[1] From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> (28)
Subject: imaging: hardware and software
Recommendations would be most welcome concerning the best sort of hardware
and software to use in an imaging project with which I am involved as an
advisor. For better or worse it is PC-based, so references to Macintosh
products will not do us any good.
The particular aspect of the project of most concern at the moment involves
viewing files up to about 1 MB or so and manipulating them to some degree,
e.g. changing brightness and contrast, enlarging portions, excising parts,
and the like. At the moment nothing very much more sophisticated than that
is envisioned. The images are of manuscripts. For present purposes we assume
no control over the production of the images, but these are of reasonably
high quality.
Money is not plentiful, so paying a high premium for slight improvement is
not a good idea.
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. The primary question here to my mind is the brand and
characteristics of the video card. Your opinions, please.
Software. Adobe Photoshop? Is there anything better for the purposes
mentioned? Anything else we should be thinking about?
Thanks very much.
WM
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Dr. Willard McCarty
Senior Lecturer, Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
+44 (0)171 873 2784 voice; 873 5081 fax
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/ruhc/wlm/