Daris Fox: PC has one great advantage over Mac OS X at present. You can use more than 2Gb of RAM for your images.

This is true and it would be great to see Mac move to 64Bit

Marios: correction intuos 4

Just got mine two weeks ago. It is great!

On my workstation I had 16Gb of RAM of which 8Gb was dedicated to the OS and 4Gb was a RAM drive. For Photoshop this machine was fast, even with Opteron processors 3 years old and can still keep up with the i7 series in many tasks (other than computationally intensive). Plus you can use SSDs natively as Windows 7 has TRIM support, again something that Snow Leopard neglected to implement.

Microsoft have finally released a good OS in Windows 7, it’s fast, stable and reliable. It’s also sets the stage for future technologies such as touch screens, OpenCL and more. Like Vista before it the system has now got better support for new screen technologies and are resolution independent which XP struggled with above 24in (icons and text got too small).

OS X is no panacea, most Mac owners will blithely ignore the major issues that’s plagued the OS in recent months the most obvious is the data loss issue as a guest user. Security is also pretty lax in OS X something that may come back and haunt Apple if they market share continues to grow.

At the end of the day the arguments for OS X Vs Windows 7 are moot, both are strong and capable systems. Choose the poison that does the job for your ideology and methodology. There is no quality difference upon input/output, there is no advantage in colour management or even font management (an old Mac strong point). The hardware is essentially the same (apart from Apples own quirks) and reliability is about the same. Although Apple’s quality control is going downhill these days (Time Capsules, faulty Imac screens and so on).

Mario from Greece.

I used to shoot live theatrical events with the old style Canon 50mm f 1.0 EF and the 85mm f 1.2 ef. The 85 was very sharp for my purposes, and the 50mm really was not usable wide open.