.

At present, with the existing machine (Acer M3420), the CPU is most often the problem. Disc use can sometimes get heavy, but an SSD could fix that. With the Topaz software, the GPU is totally insufficient. Unfortunately, the mobo only supports minimal upgrades to the CPU, currently an AMD A10-5700 (2 physical cores, 2 virtual). Worse, the GPU is an AMD Radeon HD 7470 2GB which has a truly pathetic benchmark. It cannot be upgraded. The BIOS cannot be flashed to anything other than the original non-UEFI crap. Newer graphics cards are not recognized--I don't even get a POST beep. Other people have reported the exact same problem. The new machine would have two Intel Xeon processors (total 12 cores), 48 GB RAM and support for RAID. It would need a better GPU--internet indicates newer GFX 1050 or similar woks perfectly.

My current computer was built in 2012, and is showing it. The new Topaz AI software does a great job, but this machine takes 15+ minutes to process one image. I'm at the RAM limit (16GB DDR3 non-ECC) and cannot upgrade from the Radeon HD 7470 GPU. I figure that by the end of this year, I will really need a new desktop. I am looking at some of the used/refurb Dell or HP workstations that proliferate on eBay. This one, for example. (Usual disclaimer.) While these are older, they use Xeon processors that support multi-cores and huge amounts of RAM. Would one of these with a more recent 4/8GB graphics card do the job as well as a new "consumer" machine that would probably run over $1,000 with added RAM, etc. (A note: I have several 2TB and 3TB SATA drives already that could go into a new box.) Is this an option, or are there other things I need to consider? (I have to run Windows for my dayjob, so no Mac or Linux please.) I could build a machine if the savings were real, but I'm not sure they are. Thanks all, Les

This is why I want a 14mm lens. BUT, I also see several possible photographs--the broom, the barrel and the hook, for three.

What is "flawed" anyway? Technical imperfection? A failure to convey intent? A violation of some 'rule'? I think this works pretty well, although it might benefit from some selective burning in the shadows.

Of the various versions, I like the original best, but cropped to remove the sky area. I think it has the best balance of color, detail and saturation.

That works too, but for me, Sicily is about color. Also I saw some gorgeous b/w made in Caltibuono, and mine wouldn't look as good. :)

One of the most incredible villages I've been in. Yeah, there's tourist stuff, but it coexists with the real thing very nicely.

There are a couple of these on eBay for a $30 opening bid.

I got the IIa sorted and it's working correctly. Lens has some haze, but I can live with it. I also have a IIc in mint condition.

Hello: I use a Polaroid SprintScan 120 connected to a Windows 10 computer with a PCIe 1394 card (VIA chipset). It worked fine for a while; now, I have to unplug and replug the FW cable with the scanner turned off in order for the computer to recognize the scanner. After I do this, I can use the scanner all day, so long as I do not turn it off. If I do turn it off, I have to repeat the unplug/replug cycle. I have the correct driver for the FW card, and am using the Vuescan driver for the scanner. All these drivers show up correctly in Device Manager/Properties/Driver. I have several suspects for this behavior. A Win 10 update. The scanner, as I said, worked fine with the existing card and drivers until it stopped doing so. I have also thought of swapping out the FW card for one with a different chipset. Same with the cable, although I doubt it is the problem, since it wouldn't cause the device to lose contact. If anyone who knows more about 1394 than I do (doesn't take much) has a bright idea, I would appreciate it. Les

There are laser "turntables" and they do have advantages when used with extremely clean vinyl.

But you can produce large negatives to make platinotypes.