I need an option to for tethered on-location shooting. I'm looking at this laptop.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=cart_accessories&A=details&Q=&sku=631545&is=REG

I'm leaning towards it because of the length it runs on the battery. I'm shooting a 1Ds MKIII. My only concern is how much this machine would bog down transferring the images. Does anyone else tether on-location and what setup do you use? Also would the Acer work for this type of work?

I've tried tethered shooting for portraits on location with a 1Ds Mark 3 (22mp) and a Nikon D3X (24.5mp) and 2.17Ghz iMac with 3GB RAm (and images going to an external LAcie HDD via Firewire 400 --I like to keep the main HDD with the applications on it as clean as possible) and found it bogged me down. For architectural work and still life / product shooting it worked fine.

I like the idea but I think I'd rather do it with a bigger machine like a a Mac Pro or similar Windows 7 machine.


if all you want to do is see the images larger maybe just connecting a small LCD directly to the camera might be a better alternative

E-Vener wrote:
I've tried tethered shooting for portraits on location with a 1Ds Mark 3 (22mp) and a Nikon D3X (24.5mp) and 2.17Ghz iMac with 3GB RAm (and images going to an external LAcie HDD via Firewire 400 --I like to keep the main HDD with the applications on it as clean as possible) and found it bogged me down.

That's two bottlenecks - the USB connection between camera and computer, plus the transfer to the Firewire drive.
The setup could only be made worse by using an external USB drive for the files.

As for tethering in general, any recent computer will work; performance depends a lot on the connection and the capture application used.

The Canon apps are not very demanding, and the USB connection will slow things down anyways.

Thanks for the insight. I guess I'll just give it a go & see how it works. If all else fails, I'll just download cards during the shoots in between changes.