Asus Eee PC for photographers

The Asus Eee PC is clearly handy for anyone wanting to knock out some documents and emails, but how practical is it for a digital photographer? The primary task for any computer – laptop or desktop – when it comes to digital photography is of course viewing images. The Asus Eee PC 4G is equipped with a 7in screen with 800x480 pixels which gives it a widescreen aspect ratio of roughly 16:10.

Obviously any laptop costing this amount isn’t going to have a top of the range display by any means, but the Eee’s is surprisingly good. It’s bright, has a reasonable viewing angle and even illumination, allowing you to evaluate digital images with a fair degree of accuracy. The system also feels fairly responsive when it comes to zooming-in and scrolling around hefty 10-12 Megapixel files, given the modest amount of RAM and – although our model had been upgraded from the default 512MB to 1GB.

After viewing images, the most popular use for a digital photographer’s laptop is backing-up files. The Eee is equipped with a built-in SD / SDHC memory card slot, so is ideally suited to cameras which take this format. If you require compatibility with other formats though, you can easily connect a USB card reader.

To see how quickly the Eee could backup data, we took a 1GB SanDisk Ultra II SD card packed with 168 12 Megapixel JPEG and RAW files, totalling 924MB. The Eee took one minute and 57 seconds to copy the contents of this card onto its internal solid state drive. To put this in perspective, the same process took one minute and 33 seconds on a quick desktop PC with a USB 2 card reader – admittedly faster, but the Eee’s slower speed is hardly a deal-breaker.

Unfortunately you won’t be backing-up many images onto the standard Eee 4G’s internal drive though as the default installation consumes approximately two thirds of the already modest 4GB drive, leaving you just 1.3GB to play with.

Luckily the Eee is fully compatible with a wide range of USB external storage devices from memory keys to DVD writers and hard disks. The most practical option for backing-up in the field is a portable hard disk, and we tried the Eee with Seagate’s 160GB FreeAgent Go drive. This comes with a Y-splitter cable ending in two USB plugs which can power the drive without the need for an AC adapter. This configuration worked fine on the Eee even under its own battery power, giving it a decent amount of storage without too much additional weight, size and cost.

With the Seagate drive connected to the Eee, we tried copying the contents of the SD card directly onto it, bypassing the internal storage – a process which took two minutes and 40 seconds. This may be around 50% longer than copying it directly onto the internal solid state storage, but again isn’t so long as to be impractical by any means. So if you’re happy to carry an Eee PC and a portable hard disk, we’d say it can be a practical means for backing up photos in the field.

Obviously if your camera doesn’t use SD memory though, you’ll also need to carry a USB card reader. We tried it with a SanDisk 12-in-1 model which allowed the Eee to read a wide variety of formats including a 4GB 300x Lexar Professional CF card. Copying the same 168 files from this 4GB CF card – and the original SanDisk 1GB SD card – direct to the Seagate drive using the USB card reader took one minute and 55 seconds, and two minutes and 43 seconds respectively.

Of course you can copy photos direct from a memory card to a hard disk using a dedicated photo backup device, but as a laptop, the Eee offers much greater flexibility. For starters, the built-in connectivity and pre-installed applications make emailing images, or even using them in documents very easy. But when it comes to editing images, the default software installation is limited.

As mentioned earlier though, behind the friendly desktop lies a customised version of Xandros, which opens up the possibility of installing Xandros-compatible applications. Asus doesn’t guarantee they’ll work, but some certainly will, including the excellent GIMP image editor, which also happens to be free of charge.

Windows users will be used to heading to a supplier’s website and downloading a complete application, but Linux works differently, with some applications requiring additional library files to operate properly – and the GIMP is one of those applications. Luckily, Linux offers an easy way to make sure any application can be downloaded with the required library files using what are known as repositories. Once you’ve accessed a repository for your particular version of Linux, you’ll see a list of compatible applications which can be marked for downloading complete with any required extras.

Asus offer repositories for the Eee, but sadly these don’t include programs like GIMP. Since the Eee’s version of Linux is based on Xandros though, repositories for this particular Linux variety stand a good chance of working on the Eee – again it’s not guaranteed, but worth a shot.

A utility called Synaptic can be used to access repositories and add new ones – to run it, press CTRL-ALT-T to open a command prompt then type ‘sudo synaptic’. You can then add some popular Xandros repositories.

We used Synaptic and a Xandros repository to download and install GIMP and it worked fine on the Eee. The cramped screen means you’ll need to use the ALT-drag technique to view some of the installation buttons, and of course carefully arrange palettes when running, but it certainly works.

We opened 12 Megapixel files in GIMP from SD memory cards on the Eee, and again the unit was surprisingly responsive – although some filters can understandably take a little time given its modest RAM and processor.

Verdict

The Asus Eee PC is undoubtedly a remarkable laptop for the money. Most ultra-portables are bigger, heavier and cost at least five times more. So the fact you can now get yourself a fully-functional laptop which could slip into a large coat pocket for this amount of money is almost revolutionary.

Of course it’s not perfect though – we’d have preferred more storage, a higher resolution screen and a CF card slot for starters, but it still delivers almost everything most people want from a laptop as standard. Besides, adding more storage and a bigger screen would increase the cost and put it up against more traditional models.

Asus has also got the balance between size and usability spot-on, as while the screen and keyboard are obviously small, they’re actually quite usable for serious work. And serious work is where the Eee really scores, as even though its kid-friendly desktop has the appearance of a proprietary system, there’s proper Linux running under the hood, so the web browser and office applications are uncompromised desktop versions – and there’s the chance to install powerful third party programs.

And should you tire of the kid-styled front-end, you can easily install a full Linux desktop interface, or even another operating system entirely. Asus supplies instructions on installing Windows XP along with drivers for the hardware, and the process (with the aid of an external optical drive and the XP Pro SP2 disc) should take you less than an hour – XP also runs surprisingly well on the limited hardware, although personally we returned to the default Linux installation as it did pretty much everything we wanted and tended to do it more quickly than XP.

As such the Asus Eee PC comes highly recommended for anyone in the market for a cheap ultra-portable laptop to bang out some work on the move, and equally for enthusiasts who like to tweak. As for digital photographers, it only really becomes viable when used in conjunction with a portable hard disk for additional storage, but even though one will obviously add to the cost and overall dimensions, it’s still well below that of most ultra-portable laptops in both respects.

If your camera doesn’t use SD memory cards though, then you’ll also need a USB card reader which means carrying three items with you – this clearly reduces the convenience factor, but to be fair most laptops without a full-sized PC card slot will also probably need a separate USB reader for CF cards.

One of the best aspects of the Eee though is its following by enthusiasts which means almost anything you can think of has already been tried and thoroughly documented, including installing Windows XP or even booting alternative operating systems from an SD card. There’s a great community at Eee User and we have our own active Eee PC thread in the Camera Labs forums.

Ultimately so long as you understand its limitations and what it won’t do, then it’s hard to be disappointed by the Eee. It represents fantastic value for money and should be seriously considered by anyone looking for a small laptop – or even existing laptop owners looking for a backup.