recommend a good computer and digital camera?

Agreed, forget wintel boxes, get a Mac and be done with it. Anything else is a lesser choice at best.

canon S500 powershot is a very nice cam for reasonable money. For a bit more, I'd step up to the EOS rebel digital or the EOS 10D. (those make excellent sense if you have an investment in EOS 35mm gear, as they use the same lenses.)

-Ed

Mac all the way

A

While i'm not much of a computer whiz, i know more than a few of my friends do. Having said that, they had me set-up a couple of differnt Dell laptop's for them. The first one was completely "whacked" when we took it out of the box. The operating system had major errors in it from what i can tell so we didn't even mess with it. They did send another one out to replace it right away.

Once we got the second one, my experience with Dell customer support was like that mentioned above. That is, it was horrible. I literally spent two to three hours each on a couple of different occasions trying to resolve problems. On top of that, the Dell branded Wi-Fi ( wireless network ) gear has problems with it, so shop wisely.

As a side note, Sony Laptop's don't come with a copy of the OS or a recovery disc, so if anyone has one of these, you better make a back-up disc before doing anything else to it. Otherwise, you'll have to contact Sony and purchase a disc separately, which could put your computer out of commission for a period of time. Not good and really stupid on the part of Sony's marketing as far as i'm concerned. Sean
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As a professional photographer I have much the same opinion as Gunbei. I have a Mac dual processor tower and the new 17" Powerbook. Both are excellent and you have the choice of several operating systems.

I have OS 9.1 on one hard drive in the Mac tower and OS X Panther (plus OS 9) on the other hard drive. The Powerbook is running OS X Jaguar.

For those who are accustomed to Win machines, the software that makes them so valuable in the business world is also written for Mac. I have Microsoft Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage.

As Gunbei pointed out, Photoshop and Illustrator are native to OS X and not only run faster, they never crash. With each Mac, comes photo viewing software called I photo which is the "visual" counterpart to I tunes and the I pod.

If you install the editing software provided by Nikon or Canon, the Mac software recognizes it and allows the user complete control over where to view, edit and change images. The FireWire port on Mac will allow you to plug Nikon directly into the computer and control it from the desktop. Handy for time exposures, delay flash or astral photography or a situation where you wish to be remote (or in the comfort of your car).

As for Cameras, I don't know your budget but the new Nikon D70 is pro quality for reasonable price. I suspect it will sell for about 1K. Here is a link to a new test and review:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d70.htm

Good luck with your venture whatever way you decide to go.

I'm at Brooks Institute of Photography, and Macs are the choice computer and laptop for photography and digital imaging. The Nikon D100 can be found on the used market for approx. $600, or the new D70 are both excellent digital cameras. If you already own Nikkor lenses, they work with both the D100 and the D70. I own a D1X and the images are stunning. Check out my website for samples of images using the D1X. Canon also has excellent digital cameras.

http://homepage.mac.com/rosstamann/PhotoAlbum10.html