Photoshop again

[Guest]

Over the next several years I want to upgrade the quality of steroscopic photo's,make new images from two or more photo's, postcards etc....If i purchased a cs4 what hardware, memory, hardrive, monitor etc should I purchase with a $5,000 budget. I don't want to be adding on.

 

[sminlal]

Does the $5000 include a monitor and the cost of Photoshop?

Any typical mid-to-high-end system with a Core i5 or i7 CPU, a 64-bit OS and 4GB or more of memory should work quite well. In fact you could probably get away with less unless your images are really large and/or you're trying to batch process a lot of them.

 

[ukcal]

A full HD monitor is a must and check reviews for colour quality, you need one that is definitely accurate and represents colours well. Also don't be too worried about spending money on a very up-to-date graphics card, unless your system will also double up as a gaming machine! Obviously you will be needing a large hard drive, though you may wish to consider either Western Digital Velociraptors and RAID setup for even better performance. A Solid State Drive (SSD) would be even faster, but these are still very expensive for their size and so may be worth waiting for prices to come down a bit.
Otherwise I agree, 4 - 8Gb of RAM, 64bit OS (else not all the RAM will be recognised) and one of the latest quad core CPUs to keep you up to speed for a long time.
Hope that helps