If you intend to do professional prepress scanning, you will tend to need a Macintosh G4 computer.
The reason that you may need a Macintosh has little to do with whether a Mac is better than a PC. The reason is primarily that most of the better scanners work only with a Mac. They simply don't run on a PC.
That was the rule five years ago. Still three years ago scanners required a Mac. BetterLight digital scanning backs required a Mac several years ago. Also.
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I was able to run a EverSmart Supreme with a Macintosh 9600 about 3 years ago, but the system would have run considerably better with a Macintosh G4 and Mac OS 9.x.
I am guessing that most scanner software will work primarily on Mac OS 8.x and 9.x. It may take a while for some of the scanner companies to get around to developing a bug free relationship with Mac OS X.
Today all this is changing. Lots of scanners are now dual-platform, However since you never know which scanner you may end up with, and since the software was, if at all, only recently ported over to a PC, my recommendation would be to stick with Macintosh for now.
Besides, if you intend to handle masses of images at high resolution and professional quality, there are really only two monitors that provide the size and quality, namely the Apple 22" cinema display (which is what FLAAR uses) and the newer 23" HD cinema display (which we would like to use but don't yet have any of).
The equivalent monitors for a PC cost up to $7,000 (for the IBM version with an even higher pixel count).
If your scanning is for output on wide format inkjet printers.
If your scanning is intended to be reproduced on a wide format inkjet printer, then a good source of information on Apple computers is ProVAR LLC. This company specializes in working with people in graphic design, finance, advertising, entertainment industry, and certain other specific markets
Last updated Jan. 26, 2004.
Previous updates: Aug. 20, 2002 First posted July 2002.