I have an old Mac tower dating to about 2004, dual 2gig Power PC G5 with 4gigs of DDR ram, which was a pretty decent machine in its time. If I go to a new fast Mac tower, am I actually going to get much more processing speed in Photoshop or Lightroom? Or would it just be a matter of a couple seconds here and there, doing fairly standard image adjustments (on 12.1 meg D3 images), and working on occasion with a couple of layers?

Are Leopard/CS3/Epson pro printers pretty much in sync now, or are there still issues with compatibility? I have bought the software for both CS3 and Leopard, but haven't installed it because I'd read there were problems. Have there been updates to deal with these?

I don't have much interest in, or knowledge of, computers; I just want them to behave like a toaster and do what I want them to do. If installing any of this stuff is going to be a two-day hassle, I'd wait. What do you think?

JC

If what you have is working for you, and you really don't like computers, then don't install. There will probably be some little issues here and there (and depending which Epson printer you have, maybe big issues).

My toaster burns one piece of toast and the other is under-toasted. :-)

Installing CS3 is a breeze and I've had no issues with it since beta - which was - afterall a beta! I've not installed Leopard - I'm waiting a bit - partly because I'm not convinced I need it.

Oh my god yes!

I would add that a portable MacBook Pro (2.4GHz) is at least as fast as a dual 2GHz G5 tower on most tasks. Mac Pro towers are reallly a big step-up from dual 1.8 GHz or 2.0 GHz G5s.

I have the same Dual G-5 tower with 4GB of RAM. I also have a dual Intel Macbook. Both are running 10.4.x.

Some thoughts:

1. Epson is supposed to release a fully-featured driver for my 3800 and Leopard some time in March. We'll see. There is a driver out there now, but Epson says it has limited functionality (and I haven't cared to find those limits, thanks.)

2. Photoshop CS3 is optimized for the Intel chips. I have installed it on both my tower and my laptop. In the Intel laptop, I see a good speed increase over CS2 (which had to run under Rosetta). In the G-5 desktop, it's actually a little slower -- CS2 runs faster on that machine.

3. Our graphic designer has a new dual-quad core Mac Pro with a ton of RAM. That machine just screams. I still want to test it with some raw processing actions, but my first impression is that there is a tremendous speed increase over both my tower and my laptop.

4. Everyone else in my office is running 10.5 happily. (But they don't have odd peripherals like the Epson printers.)

5. As much as I would love a new Mac Pro, my old G-5 tower is plenty fast enough for me right now. That might change if we can find some money to upgrade cameras, but probably not.

The driver is fully functional.

I'm told that the Number One way to speed up Photoshop is to give it a dedicated hard drive as a "Scratch Disk". You can do that for not much $.

Those were screamin' machines back then, right? I'm in the same boat and as Andrew Rodney said YUP - the number from me (CS2 to CS3 and new MacPro) seems to be around 5-8x faster from then to now on PS suites and processor stuff. Going from 100 millisecond waits to 10 millisecond waits isn't much, but from 10 sec to 1 sec is worthwhile. I play with 16bit 4x5 scans at 2500 ppi sometimes, so going from 10 minutes to 1 or 2 minutes will be heaven I'm going through house-moving but when I'm moved, I'll be upgrading and paying special attention to getting the fastest (within reasonable$) scratch disk

Made me laugh.

All right, so I get a Mac Pro with the dual quad-core; does it make much difference what the processor speed is -- 2.8, 3 or 3.2 GHz? If I get 8 gigs of Ram, do I really need a scratch disk?(Though, disks are cheap, so maybe I should get an extra one up front.) Any other extras that anybody would recommend? Upgrade from the standard video card?

I really used to value those naps between prints...

JC

Great, I will download it and give it a test. Any idea why the Epson website refers to it as having limited functionality?

Only thing I could think of is the 16-bit support. Photoshop nor Lightroom (who knows whatever app's) don't hand off the 16-bit data despite the new check box.

As far as I am aware, the new drivers are just the drivers - you don't yet get the remote panel and full status monitor functionality under 10.5, so that could have something to do with it in addition to what Andrew's mentioned.

You need to download the beta version of the new Leopard driver. The final version will be available in March. The regular drivers you find on the Epson web site are not for leopard and give "limited functionality" if used under Leopard.

The beta version Leopard drivers here:
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support...¬eoid=101603
They seem to be quite stable.

The driver is not only functional but substantially better.

Wayne:

I am still using the older (universal) drivers under Leopard, and see no change or loss from Tiger. Are you saying the beta drivers are even better? How so (other than the promise of 16 bit)

Glenn