Digital BW, The Print

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 2:13 AM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Digital, film, scanning comparisons


> Alan writes:
>
> > I can't imagine the sheer processing power
> > and memory requirements to handle a 4000 dpi
> > 8x10 scan. My 1600 dpi 16-bit gray scans are
> > large enough!
>
> You need 3 GB just to load a 4000-dpi scan of 8x10, in B&W.  In color, you
> need 8 GB.  To do anything besides load the image, you'd need 20 GB of RAM
> or so.
>
> Unfortunately, many computers are limited to far less memory than that.
> Typically they accept only a few memory modules, and even with the largest
> modules available, it may be impossible to get beyond 1.5-3 GB.  Worse
yet,
> currently available Windows systems do not support more than a few
gigabytes
> of RAM (the 32-bit processor architecture makes support of more than 4 GB
> problematic, and most versions of Windows limit applications to half this
> amount).

Anthony,

I too am disappointed at the memory limitations on current systems and lack
of OS support. In this case though, Photoshop is still the limiting factor.
I am running 2GB of RAM under Win 2000 and Photoshop will initially open say
a 1.2GB file entirely in RAM but as soon as you try to do any adjustments or
manipulations it starts spooling to the swap file and only uses a fraction
of the available memory. Adobe's insistence on using a separate swap file in
addition to the Windows page file results in sub par memory performance. As
things stand now there does seem to be much benefit to exceeding 1.5 to
2.0GB of RAM. Hopefully this will change.

Martin Wesley

(snip earlier)