Wednesday 30 April 2008

output media Evaluation

Monitors
The average monitor today is a very high standard, 17" flat screen monitors are what most people have and is a high enough quality and resoulution to make very detailed graphic images which are plentty good enough for what it needed. widescreen monitors are a different resoulution than the standard monitor so arent always the best to use when making graphics, the fact that they are much more expensive and not the standard resoultion means using them to create graphics is not advised.

Printers
printers nowdays are only usually used in either extreme of what they will be used for, either to print off black and white word documents or at the other end of the scale is printing posters. if you want the printer to be good enough to print good poster print outs you'l need to spend around £200-£300 depending on the manufacturer, this may seem expensive considering you can get one for around £50, but if you want to make a living from making and printing graphics it has to be of a very high quality.

Thursday 17 April 2008

Comparing Software packages

The two software packages i'll be comparing are Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, i have used both myself so know what each can do, i started with Paint Shop Pro and advanced to Photoshop which kind of shows what the difference is between them. Photoshop is a much more advanced programme, it is harder to use but has alot more features, although each feature has its own area where it can be used for maximum effieciency, features such as multiple filters to edit the appearence of each layer, magic want tool which only selects specific parts of the image, both useful features that arent in Paint Shop Pro.
Paint Shop Pro is a relativly easy to use and a cheaper alternative than Photoshop, it doesnt have alot of features but it has enough for simple and certain areas of advanced photo editing. Both packages have their downfalls, the biggest by far downfall of Photoshop is its pricetag, costing around £700 where Paint Shop Pro costs around £40, a much cheaper choice. The biggest downfall in Paint Shop Pro is its limited features, but when it comes to doing this as a proffesion nothing other than Photoshop will do, its not always necessary to get the latest version but at least you'll need Photoshop CS.

Software used for digital graphics

Vector graphics software such as Visio are used in situation where the user has an image that needs to keep its quality even after it has been resized, bitmap images are noo good for this as they are created pixel by pixel.
Bitmap software, such as Paint is only really used for simple things, like print screening images then saving them, or other very simple editing, such as putting text on images, it has no layers so is very limited in what can be done.
Photo manipulation software, such as Photoshop are used to do advanced photo editing, the layer system in Photoshop allowes easy editing of each layer indevidually. Photoshop is also used to create website layouts and templates which are then cut up and used in different software to create the website.
Graphic facilities embedded within other application packages, such as Word are only really used because it is quick and easy, they are also usually vector images so they can be streched but will keep there quality.

Graphic-related hardware problems in this system

System specification
Intel Pentium D 'Dual Core X2' CPU (5.3 Ghz)
VIA Chipset 1066 Mhz Motherboard - slots available: AGP8x (1), PCI (3), RAM (2); ports available: LAN (1), USB (6)
512 MB RAM
80 GB HDD (SATA300)
18X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer & Dual Format
onboard UniChrome PRO 3D Graphics with 64 MB shared memory
mouse and keyboard
15" flat screen
cheap inkjet printer

Monitor
15" monitors aren't good enough for graphics nowadays as they usually have a very low standard screen resolution (800x600 pixels) and to effectivly create graphics you need a much higher resolution screen, the more pixels you can see at one time the more detail you can put in images. 19" is a recommended size but 17" is just about enough for what its needed.

My recommendation for this product is a LG W1952TQ 19" Widescreen LCD Monitor. Its Description is below:
£109.99ex VAT
£129.24 inc VAT
Viewable Area: 19” Widescreen (1440x900 Resolution)
- Interface: Analog / Digital
- Response Time: 2ms
- 16.7M Colours
- Contrast Ratio: 10,000:1
- Viewing Angle (H/V): 170°/ 170° (TN Panel)
- Brightness: 300cd/m2
- Supplied with DVI Cable
- ez Zooming, Adjust resolution by one level with a touch of a button.
- 4:3 in Wide (Aspect Ratio Control), Enjoy original 4:3 images with LG Wide Monitor!, With 4:3 in Wide(ARC) Function, No more distored image!
- Wide Color Gamut(WCG 100%)
- 3 Years On-Site Warranty with LG, contact them on 0870 872 7888 or email at ukmonitor@lge.com
These features are perfect to create and edit images effectivley for a low price. although there are better machines available for much more money, i believe this LG monior has the right blend of features and value for money.

Graphics Card
The onboard graphics aren't close to whats needed to create good, high quality graphics, theres no need to go over the top as its not for playing games, just creating graphics, although you do need it good enough to view very high definition pictures and needs to support a good monitor

My recommendation for this product is a Asus GeForce EN8800 GT 512MB GDDR3 Graphics card. Its Description is below:
£89.99ex VAT
£105.74 inc VAT
- GeForce 8800 GT core running at 600MHz
- Shader Clock Speed of 1500MHz
- 512MB GDDR3 Memory running at 1800MHz
- Glacier uprated cooling solution (Quieter and Superior to reference cooler)
- 256-Bit Memory Interface
- 112 Stream Processors
- Shader Model 4.0
- Memory Bandwidth: 57.6GB/s
- Designed For Extreme HD Gaming
- Nvidia Pure Video Technology
- Dedicated Video processors free the GPU Shaders to run 3D applications
- Dual dual-link DVI supports two 2560 x 1600 resolution displays
- HDCP Enabled!!
- SLI ready – Upto 2x the performance of a single GPU (Available on with future driver release)
- True High Dynamic Range Rendering Support – Based on Open EXR technology
- World's first unified architecture supporting Microsoft® DirectX® 10
- Built for Microsoft® Windows® Vista™

These features are more than enough to cope with anything you can throw at it graphically, its more than capable of running everything you'll need but its not too expensive that its not financially viable to buy it.

Both of the proposed system upgrades can be found on www.overclockers.co.uk

Describe how the following hardware components affect the performance of a computer system used to manipulate digital graphics

Hard drive
The only difference the hard drive will make is if it runs out of space, it has no real affect directly on graphics but without the hard drive making them is impossible.


Graphics card
The graphics card is used to display the images on the screen so the better the quality of the graphics card the more detail can be put in the image.

Processor(s)
The processor is what is used to run the programme your making the image on, the faster the processor the faster the effects are done in the programme, with some programmes like paint, this isnt an issue but for PhotoShop loading time is important.

RAM
Random Access Memory, everything on the screen is done through RAM, the more RAM you have, the more you can do at the same time.