I'm going back to the mountains this winter as planned. However, due to a change in circumstances I will now be repping again. I still plan to try to make a little extra with photography though. Problem is, I can't afford to bring the car this time. So I'm gonna be without my desktop PC and IPS monitor. Consequently, I'm stuck with this crappy netbook and bad screen which won't have the juice to run Lightroom and/or process RAWs in any way.

So....

What are my options for RAW handling? I'm guessing it's a new laptop of some kind (expensive), maybe an Android tablet (possibly less expensive), or just shoot JPG and cope with my current equipment.

Thoughts please?

Personally I would opt for a new laptop but that is my preference. You could hunt one down for not so much, but then you might need power adaptors to use it locally which could boost the price.

Continental adaptors are dirt cheap tbh, so not too much of a consideration.

I was thinking could you do the processing on an iPad? There are plenty of apps that do that sort of thing on the iPad and it might be a cheaper and more portable solution. It would be worth looking at the app store in iTunes to see if what you need can be found there?

I don't know what editing you need, but some of the tablet apps are highly rated. If you shoot to SD then it might be an option.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... id.feather
No idea if that handles raws though.

Presumably your netbook will suffice for backing up cards to a portable drive?

I think the iPad would be too expensive. But how much are they? A Nexus 10 is just over £300 and there appear to be some apps that as JJ says are highly rated. Stupidly, I've just remembered that my camera uses CF, so I'll need to bring my adapter and netbook anyway.

Just thinking a tablet has a decent screen for movies and tv too, so could do double duty.

Question though, if a tablet with an awesome screen, pretty good processor and goodish battery life can be had for £300ish, but a laptop with similar attributes is around 3x more expensive - what do you lose by opting for the tablet?? It must be more than windows/iOS and a keyboard.... No?

A £300 laptop would be faster than any normal tablet. Tablets just seem fast because the software is lighter. If you could actually run the full version of Photoshop on the Nexus, it would just die.

My iPad 2 processes RAW images fine.
It's the 64GB variant so you may need larger, and I have a CF adapter that plugs in to the dock connector which works great for getting the images from the card in to the iPad.
You'd likely need some sort of other, longer term storage device to keep the original files on as a backup.

It's an adequate system for sure but it's really only a field solution I use until I get back to my computer.
Obviously your mileage may vary as to usability and comfort with working this way on a tablet.

Mark

Adequate it sounds. For the price of a specced iPad, we're approaching decent laptop money and therefore a familiar ecosystem and the use of a mouse and larger screen. Hmmm....

Though you need to decide how much you value the portability. A laptop does have other uses and offers decent bang for your buck.

I would assume a laptop would be the better solution as it'll be able to run the full up software you're familiar with, have greater storage capacity and allow the easy plugging in of an external drive for backup purposes. If you can stretch to a halfway decent laptop then that's certainly the way I'd go personally.

Just by way of an update in case anybody else is looking for a cheap solution, I bought a 2nd hand Latitude D6410 on eBay for just £220. The screen is not the best, but it's adequate and has a huge 1400x900 res, which is far better than most of more recent latpops. With a 1st gen i5 and 4gig of RAM, it copes with Lightroom reasonably well (although exports take a little while). Overall I've been very pleased with it.