Basically, hate to go against your wishes, but you get what you pay for.
Is it acceptable? Quite honestly, it might be!!

Alien Bees are very popular here. They are relatively inexpensive.
But they are not consistent with color and power. (shoot ten photos and you probably have five to ten different results).
Still, there are pros making lots of money using these things (see Zack Arias). They know the limitations and find them acceptable.

For the most part, the client may not notice a 300K change in color or a 1/3 stop change in lighting.

But if you were doing stop motion and piecing together the images into a movie... darn right you'd notice!
Or if you need to have color correct lighting for a product - a big name product for which your client pays millions of dollars a year to ensure the color is perfectly matched on every item they sell... they will want to make sure your images are reproducing that color correctly.

Which is right for you? We cannot answer that.
Take the info for what its worth.

As you figure out what it is you're trying to do and what it is you want as a result, perhaps you'll find you have more specific questions that we can help you with.

And the Great oracle spoke...

OK, actually a headstone in a graveyard.
But most likely for an alien. Dunno who/what else would do that.

Note that for the istD, top sync speed is a mere 1/150 sec.

It may or may not be the firmware...

Take off the grip. Take out the battery from the body.
Turn on the camera (dunno if this really helps).
Wait a minute or three.
Re-assemble.

See if that clears the problem. Mine seems to get in a state where the body e-dials stop functioning.
Sometimes just removing and re-assembling the grip is enough to put things back in order.

How odd. Last night out of the blue for some reason, I thought I should check for an updated firmware, but nothing. Guess I just a little bit too early.

Haven't noticed any improvements myself.

The horizon meter is funky! I like that. Much easier to see whats going on. Wish that could be overlayed in live view. More than that, I wish it operated that way when horizon level was otherwise turned off. I hate having the level replace the EV adjust displays.


Hmmm, does automatic horizon adjust work for anyone now? I know it had in the past but now it does not seem to work. Thought I'd give it another go, now that the meter is so specific about telling you when the tilt is beyond its fixable range by turning red. (even half way there no adjustment)
Did the firmware break something? Not that i care, never use it in real life.

Have to ask a silly question... I assume the message said the file was over 2G, not over 2M.
Hmmm, that being the case...
I am just looking up some info and it seems to point to the issue being that XP Home cannot handle files over 2G! Anyone else able to confirm if that is true?

If so, you need a better OS for doing large scale projects.
With a 2G filesize limit, it isn't even worth upgrading your RAM to 3G until you go to XP Pro or any OS that can use larger file sizes.

Basically, I suspect your temp file needed for PS to operate (and probably the temp file needed for the OS to operate) are getting near their top end and causing a lot of slow down. You are not yet memory bound, with nearly 1G free RAM, but everything that normally gets swapped out to disk is fighting hard to reorganize itself to fit in your memory/disk space configuration.

Sadly, it appears you need an OS upgrade, possibly a memory upgrade... and in a worst case scenario a motherboard upgrade. (my guess is that the motherboard is sufficient and you do not need to worry about that... an AMD64X2 dual core mother board should almost certainly handle 4G of RAM)

That is cool. Wish I had that when I had a PC. So many times trying to scrounge up the docs or doing searches on the motherboad's model# in order to see how high I could go with buying new RAM. (usually to find that the motherboard only supported 2G of RAM or less).

960MB? That must be free RAM. (thats not enough to run XP itself)
Do you know how much total RAM you have?
PS will take lots, but 960MB free indicates you're not totally out of RAM yet.
Although if you do not have 3G, you may want to upgrade. (you can put 4G in XP, but only 3.5 will be used by Windows so don't waste your money. Get Windows 7 or a Mac if you want to get away from 1980's style memory handling)

At 22x55, are the images at actual size or scaled up?
You may want to work with native resolution and only scale to full size when your work is done.
Three full sized images should not be taxing too much from your system.
Three scaled up images will likely require a LOT of processing.

My recommendation would be to work at native resolution if that is possible.

Also, if you're not doing a lot of blending or color manipulation, I would suggest working in 8bit mode instead of 16bit (if not already doing so).

Otherwise do what you can on the individual images, then convert down to 8bit and work on the combined image set with the processed images (saved as TIFF or PSD. Do not work off JPG. Saving as JPG once in between at Quality 12 should be OK but at larger sizes any degradation will become more noticeable .)

Just remember to convert compact focal length to 35mm if comparing against a 35mm style lens's focal length. Compacts have focal lengths of like 3.8mm -- which is not extremely wide.

For the first impressions of a B&B the photos in the brochure should not look like they were taken by an inexperienced tourist. At least get an enthusiast photographer to take some nice photos. You could probably "hire" such a person for less than the cost of a compact camera.

The person could also borrow a camera... Why spend the money for something that may not be used again?

Most compact cameras do not do well indoors without lots of light.
The Canon G9 & G10 should be decent, but not very compact. (Also not sure how wide angle they go.)