Decided to test all types of RAW converters today, including Bibble Pro, Capture One LE, and Nikon Capture Editor. They all have roughly the same features, so it seems more about speed and usability rather than a pure feature comparison. Anyhow, all of these programs were acting super slow duing testing. Some were better than others but in general the performance of the G4 in this Powerbook seemed unacceptably slow.
Then I remembered I was running on battery power, and under that profile, my processor performance setting is set to “Reduced”. I think this cuts the clock of my cpu to something around 800mhz instead of its full 1.6ghz. Plugging the thing into a power source promptly sped everything up greatly, although I wish it were still a little faster. I can understand why they’re moving to intel chips.
Photo mechanic + Capture one seems to be the right combination for now. Maybe the occasional Nikon Capture but NC seems way to slow. If I turn on D-lighthing, Anti-vignetting, then every little update of some slider will yield a spinning beachball. All the other options are good about showing low-res realtime feedback, which is usually enough to find the setting that you want.