iMac 27 inch with retina display

[richam]

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I dropped by an Apple store in Florida to see first hand the 27" iMac with retina display. There was one advertised at $2,499, so I called up a page from my website, Casement Esch - Michael Richards Photography. This was a series of photos mostly taken with my M9p and various lenses from my 18mm SEM to 75mm Summarit. A representative came over and, not realizing I was viewing my own images, commented that these (what he thought were Apple custom images) were probably taken with a camera that could have been even more expensive than the iMac. He indicated that such cameras could run up to $3,000 plus lenses and I should not expect the same results from my equipment. Hmmmm. When I told him these were indeed my images, he was amazed. I explained that these website images were much smaller than the originals, and were taken with Leica equipment. He had never heard of Leica, so I let it drop there.

 

I did like the iMac with retina display and probably will get one when I return home to Greece next spring.

[zlatkob]

The 27" iMac with retina display is a beautiful machine — perfect for photography. The screen displays 5120 x 2880, almost 15 megapixels.

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[Jennifer]

The 27" iMac with retina display is a beautiful machine — perfect for photography. The screen displays 5120 x 2880, almost 15 megapixels.

 

I'm very much looking forward to unboxing the new one which is waiting for me at home when I get back next week from the South of France.

 

Apparently, not "perfect for photography" so I did think hard about teaming an EIZO/NEC monitor with a new Mac. But as I can't justify the Pro and I don't enthuse over the Mini in its latest iteration and I'd never allow a PC through my front door, I stuck with my mantra of 'form over function'.

Edited January 10, 2015 by Jennifer

[LocalHero1953]

The down side of such exceptional resolution is the tiny rendering of text. I would never let an Apple through my front door () so this may not be a problem on Macs, but although my Dell U2713 is great for showing photographs, I quite often make mistakes clicking on small menu items, and have to peer closely to read some of them. The software hasn't quite caught up with the hardware.

[zeitz]

The iMac 27 inch Retina must not be selling very well. It is already being offered with discounts at US stores. Quite different from the MacPro which took months of waiting to get delivery.

 

The MacPro now seems to be an orphan product. It was not mentioned, not even showing up on a slide, in the big Apple product release show in October. There are no Apple 5k monitors for it, not even an Apple 4k monitor. Just the ancient Thunderbolt monitor.

 

Then we are told that the MacPro can't support a 5k monitor, such as the Dell offering, because of not enough bandwidth from the computer to the monitor. You can use lesser iMac as monitors for MacPro computer, but not the retina iMac. How can 6 ports of Thunderbolt 2 driven by two high end AMD graphics cards not support 5k? Dell figured it out for PCs using two Display Port 1.2 connections.

 

Maybe Microsoft or Apple can figure out how to show bigger icons and text in Windows 10 and OS X 10.11. Come on guys. You should be able to fix this by lunch.

 

I forgot to mention Apple is now the world's largest capitalized company. And they best they can do is one old Thunderbolt monitor for the now obsolete Mac Pro?

[microview]

Obviously with a Mac you can click on "scale" in System Preferences>Displays and scroll to a lesser resolution which then enlarges everything on desktop.Revert to "Best for…" for photo work.

[zeitz]

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I have to go to the Apple store and play with the display settings on the iMac 27" Retina.

 

"Everything" though is not what I want. "Text and icons" readable size, but "images" at 4K or 5K, is what I want. That has to be about 10 lines of code in the OS and re-rendering the icons with more pixels. There is an app that can do it, but the text and icons are reported to be fuzzy.

 

I do expect more from Apple ("the world's largest capitalized company"), and I'm not seeing it.

[jaapv]

Nobody notice that the Apple screens render barely more than sRGB? You wouldn't see that if you pick up images from online, as those are usually not in Adobe RGB.

Edited January 12, 2015 by jaapv
old stuff

[zeitz]

Jaap, you are getting exactly at the source of my complaint. Eizo, a little company, offers a full range of monitors from office use to critical color use. NEC is bigger, and has a full range of monitors. Dell is bigger still and has a range of monitors for all kinds of uses that is so extensive, it is hard to figure out; their big 4K monitor (UP3214Q) is nearly indistinguishable in RGB accuracy from Eizo. Apple is Number One is size; yet it offers one out-of-date monitor. Why doesn't Apple think enough of its customers to offer at least a limited range of monitors for the buyers of its high-end computers? Look at the MacPro (Late 2013) ad on their web site. It proudly proclaims the MacPro will drive three 4K monitors. (Actually two 4K monitors at 60 Hz via Thunderbolt and one at 30 Hz via HDMI.) What monitors are they talking about? The target user for MacPro computers do critical color work (photography, video, and graphic arts) where color accuracy is critical. What monitors do they think these users want? It certainly is not an out-of-date Thunderbolt monitor.

 

Concerning Eizo, can't they make one Color Guard/Color Edge monitor that looks like it was designed in this century and you would be proud to show to a client? Can't they make one 4K monitor that is not $45,000 and designed for air traffic control? Can't they have a distribution system in the US that actually lets you try the monitors and provides local support?

[Fotoloki]

I've been using the iMac 5K since early December and enjoying every moment. Images are displayed at resolution previously unavailable, we're getting much closer to true camera resolution. When using a photo app like Aperture the OSX would display large resolution photos but scale the UI at normal size so that's awesome.

 

As for displays, Apple might soon offer the 5K display as a standalone once there's any Mac with Thunderbolt 3 with DisplayPort 1.3. As currently there's no computer with DisplayPort 1.3 there's no point in releasing it. As for 4K display I'm now not so sure Apple is releasing one soon as their 27 incher is 5K, with 4K probably planned for iMac "21.5.

 

Apple doesn't care about other companies and displayed their Mac Pro with 4K LG displays and other brands.

[tobey bilek]

The down side of such exceptional resolution is the tiny rendering of text. I would never let an Apple through my front door ( ) so this may not be a problem on Macs, but although my Dell U2713 is great for showing photographs, I quite often make mistakes clicking on small menu items, and have to peer closely to read some of them. The software hasn't quite caught up with the hardware.

 

Under view is zoom text only.   Been there a long time

[LocalHero1953]

What's "Under view"? (according to google its a 4-piece indie rock band from Hemel Hempstead  )

[pop]

Perhaps "subordinate to the browser's menu with the label view"?

[LocalHero1953]

My original comment was more about LR and PS than browsers.

I'd still appreciate a longer explanation.

[hoppyman]

Assuming that these iMacs work similarly to the Macbook Pro etc with retina screens, the resolution is not directly comparable to that of other monitors (Eizo and NEC for example)
Text is certainly rendered more clearly but images are not reproduced as a 1:1 pixel item.
That's not to say that the design can not and does not work well, (it's a system, not just a monitor) but it is a little bit of an apples and oranges comparison to the high end Eizo and NEC designs for example.

[LeicAmigo]

Can anyone let me know how the the 27" Retina iMac compares to the previous non-Retina iMac when viewing photographs. Do I need to re-size my M8-jpeg files from the DNG-files to make sure that they don't look lousy on the Retina-Mac? Or do I need to get ffirst an M to fully enjoy the Retina version? Will it be the cutting edge to see these images on the Retina or only a slight improvement?

[richam]

I did purchase a 27" retina iMac, and have been using it about a month.  I like it.  I use Lightroom predominantly, and the full screen images (Control-Shift-F) are a delight to view.  Perhaps more important to most people is that it makes it easier (especially with older eyes like mine) to spot blur and other problems and make adjustments easier, especially noise.  Here's an example, full size insets.  In full viewing size, the top image blur was impossible to detect on my 11 inch MacBook, and difficult to spot on my iMac 21" (non-retina).  The blur was obvious at full size viewing resolution on the iMac 27" retina.  At bottom is a sharp image for comparison.

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[richam]

Can anyone let me know how the the 27" Retina iMac compares to the previous non-Retina iMac when viewing photographs. Do I need to re-size my M8-jpeg files from the DNG-files to make sure that they don't look lousy on the Retina-Mac? Or do I need to get ffirst an M to fully enjoy the Retina version? Will it be the cutting edge to see these images on the Retina or only a slight improvement?

See my previous post.  Also, with my old small files, Lightroom displays them at full size with a gray background to make up the missing pixels.  I don't think you need to do anything to your M8 files.  Here's what an old Digilux 1 file looks like 1:1 inside Lightroom:

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Edited June 25, 2015 by richam

[richam]

Can anyone let me know how the the 27" Retina iMac compares to the previous non-Retina iMac when viewing photographs. Do I need to re-size my M8-jpeg files from the DNG-files to make sure that they don't look lousy on the Retina-Mac? Or do I need to get ffirst an M to fully enjoy the Retina version? Will it be the cutting edge to see these images on the Retina or only a slight improvement?

 

Here's what an M8 image looks like 1:1 in Lightroom full screen (Control-Shift-F):

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Hallo,

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[LeicAmigo]

Here's what an M8 image looks like 1:1 in Lightroom full screen (Control-Shift-F):

Thank you very much for your feedback and telling illustrations. Good to even see an M8 example! This is very helpful. I can see that for the detection of blurriness such a resolution is offering a lot of detail. I have seen that your example of the M8 is a DNG file. Do you think that the standard JPG fine files (3936 x 2624) coming out of the M8, about 5.5 MB as well as those being cropped down to about 3 MB still look good? With 5120 x 2880 the Retina screen resolution is much higher!