I just was looking on the Dell site and I read that a good graphics card
sounds good but if you think other things are more important I thankyou.

I understand the 2D market is accommodated on the newer cards, but in a less
than perfect fashion.  I have heard most gamerz cards (nvidea, radeon ati
etc) have bad RFI filtering, high frequency signal roll-off and similar
problems result in blurry image quality. I also heard that colour fidelity
is sacrificed for high frame rates *even* when running in 2D modes.

My wife could not understand how I could spend all day editing and writing
on the puter, claiming she always got a headache after 5 or 6 hours on her
various machines irrespective of the refresh rate, bit depth or screen res,
one day when hers was down she used mine.  a few hours later she commented
that she felt absolutely fine and understood why I was so insistent on
keeping the matrox ;)

Grunt has little to do with image editing, colour fidelity and sharpness is
more important but then again, I see people who have become familiar with
some awful systems and seem more than happy, producing fine work on less
than optimal equipment.

Another point, I understand that only X amount of video ram can be addressed
and a lot of the newer cards with 2x X ram is largely a marketing ploy.  Can
any one confirm how much can be addressed? (** see below)  I've also not
seen a squeak of difference using 8,16 and 32Mb matrox cards in any area
other than when playing games..

Do they make 1500rpm SCSI drives?  not that hard drive speed makes a heck of
a lot (any??) difference in image editing if enough ram is loaded.  Sure,
video and audio where files are accessed and written to hard drive along the
way, but image files rarely seem to need the drive to be involved.

re Vram: from http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthread.php?t=158406
Myth: More VRAM = Better!

Fact: Not true, depending on what you're doing.

VRAM is used by a card to store commands, textures, and rendered materials
before the RAMDAC sends the stuff out through your VGA/DVI port. Most games
will only need 128 megs of VRAM at medium-high settings, and 256 megs of
VRAM comes in handy with max settings, especially with textures. And the
7800GTX with 512 megs of VRAM is NOT better just because of the RAM. It
comes significantly overclocked out of the box, at 550 Mhz Core and 850 Mhz
(1.7 Ghz effective) Memory. And for those of you who are wondering about the
6200 series cards that have "128 Meg supporting" in the name, the mem
controller uses system RAM as artificial VRAM when needed. HOWEVER, for
reasons that I can't fully explain, having low amounts of system RAM will
almost definately bottleneck higher end graphics cards, such as the 7800GT
or GTX. 1.5 to 2 gigs will take away that bottleneck, and then it will be
the CPU's job.

what the ram is used for

Ok, first, your CPU sends data to your video card to be cached in RAM. This
is what it's there for, to hold pre and post-processed data. Next, Geometry
and Commands are sent to the Pre-T&L Cache. Vertex Shading (T&L) then takes
place, and the data is sent to the Post-T&L Cache. Then, this data is sent
to Triangle Setup and Rasterization.  Now, what about Textures? They're sent
to the... take a guess... Texture Cache. Fragment Shading and Raster
Operations are then executed on those Textures and semi-processed Geometry
from the Triangle Setup and Rasterization stages.  All this is then sent to
the frame buffer, which is located within your VRAM. Now what? The RAMDAC
sends this info out through your VGA/DVI port, and the rest is for another
guide.   That's the basic overview of how at least an nVidia card works

"Phred" <

Sam:

it's an issue..

both contrast and colour (come ON with the OLED monitors please!!)

contrast:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_ratio

it seems as usual, there are differing ways of measuring and expressing the
idea of contrast ratio, one considers the available room light, another
method does not.  Another method highlights dynamic contrast advantages
over static

"Emissive display technologies - where all pixels emit light individually,
such as OLED, plasma, FED and SED - are capable of achieving a very good
contrast ratio. This is also true with the case of CRT[1] which have a
theoretically infinite contrast ratio and practically achieve such a high
contrast ratio that this terminology usually does not refer to them."

this is largely because the light is emitted when the gun in the CRT causes
light to be emitted when it fires at the phosphor screen at a given part of
the screen, the comparison being against the bit where NO emission occurs,
thus no light.  LCD' have a light that's always on and black is produced by
blocking this light (to a certain degree).  
There's a limit to how much can be blocked, and a
limit to how bright the LCD backlight can go (obviously) and the difference
between the two limits LCS's more than CRT's, OLED's or any of the others
mentioned above

Personally I have great hopes for OLED's and hope we see them on the market
soon.  Prices should be VERY cheap and sizes are not limited by existing
problems in technology as the screen can be created by virtually 'printing'
it on a substrate :) :)

"A notable recent development in the LCD technology is the so called
"dynamic contrast". When there is a need to display a dark image, the
display would underpower the backlight lamp ..but will proportionately
amplify the transmission through the LCD panel. This gives the benefit of
realizing the potential static contrast ratio of the LCD panel in dark
scenes... The drawback is that if a dark scene does contain small areas of
superbright light, they may be sacrificed and blown out."

"Some manufacturers have gone as far as using different device parameters
for the two tests, even further inflating the calculated contrast ratio. ..
one method to do this is to enable the white sector for the "on" part and
disable it for the "off" part[4] This practice is rather dubious, as it
will be impossible to reproduce such contrast ratios with any useful image
content."

k

I do have both a 21" Trinitron tube CRT and a 19" LCD. Actually a Dell

Using either is no problem to get the colour balance for printing,
unlike the older LCD screens where they varied in intensity with the
angle there viewed.

We are just coming into the 64bit processing. So my guess, it will be
full on in the next 3 years. What's available now that looks good and
cheap and smart - say, P4 3.2 1G ram 128M AGP - ain't gunna cope with
the new generation of software.

Over the last months I have put a couple of PC's together and looked
more closely at the specs as they have changed.

There is a difference between a Home PC which is kept much longer than
an Office PC (work) - the office pc gets written off in 2 years and
replaced. At home the PC is kept for at least 5-6 years.