Affect of using 42 Mega Pixels vs. 24 Mega Pixels on computer capacity: I am using an iMac with 32 Gig. ram, & Intel I-7. I would like to know if switching to a Sony camera with 42 MG...

wiselee Loc: Henderson,NV.

I am using an iMac with 32 Gig. ram, & Intel I-7. I would like to know if switching to a Sony camera with 42 MG would require more computer capacity. I don’t want to have to rebuild my computer if I switch to the Sony. I have access to the Cloud and an external hard drive for storage.

I’m not up to speed on computers.

Thanks....

Fred Harwood Loc: Sheffield, Mass.

Don't know what 42 MG is. Do you mean files of 42 megabytes? If you shoot raw, 14-bit, your files out of camera could be that large. Opened in, say, Photoshop, a file might be much larger, due to lossless compression. If you save a TIFF or PSD file from PS, you might have hundreds of Mbytes. Perhaps you could be more specific?

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

wiselee wrote:

I am using an iMac with 32 Gig. ram, & Intel I-7. I would like to know if switching to a Sony camera with 42 MG would require more computer capacity. I don’t want to have to rebuild my computer if I switch to the Sony. I have access to the Cloud and an external hard drive for storage.

I’m not up to speed on computers.

Thanks....

You will likely be fine with processing power and ram, but you'll need to get a few HGST Ultrastar or WD RE 4 tb drives. You probably won't want to have to deal with moving these large files back and forth, so a large external drive on a fast interface (USB3.1 or Thunderbolt 2) should be adequate.

wiselee Loc: Henderson,NV.

I’m looking at buying a Sony a7R111 camera which is a 42 MP camera. I’ve been using a Nikon with 24 MP. I’m concerned about what affect it may have on my computer capacity. I do shoot raw and the files would be quite large.

wiselee Loc: Henderson,NV.

Thanks, I’ll look into that.

SharpShooter Loc: NorCal

wiselee wrote:

I’m looking at buying a Sony a7R111 camera which is a 42 MP camera. I’ve been using a Nikon with 24 MP. I’m concerned about what affect it may have on my computer capacity. I do shoot raw and the files would be quite large.

I'm not a computer guy but I would just get the camera if you want it. Everything will run half as fast but how fast do you need it to go?
My computer is a PC i7 dual core with 12 gb, DD3 ram.
It's maybe 5 years old and cost about $600 when new. It was a cheap, fairly fast computer but not even CLOSE to what people talk about here.
I shoot 50 mp files and I have no trouble whatsoever. I went from 21 mp to 50, so yes, I noticed a slow down!!! LoL
What takes a while longer is converting from Raw or tiff to Jpeg. I usually convert when I go to bed or during dinner, same when loading 500 or more images. It might take an hour to convert 300 files. Good luck
SS

Rongnongno Loc: FL

wiselee wrote:

I’m looking at buying a Sony a7R111 camera which is a 42 MP camera. I’ve been using a Nikon with 24 MP. I’m concerned about what affect it may have on my computer capacity. I do shoot raw and the files would be quite large.

Look at it this way: Once you are done with a file, transfer to another external if 'space' is your concern.

Personally I keep only the active files on my PC.

Process is this way:
Shoot
Copy to PC drive
Prune all unwanted
Copy all kept as original to a storage drive.
Work on those I need too
Copy the PSD files (Any software will do) and the image file with its side car onto a PSD Storage drive These will take way more space than a puny raw file.
Delete whatever is left over (non edited)
Advantage: Unlimited space.

Backing up all this crap is an issue thought.

repleo Loc: Boston

wiselee wrote:

I am using an iMac with 32 Gig. ram, & Intel I-7. I would like to know if switching to a Sony camera with 42 MG would require more computer capacity. I don’t want to have to rebuild my computer if I switch to the Sony. I have access to the Cloud and an external hard drive for storage.

I’m not up to speed on computers.

Thanks....

I'm processing RAW files from my A7Rii with PS / ACR on my i5 laptop with just 8 meg of RAM. Not great, but adequate for my needs. Nix filters and Lightroom are sluggish.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

32 Gb of system RAM is ideal for photo editing.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

wiselee wrote:

I am using an iMac with 32 Gig. ram, & Intel I-7. I would like to know if switching to a Sony camera with 42 MP would require more computer capacity. I don’t want to have to rebuild my computer if I switch to the Sony. I have access to the Cloud and an external hard drive for storage.

I’m not up to speed on computers.

Thanks....

As others have said your computer should be fine for now - at least for a couple of years unless you already feel that it is slow, just get more external storage if needed. The bigger files shouldn't have that much of an effect on your current machine when being processed, unless you just want an excuse to buy a new machine.

DMGill Loc: Colorado

I’m using a windows based computer with 32 gig of ram and a liquid cooled, over clocked I7 cpu. I have two fast Solid State Drives in the computer and use NAS for photos not actively being worked on. The I7 seems to be the bottle neck, but speed of file handling did decrease noticeably when I went from a D500 to a D850.

BlackRipleyDog

My system is a Dell Precision Win7 Tower running dual Xeon multi-core processors with 36 gig of ram. It handles files from my D800 rather nicely. I can stitch panos within two minutes. The real time-killer is downloading images from the cards which are plugged into a card reader wired direct into the system and not an external USB reader. The files are usually only NEFs going to SSDs.

chepo1956 Loc: Puerto Rico

You have more than sufficient power for all your post processing needs. The only thing you might consider getting is more space since the files will be large. Maybe a 1 or 2TB SSD (solid state drive). Also, you might consider subscribing for cloud storage which is relatively cheap or even getting external hard drives.

peterg Loc: Santa Rosa, CA

I process my Nikon D850 raw files (about 56mb) on a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and i7 CPU. Works fine. No noticeable slowdown compared with raw files 1/2 that size.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

You'll be fine. I shoot with a Nikon D850 and my RAW files run about 94MB. You just need lots of storage.

wiselee wrote:

I’m looking at buying a Sony a7R111 camera which is a 42 MP camera. I’ve been using a Nikon with 24 MP. I’m concerned about what affect it may have on my computer capacity. I do shoot raw and the files would be quite large.