The topic of hardware doesn’t always scream “creativity,” but nonetheless, hardware is essential for doing creative work. Keeping up with the latest graphic tablets or hard drives may not be at the top of your list, but it’s at the top of mine.
Here are a few recent items on the hardware beat — new tablets for designers and fast hard drives for Photoshoppers — that could make a big difference to your creative process.
The Pen is Mightier
As the means by which your hand executes what your eye sees, input devices are a very personal choice. Some designers love graphic tablets, while others still swear by the tried-and-true mouse.
The attraction of tablets is obvious for several reasons: They emulate the paper-and-pen human interface that we grew up with. The pen-and-tablet combo has a finer resolution than what’s possible with the ordinary mouse. Even better, most graphics applications support pressure-sensitive pens so they respond better to the hand’s manipulation of drawing and painting tools. Another benefit is that many pen users report that their hand position with a pen is better ergonomically than with mice, this relieving the physical stress from hours at the computer. On the other hand, becoming facile with a pen takes some time and training.
Most tablets, though, are a blank slate visually, so using one is like drawing with a pen on a mouse pad. The element that’s missing is the ability to digitally draw on the image itself. Wacom Technology addresses that shortcoming with its Cintiq line of “interactive” tablets that incorporate an LCD screen.
I saw a demonstration of the new Cintiq 15X tablet at the Seybold Seminars conference and expo in San Francisco earlier this fall. Now I’m firmly in the CRT camp where high-quality color work is concerned. But the Cintiq’s combination of a wireless pen, pressure-sensitive tablet, and LCD would appear a natural fit for tasks such as masking. Several Photoshop professionals I queried at the show seconded that opinion.
Like its predecessor, the Cintiq 15X sports a 15-inch LCD; however, the company said the new 1,024-x-768-pixel screen is 35 percent brighter than the previous model. The updated tablet also features a variety of improvements, such as offering both DVI (digital video interface) and 15-pin analog ports, and 512 levels of pressure sensitivity (double that of the earlier version).
In addition to the updated technology, Wacom dropped the Cintiq 15X’s list price from $3,999 to $1,899.99 — yes, that’s less than $1,900.
Wacom also introduced a new line of professional tablets called Intuos2 that feature a pen with improved ergonomics and a tablet that’s more sensitive and responsive — no LCD, though. The Intuos2 tablets range in price from $219.99 to $819.99.
Wacom tablets support Mac, Windows and a range of Unix flavors. Wacom also recently released a beta driver for Mac OS X.
When More is Less
We all know that Adobe Photoshop is a space hog and that not enough disk space slows Photoshop to a crawl. One way to improve performance in Adobe Photoshop is with a fast scratch disk. Photoshop and other products such as Adobe Premiere use this virtual-memory architecture to temporarily hold items that you may recall during the course of editing an image.
At barest minimum, Photoshop 6.0 (and 5.5) needs 125 MB of free space on your hard drive. Plus, the application can support up to 200 GB spanning as many as four partitions. According to an Adobe technical note, the First Scratch Disk setting should be at least 10 times the size of your largest image. Of course, the faster the hard drive and the more contiguous the storage space on a disk’s platters, the better. Slow removable media such as ZIP cartridges are inappropriate for this purpose. You can change the settings in Photoshop with the Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks menu under Preferences. Adobe offers an interesting list of speed optimizations that includes step-by-step instructions.
With this in mind, storage-minded content pros should take note of Maxtor’s recent release of several new lines of high-capacity, high-speed drives using the new Ultra ATA 133 standard.
Developed by Maxtor, Ultra ATA 133 is the latest advance in hard drive technology that increases the speed with which the computer communicates with the hard disk. It also supports higher capacity drives — at current count up to 160 GB. Ultra ATA 133, as well as its companion Big Drives technology, is supported by a number of several RAID controller and PCI card vendors. Drives using the new interface are backwards compatible with ATA 100 and ATA 66 products. However, a longer list of other system vendors, including market leader Intel, will wait for implementations of Serial ATA, an even faster competing technology due in the next couple of years.
Maxtor’s new DiamondMax D540X and DiamondMax Plus D740X lines are designated by spindle speeds: 5,400 and 7,200 rpm, respectively. The slower series provides capacities of 120 and 160 GB ($279.95 and $329.95), while the faster DiamondMax Plus D740X comes in 80-GB capacity ($229.95). Maxtor has a promotion running through the end of the year that bundles a Promise Technology Ultra ATA 133 host adapter, which is needed to take advantage of the extra high capacity and performance.
Promise’s $59 card is compatible with Windows and Unix systems. Mac users can take advantage of Miglia Technology’s $149 Alchemy ATA 133 PCI card.
There’s one significant caveat that set off some recent grumbling in online forums. When plugged into an ordinary, built-in ATA interface, Maxtor’s higher-capacity drives will only format to 128 GB. The drive functions, but your computer can’t see the extra capacity without the host adapter card.
There’s no big mystery here. The capacity limitation is part of the ATA standard. It’s based on the way that ATA addresses logical blocks on the hard disk platters inside the drive. When you add up the bits used to track data on the disk sectors — by the drive’s controller, computer hardware and operating system — the total comes to about 128 GB.
As usual, there’s rabbinic wisdom applicable to this situation: “Many see, but few understand.” Yes, Maxtor’s drive technology permits bigger and faster drives. Still, buyers must weigh its level of compatibility for their work environment.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on November 15, 2001
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