Digital Darkroom Nirvana

Years ago, back in the "ancient" film days, I had a darkroom outfitted with blackout windows, a dichroic (color) enlarger, a huge sink for rinsing prints, and lots of very smelly chemicals.

Well, times have changed. Now that same room is no longer in darkness and all the chemical fumes have finally dissipated. In their place is the faint hum of hard drives and the glow of flat panel displays.

I've just recently upgraded the system, added more hard drive space, and can gaze into 525 square inches of flat panel color instead of peering at a faint projected image in near darkness. It's digital darkroom nirvana!

For the techies reading this, here's a brief rundown of the setup:

HP Tower PC with Intel Quad Core CPU and 4GB DDR2 memory, (3) SATA hard drives (RAID0, 1.5 Terabytes), Dual Samsung SyncMaster LCD displays (27" and 19", landscape + portrait), plus two HP servers on a LAN with another Terabyte of drive space.

Sure beats that old darkroom...