After switched from 6MP’s D40 to 10MP’s D80, I found that my previous ThinkPad T42 could not provide me sufficient performance when I processed those NEFs in Capture NX, even the T42 2373-8ZU I owned was equipped with 2GB DDR333 DRAM + Seagate 5400.3 16MB 160GB HDD.
For the sake of being a ThinkPad fans, I built up my small workstation for photo processing with ThinkPad T400 2764-CTO + Advanced Mini Dock + ThinkVision L220x. Following is a short introduction on this combo.
The T400 I ordered is configured with Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, AMD Mobility Radeon 3470 256MB GPU, 1GB x 2 DDR3-1066 DRAM. Recently I upgraded the original 5K320 80GB HDD to WD Scorpio Black 320GB HDD to boost the Read/Write performance of the file system. Particularly, the 1440x900 ThinkPad LCD can help to do some temporary photo processing during the travel where my L220x is not available.
Generally speaking, this T400 satisfies me well for its great stability and sufficient performance, as well as the cool and quite behavior (thank for the great thermal design). You can get a good deal if you keep an eye on Lenovo’s official website in US (extra discount available from time to time).
The ThinkVision L220x has a 22 inch 1920 x 1200 S-PVA TFT panel. I think the words in blue already tell you the great color performance delivered from this LCD monitor. I don’t need to say too much about this LCD (quite a lot of reviews about it in internet), and it’s well worthy to get if you want to balance between desktop real estate and color performance (plus the 178°/178° view angle).
I output T400 to L220x through the DVI-D interface on the ThinkPad Advanced Mini Dock to get a stable image signal under the resolution of 1920 x 1200.
The last one which I want to mention here to help a lot for my photo processing is a good mouse. Good in shape (ergonomic design), as well as good in performance. If you can get the Logitech MX Revolution with a good price (current price in The Netherlands is not nice compared to 1 year ago), better don’t hesitate!
Finally I would like to share something for software. Capture NX is the greatest tool in my opinion for NEF processing. By using it, you feel like you are really developing the NEF to a JPEG. Apart from NX, IrfanView is a neat, swift, but powerful freeware for photo viewing and management (like multi-renaming and multi-resizing).