Capture One D-SLR 3.7 Release Candidate 1

Although Capture One is an industry standard program used by professionals with medium format digital camera backs in the 5 digit price range, we were surprised to see that Capture One is only capable of processing to 2 threads. This means that on a 2x Dual-Core Opteron system, only one of the Dual Core CPUs is in use.

Time to Process a Canon EOS-20D CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Canon EOS 1D Mark II CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Nikon D2H NEF (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Nikon D2X NEF (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Phase One P25 RAW image (shorter is better)

With Capture One only supporting two CPU threads, the dual-core Opteron’s lower clockspeed is a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the AMD Opteron platform remains a strong Capture One platform on the market. Digital photographers looking for the best bang-for-the-buck performance in Capture One should consider a system with one Dual-Core Opteron 275. With 4 logical processors being more common in the future, we anticipate that Capture One will quickly include support for 4 processors (despite their tardiness in supporting the EOS-20D). This doesn’t require a complete rewrite of the processing engine – all Phase One needs to do is to allow the batch to process multiple files. Each dual-core CPU can focus its attention on different images.