articles/Commercial/soaretheyfitforpurpose-page3

So are they fit for purpose? - part 3 of 1 2 3 4

by Mike McNamee Published 01/12/2009

Other uses

Electronic advertising screens in the shop or studio window is another ideal scenario where the Fit-PC2 could be deployed. Unlike many desktop PCs and nettops such as the Acer, the Fit-PC2 is designed from the outset to run 24/7 without problems.

The third use of such a low-powered computer would be to run a small network server. Our preference here would be to use Ubuntu Linux, which CompuLab will even pre-install. We opted for the latest version 9.04, and tested both the Desktop and Server edition. These both ran quickly and there were no driver issues at all, which is very refreshing!

Video Performance

Quantum of Solace and Harry Potter (Half Blood Prince) Trailers at 1080p: Ran at 1920x1200, but there was slight tearing and the video wasn't smooth. Dropping the resolution to 1280x1024 fixed this. Strangely, running it at 1280x720 the video streched to fit the entire screen, and the performance wasn't as good.

The Fit PC is soundly made, compact and low energy. It performs well enough for many of the tasks that might be asked of it and is certainly more discrete (and less attractive to thieves) than a laptop. The Acer Revo is a strong competitor especially on cost; the differences in power consumption would probably never reach the payback point. It is, however, quite a bit larger than the Fit PC. The Mac Minis are more expensive but they are more functionally akin to a real personal computer and they do get you away from the dreaded Windows operating systems. Note, by the way, that the cost of the operating systems are not included in the table on the previous page.


We tested the Fit PC on Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux and OpenSolaris operating systems, the average photographer might need some help using the latter two but they are both free!

And now something that does work! Every so often when you use computers you stumble on something that works! The fact that it was freeware in this case only made the experience more pleasurable. Paul McMullin was editing his shots from a recent shoot in Singapore and the architects has asked for each shot to be GPS tagged so that they could get to work with their 3-D CGI packages and 'build' the new project in a virtual environment.

Photoshop allows you to get at the GPS data but in a very limited, textonly way, requiring a lot of manual data entry. Geosetter, a piece of freeware (www.geosetter.de) came to the rescue. This took less than five minutes to download and install and voila! - when you click on a file in the browser, Google Maps pops up and shows exactly where you were and how high off the ground you were (in this case 165m high and just off Raffles Avenue, Singapore - cool address!). Once again the enthusiast community are out-running the commercial sector. Our thanks are due to Better Digital Camera, the Australian magazine whose timely article on the subject led us to this little gem - some days everything just comes together!


Please Note:
There is more than one page for this Article.
You are currently on page 3 Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/12/2009
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:26

More Commercial Articles



There are 0 days to get ready for The Society of Photographers Convention and Trade Show at The Novotel London West, Hammersmith ...
which starts on Wednesday 15th January 2025


MPB - Buy, sell or trade used photo and video kit

Update cookies preferences