By the looks of it, Pentax is trying to do with 645D what Sony did with the A700.
Simply offer the format at a lower price as the rest.

I don't know how successful Sony is with the a700 but Pentax might be able to bring medium format to a bigger group. Most probably studio photographers that just started, maybe even some wedding photographers or amateur fine art artists.

Mongoose you make a point there.

I've bought the newest thing in 2003, amd athlon64, good motherboard with new PCI-E instead of AGP which was common then.
I've been upgrading along the way but AMD abbondand socket 939 quite quickly but bought the best processor there was for it for little money and upgraded my video card also, since i had PCI-E I could do that. If i had gone for the older AGP I would have needed to buy a new mother board, that comes with a different CPU socket so a new CPU was then also needed and I would have needed to buy new RAM since they wouldn't fit either.
So in the end I've save quite some money a long the way.

Since I bought the newest thing I could upgrade and I'm still running everything on it. the CPU is now getting slow though so will need to upgrade but will try to get everything as new as I can so DDR3 just to be sure I can upgrade that in the future. CPU is always a problem though but DDR3 will be there over 4 years but DDR2 will become every more tricky.

The system I propose is around £550 (don't know your prices so converted those here) so only slightly over budget but still being bleeding edge new though. Only question is if he needs a new power unit or not?

Too be honest it's the worst time to get a new PC.
DDR2 will get replaced fully by DDR3 in the future just like DDR2 did with DDR. So will you go for the new formats so that you can upgrade later or get bang for the bucks now but loosing the possibility to upgrade over 4 years?

I would suggest to take a look at the Intel P55 boards with in combination with i7-860, this cost probable £360 then you also need RAM and maybe a video card.
Two strips of 2GB DDR3 RAM will cost you around £80 and leaves you room to upgrade.
Graphics card is a bit hard, ATI new cards deliver a lot of punch for little money and they use less power.
ATI Radeon HD5770 would not fit in your budget though since it's £110.
But the card can also process just like your processor does and give a performance boost to Lightroom and CS4. Nvidia cards have CUDA, that is basicly the same but the new ati cards use the new open standard that is in Windows 7 I believe, don't know if the other cards do???

This system here is probably over kill at the moment though but it will keep you running for at least 4 years and then you can upgrade it most probably quite easily to keep it running for another 3 or 4 years.

I thought K10's question referred to to XP pro. XP64 would be another alternative with the limitation that it may be hard to find drivers for peripherals.

Does anyone know whether Open Office will run with W7?[/quote]Yes but like the way you said it, it seems that any version of Vista or Win7 can have more then 4GB of ram but that isn't the case.
The 32bit version still have the 4gb limitation.

And yes indeed drivers are a problem with XP64, besides that it was an fine system but I wanted to make the point that XP64 also support more then 4GB of ram because it was 64bit.

They do look a lot better Oggy.

The photos of Hyram have the same "softness" as that from Oggy.

I believe the close focusing is to blame since with subjects further away it's far sharper.

Right on topic link
Seems Canon has some problems.
profits down 21,5% and operational profits down 53,6%

Thank you Mhuni, found the answer in one of the links there.
link
S-PVA/MVA panels offer better color reproduction and viewing angles than TN panels, have slightly worse response times than TN or S-IPS, offer the best contrast ratios, may suffer from color shifting or input lag and have higher availability than S-IPS panels. Mid range, fair price.

Was my thought too when I saw it

Did some more research on that and it seems it isn't at all that special, it's simply downgraded version of the full version and with restriction.
So it is not specially design for running on netbooks, it's design to be as cheap as it can and so make netbooks even cheaper.

just read a Dutch test and they say it runs just as fast as XP on the samsung NC10 but the startup of win7 is faster and recovering from sleep to and connecting to wireless network also. Although they have 2gb of ram in the machine so lower rams machine might do worse then XP.