Anyone using the newer generation of netbooks for on the road downloading of files, and shoot reviews?
The price and weight are about 1/2 that of a 13" laptop, they are underpowered, but are they good enough for simple shoot reviewing and minor editing?
What software are you running?

Personally I wouldn't bother with a netbook. As the name implies, they serve one purpose and do not sport the necessary graphic power, memory or storage capability for photographic purposes.

I disagree. I use my Asus all of the time. It is everything that Jerry said, but it still gets the (basic) job done. I got mine a couple of years ago when they were called "Ultra Mobile PC's"and I'm sure a lot has improved since then. As a matter of fact, I'm waiting for the Nokia announcment on Sept 2nd because I might jump to their new Netbook depending upon price - I like it's features, real glass screen and HDMI output as well as 3G,WiFi and GPS. As long as I can get 2gigs of RAM and a decent size HD (160 will do) for a not too bad price I'm in for a new one. Yes, they work that well!

I took an Aspire One laptop to Antarctica because of its size and weight. The bag I took (Kata 3-in-1 30) doesn't have a laptop slot, but the netbook fit nicely in the top compartment. Mine has 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive and runs XP. I installed Lightroom 2 on it and used it to download images from my Canon 5D and 5D2.

The display on my laptop (and it seems most of the other netbooks) is 1024x600 which presents a couple of problems. The first is that the Lightroom 2 import dialog needs a height of 768 so you need to go to the display preferences and set the laptop to do 1024x768 in scrolling mode before starting Lightroom. The screen will continue to display 1024x600 but as you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, the whole screen will scroll up to show the remaining 168 pixels.

The second issue is that with a width of 1024 pixels, the center part of the screen where Lightroom displays the image will be quite small because the panels on either side also take up space. I got around this by auto-hiding all the panels in Lightroom.

While not a speed demon, it was totally usable for rating, cropping and reviewing images. Just make sure you don't have it generate full previews of the images. I forget whether I used Minimal or Standard. I do remember adjusting something in the Lightroom preferences to make the standard be fairly small (like 1024x768 or something like that).

The laptop cost $400CDN or so at the time (now closer to $300) and I thought it was a more flexible solution than one of those card backup devices that cost the same or more. For automatic backups on import or if you want to shoot more than 120GB or so, buy an external USB hard drive and you're all set. The netbook I have has 3 USB ports - mouse, external hard drive and card reader.

Martin

I have the same netbook. For your purposes a netbook should work fine.

Try Breeze Systems BreezeBrowser Pro. I still prefer it to Lightroom for renaming, sorting, tagging, and ranking images, even on my main desktop. It has a slideshow - full screen - mode that is great for reviewing images.

http://breezebrowser.com/BreezeBrowser/index.htm


It has a very small footprint (memory and cpu usage), generates previews quickly, and treats RAW + JPEG as one file, which is nice (I always shoot RAW+ JPEG. RAW for best images and JPEG for quick web posts, etc.) Download a 15 day trial copy to test.

I would never take a full size laptop on a trip again. Just can't see hauling a relatively huge beast like that for basic use.

Matin, you're right. The downside is the image size. However, for my workflow all I do is ingest the shots onto two portable USB drives, put one aside for safekkeeping and then edit Picks and Rejects, add captioning and keywords and take a general "look see" how things are going- albeit, I have to squint. It's a real timesaver because by the time I get home I'm part way there already and I just have to process my keepers. Mine has a video out port too and once I even had a hotel room with a TV that had a video in port and I used the TV as my screen. In addition, I can call home over Skype and save myself a bundle!

I have my eye on the nokia as well, nice looking machine, not so chunky as the other netbooks I have looked at, with nice features. As I said, I don't need a power machine for on-the-road work, just some basic editing, reviewing. So size, weight and price are more important than power. That said, I really like the Macbook Pro 13 as a possible option.

Don't get me wrong - I like the netbook very much and it is great for traveling. Having a netbook allows you to do Skype, email, flight check-in and all that stuff and still be able to do basic image editing. The fact that you can run Lightroom on it and them import all your work into your main machine is a huge bonus. The 9 inch screen is also bigger than that of the camera or those card backup devices.

I'd certainly recommend it to anyone that's looking for a lightweight solution. (At least those people that don't have P65+ backs)

Martin

I have one of the original Macbook 13" laptops and remains my favorite laptop. I would have taken it to Antarctica had the camera bag accommodated it. It does weigh twice as much as the netbook and costs 3-4x as much. My other camera bag (Kata R103) has a laptop slot and when I use that bag I take the Macbook. It depends on how light you want to travel.

Martin

I've got a old Dell XPS M1210 that I'm dusting off to use instead of a netbook.

I also have an Acer Aspire One that I use in the field. It's perfect for downloading images from cards, basic checking of exposure, etc. It fits in the back compartment of my photo backpack, leaving plenty of room for external drives, power cords, etc.

One of the reasons I went with an Acer is that it's very easy to hack them to run OSX, which I did right off. Right now, I have mine dual-booting 10.5.6 and Windows 7. Runs fine under both. In fact, I get around the issue of the screen being too small for Lightroom's import dialog by just running it under OSX. There's a simple command you can type to scale the display for specific program. I just run Lightroom scaled to 90%; problem solved.