Digital BW, The Print

awahlster writes:
 > well as always when a question is asked like this the budget gets 
 > thrown out the door.. BUT as I said I stretched the budget to get to 
 > $400.00 See I'm not just buying a Monitor but a New PC (custom 
 > assembled with a 3gig HT PentIV 800fsb 1-2 gig RAM 80 gig HD with 
 > 8gig buffer) it is being built to only do photo editing nothing else 
 > won't even be on the net, two printers (a Canon i960 for color and an 
 > Epson 890 for UT-2 B&W), a FS4000D film scanner and a Epson 3170 flat 
 > bed for MF and prints plus three of four pieces of software. [...]

I think that it's *really* important for a system to be balanced.

One thing that you might want to consider is trimming a bit off of the
spec's of the computer itself (you're paying a premium for bleeding
edge stuff there) and putting the money towards high quality monitor
and/or calibration tools.  

The monitor and calibration tools you use will make a *big* difference
in the quality of the work that you're able to produce.  The
hot-rodded CPU and big RAM, etc.... won't have any effect on the
quality of what you're doing, just the speed at which you can do it.
If you're working on 4000dpi scans from 35mm film, you could certainly
buy a simpler machine and it'd still feel like an amazing upgrade from
the box you've been using.  Upgrading components in the box itself
will be easy going forward, and prices will only keep dropping....

g.