Its been on my mind for some time. At least since I bought my Pentax K10D last year, and especially after I changed to the Nikon D200. Two things I am thinking about: a screen, a machine.
The screen
If you are on a budget, you may go for a £450 Apple HD display. If you are not, you can spend several thousands or go with the result of a partnership between HP/Dreamworks: the HP DreamColor Display 
1 billion colors in 30 bits and knowing that Dreamworks use the same one to make cartoons is quite cool. Unfortunately the price tag (at £1800) is prohibitive.
The machine
I’ve never really understood this. But here’s a try: You’ve got your harddrive (where you store your pictures/videos etc when you are not using them; analogy in your home would be your sideboard where you store cups, plates, and other things), your hertz (processor speed, i.e. how fast the thing can calculate or conduct a task), your cache (like a little area where you store stuff before and after the processor deals with it), your memory (the stuff that the processor use to store stuff one while working; analogy in home here would be a dinner table where you put the plates out when you eat, do your bills, etc), your video card (the stuff that makes store stuff appear on a screen), video card memory (how is this different from the normal memory?), and lots of other small things.
For the computer savvy, I apologise for the obviously boring introduction - here’s my question: what is the optimal combination of all of the above to secure best conditions for image editing? The constraints include a relatively low price and the that I use Lightroom for image editing.
I’d say the screen itself. And a good/decent calibrator. Next thing on my wish-list would be “huge” amounts of RAM (min 4GB) as the hard-drive is the slowest part in there and you’d like to access it as little as possible while working. I’m no expert, but I think the video card, and especially the video card memory, is of little or no concern in regards to image-editing (nowadays).
Eizo is also supposed to have good image-editing screens to meet different budgets.
Jeg har mindre og mindre greie på slikt, men kan gi deg min anbefaling!
Du kjøper et stereoanlegg av rimelig høy kvalitet, putter inn favorittcden og setter deg i kongesofaen. Problemet er således løst i ren forglemmense!
Good advice. I’ll check out the Eizo screens as well.
As for set-up, we currently use an external hard-drive (a 500MB LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive) which we hook up to our laptop via a USB 2.0 cable. The drive is pretty quick (7200 and has 16MB cache), but I am beginning to worry that the USB connection may be what hinders its performance and that if I could use the Firewire 800 or eSata interfaces instead that would also help. So on my list: computer must have eSata/Firewire800 connection
Your point on the video card is one I’d like to heed as well: anything that brings the cost down
Liker forslaget ditt gamle ørn. Det er ikke sikkert kona er like fornøyd om den lille stua vår blir utsatt for noen høytalere av rimelig kvalitet
Bernt, hva er “rimelig kvalitet”?
We’re using an external drive as well (primarily as backup) hooked up via FW (400 even) and it’s way faster then USB (2.0) on our machine (an Intel Mac).
FW800 should really “fly”.
Jeg skal nok finne noe for prisen av denne “HP DreamColor Display 1 billion colors in 30 bits”