CompuServe Messages

Gee, did you expect the "head of one of SGI's software/hardware developers to tell you anything else? If someone's ready to plunk down $100K to solve an animation problem, it's not low-end no matter how you look at it. In that case, it would have been just as ridiculous to suggest for them to buy 20 PCs or 20 Macs. I'd be willing to argue that a Toaster is more useful for animation than as a switcher or transition generator. Its animated transitions are fairly low resolution, on the order of about 320 x 400 pixels; but they're moving, so it looks OK. But of course "OK" is a subjective thing, usually subject to how much cash is available in your wallet. 🙂 That's true for rendering, too. Adding a single-framing setup to any system might cost more than the computer and software, no? If we remove ourselves from the rarefied atmosphere of $100K animation solutions, then the price, performance and feature differences between PC, Mac and Amiga solutions could be significant to some buyers. That's what makes it a horse race – there's a low-, a middle-, and a high-end. SGI is debating with buyers who demand comparisons against the mid- and low-end. 3D Studio no doubt gets compared against the Toaster. I'm open-minded enough to see why people buy different systems, and to recognize that the needs of one buyer might not be the same as another.