# A photographer dream? New iMac with 27", 14.7 megapixel (5K) retina display



## xvnm (Oct 17, 2014)

5120x2880 pixels: http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/


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## 9VIII (Oct 17, 2014)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8496/dell-previews-27inch-5k-ultrasharp-monitor-5120x2880

Dell announced their monitor with this panel a while ago.


This is one of two displays I hope to be using moving forward over the next five or six years (the other being a 120hz 4K panel).


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## canon_convert (Oct 17, 2014)

2.5k just for the monitor as opposed to same price for a full-fledged desktop (that includes monitor) ... that's the difference here.


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## 9VIII (Oct 17, 2014)

canon_convert said:


> 2.5k just for the monitor as opposed to same price for a full-fledged desktop (that includes monitor) ... that's the difference here.



Indeed, but prices can't stay like that forever.


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## 3kramd5 (Oct 17, 2014)

Single hard drive and max 8GB memory is not my dream. Nice display, but all in ones still feel to me like immobile laptops.


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## dcm (Oct 17, 2014)

3kramd5 said:


> Single hard drive and max 8GB memory is not my dream. Nice display, but all in ones still feel to me like immobile laptops.



That's the minimum config. You can upgrade to 32Gb memory and a 1Tb SSD drive. Also has two thunderbolt ports and 4 USB 3 ports. You would typically add a thunderbolt RAID for your photo storage, leaving the internal for the OS and applications. 

This would be similar to what you would do with a maxed out MacPro that contains 12 cores, 64Gb, a 1Tb internal drive, 6 thunderbolt ports and 4 USB 3 ports that can handle 3 4K displays or 6 thunderbolt displays.


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## 3kramd5 (Oct 17, 2014)

dcm said:


> 3kramd5 said:
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> > Single hard drive and max 8GB memory is not my dream. Nice display, but all in ones still feel to me like immobile laptops.
> ...



Ah, I read "up to 8GB." 

Regardless, one internal drive with a built in display kills it for me. YMMV


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## leGreve (Oct 17, 2014)

3kramd5 said:


> dcm said:
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We have 10 iMacs in the studio..... They are completely reliable workhorses and none of us would rather sit at a laptop with an even smaller screen and weaker config.

I'd pay for this if I had the money right now... I wouldnt pay for a Pro unless I had to work on a feature of some kind and needed raw power to shorten render times etc.


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## cerealito (Oct 17, 2014)

I'm soooo looking forward to see it in person 

I might wait for a generation before upgrading tho...


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## AcutancePhotography (Oct 17, 2014)

I have never cared for the all-in-one imac design. I prefer my peripherals to remain separate and easily switchable in case something breaks or there is an upgrade.


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## e17paul (Oct 17, 2014)

3kramd5 said:


> dcm said:
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The speed of Thunderbolt allows an external drive to perform to the full potential of its internals, whether spinning disk or solid state. Given a fast enough connection, there is no performance downside to the drive being external.

The upside is upgrading of storage without any disassembly, the downside is more clutter if you have several drives.


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## neuroanatomist (Oct 17, 2014)

canon_convert said:


> 2.5k just for the monitor as opposed to same price for a full-fledged desktop (that includes monitor) ... that's the difference here.



But...but...Macs are way overpriced for the features, right? :


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## tolusina (Oct 17, 2014)

sRGB?

Really?


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## Coldhands (Oct 17, 2014)

Wide colour gamut? IPS? Matte screen? Unless the answer to all three is "yes", then the answer to the title of this post is "no".


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## Maui5150 (Oct 17, 2014)

It is a POS! Who cares about a 5K display if it is only sRGB

"5120‑by‑2880 resolution with support for millions of colors"

Millions? What about BILLIONS... like 1.07 Billion give or take to be exact.

This is the problem I see with most 4K or 4K plus displays, lack of color depth. 

The ASUS PB287Q may only be a 4K monitor but it handles 60x more colors.

All you hear people harp on is Dynamic Range... Dynamic Range... And then you throw away a BILLION colors?

I am sure it is a "nice" display, and it is a "big" foot print. But I like colors... Lots of colors.

And even if you do get one of the few 1 Billion+ display monitors that are out there, so still need a card that can handle that as well.


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## chauncey (Oct 17, 2014)

I do hope that you're not counting on getting increased resolution for your tethered shooting...that is limited by your camera's LCD screen's resolution.


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## Jim Saunders (Oct 17, 2014)

Coldhands said:


> Wide colour gamut? IPS? Matte screen? Unless the answer to all three is "yes", then the answer to the title of this post is "no".



Game, set and match.

Jim


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## Eldar (Oct 17, 2014)

I think I´ll stay with my Eizo i bit longer. My post processing skills does not deserve any more resolution ...


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## Maui5150 (Oct 17, 2014)

dilbert said:


> Maui5150 said:
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> > It is a POS! Who cares about a 5K display if it is only sRGB
> ...



Funny. Most of the professionals I know are using wide gamut monitors.

Most of the people out there don't use color calibration either.

In the end you must decide what you value.

Does it matter?

I would much rather shoot in RAW and work with a full color calibrated atmosphere and see the difference of color depths, than work in a downscaled sRGB environment. 

And yes, I do down scale and convert the images I post to the web to the sRGB color space, but the base of all I do is Adobe RGB.

I would much prefer having a 4K Asus ART monitor with 1.07 Billion colors than a 5K iMac Retina with 16.7 Million colors.

color and color depth are kind important


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## 3kramd5 (Oct 17, 2014)

leGreve said:


> We have 10 iMacs in the studio..... They are completely reliable workhorses and none of us would rather sit at a laptop with an even smaller screen and weaker config.



I don't doubt their reliability. My MBPs have been mainly reliable. And no, I wouldn't rather sit at a laptop either; that isn't what I'm saying. What I am saying is this: you give up expandability with all in ones just like you do with laptops; you give up portability with all in ones and traditional desktops. Each of the three systems gives up something. All in ones give up more. If I'm tied to a desk, I want a tower with all it brings (easy swapping or addition of components, multiple video card options, multiple hard drive options, optical drive options, etc). If not, I want a laptop. However, this obviously works for some people and that's great. 



e17paul said:


> The upside is upgrading of storage without any disassembly, the downside is more clutter if you have several drives.



The upside is pretty minor given modern chassis design. It's really easy to replace drives. I run 4 internal drives, and keep two open SATA ports for when I swap out the main data drives (currently they're 4TB). Pulling the drives and putting in new ones is easy. On the other hand, I hate clutter. That's a big downside for me. I have an external drive tucked away out of sight which I use for temporary external backup, but my main backup solution is cloud based, so I don't need nearly as much external storage as internal storage.




e17paul said:


> The speed of Thunderbolt allows an external drive to perform to the full potential of its internals, whether spinning disk or solid state. Given a fast enough connection, *there is no performance downside to the drive being external.*




Out of curiosity, can you build RAID arrays over thunderbolt (heh, I think these days we can all ignore the "I" in that particular initialism).


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## ahsanford (Oct 17, 2014)

AcutancePhotography said:


> I have never cared for the all-in-one imac design. I prefer my peripherals to remain separate and easily switchable in case something breaks or there is an upgrade.



Unfortunately, Apple doesn't sell a classic desktop computer. You have a choice between:


Really roughing it: iPad and keyboard
A laptop on a stand plugged into a monitor (my choice for many years)
A mini: a little shuttle that has relatively limited horsepower and limited upgradeability
An all in one like the iMac (which is upgradeable if you don't mind following some step by step guides: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel_27%22_EMC_2639)
A budget busting Mac Pro.
Or you spec a killer PC and set it up as a hackintosh, but that's fraught with some degree of risk -- risk of buying components that don't play nicely with MacOS, risk of cooking components, risk of being locked out with subsequent OS updates, etc.

The value proposition has been best with the Mini, but I have considered replacing my 5 year old Macbook Pro with an iMac as I never use the laptop out of the docked position these days (due to iPad use, phones capable of moving files more easily, etc.).

So the iMac announcement seems like a feature-level winner, but there are some drawbacks:


The last iMac was a much better value proposition. I believe there's a huge price bump for the new retina 5k version.
How many video cards natively support that massive resolution? Upgrading to a nicer card in 2-3 years time (a common move by PC builders to stretch the life of their PCs) may be difficult, expensive, or outright impossible if Apple has a difficult mount geometry (which is highly possible with these kind of all-in-one rigs).
If you also use your nice Photoshop box to play games, you are likely hosed. 99% of the world presently makes all of its desktop/TV games for 1920x1080 resolution, and we all play them on monitors with *exactly *that resolution, as leaving that native resolution on an LCD monitor aliases everything all to hell. So with that fancy new monitor, you either have to (a) enjoy gaming on a fuzzy TV like view or (b) wait until game companies offer games that run in a native 5k format (don't hold your breath) and you crush your video card trying to render all those pixels real time. So if I bought this, it would be a dedicated Photography box only and I'd need additional space and different monitor for a gaming PC.

- A


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## ahsanford (Oct 17, 2014)

Oh yeah, I forgot. Ever-so-green Apple uses 100% arsenic free glass on their displays, ipads, phones, etc. I always forgot about that because my MBP is plugged into a Dell 24" widescreen matte monitor.

A glass display is a categorical fail for me, resolution be damned. I have two large windows in my office -- the reflections would be horrible. 

- A


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## tolusina (Oct 17, 2014)

dilbert said:


> Maui5150 said:
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> > It is a POS! Who cares about a 5K display if it is only sRGB
> ...


This ^ from the guy so thoroughly dissatisfied with Canon camera's current DR???
You desire (but cannot afford) the ultimate in DR but are also satisfied with limited gamut?


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Oct 17, 2014)

xvnm said:


> 5120x2880 pixels: http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/



not bad.

But I'd go for the 5k Dell, it will have wide gamut (programmable sRGB emulation mode too of course), programmable high bit internal LUT, programmable screen uniformity compensation, if it follow the path of the UP2414Q it won't use PWM and will use fancier direct current control of the LEDs for brightness dimming.


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Oct 17, 2014)

AcutancePhotography said:


> I have never cared for the all-in-one imac design. I prefer my peripherals to remain separate and easily switchable in case something breaks or there is an upgrade.



+100000000000000000000000000


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Oct 17, 2014)

dilbert said:


> Maui5150 said:
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> > It is a POS! Who cares about a 5K display if it is only sRGB
> ...



A lot of photo people have wide gamut, although many don't. Most of the better IPS LCD screens are wide gamut.

It's weird that Apple OS is like the only OS that is totally color-managed and yet they are the only company that doesn't make wide gamut displays!

Overall the 5k vs 1080p will make the most overall difference for sure, but don't knock wide gamut. It can make a difference for stuff like fall foliage, golden evening lighting on almost anything, sunsets (sunrises if you are awake), bright color clothing and cars, flowers, brilliantly plumaged birds and those are some pretty top notch subject types to shoot. Plus stuff like emeralds and certain minerals and tropical waters.

Even a simple red rose will clip something horrible on sRGB. (even wide gamut isn't quite enough) In fact the whole stuff you read about digital sensors blowing reds or Canon sensors being notorious for blowing reds- that's all myth. It is sRGB that blows the reds. The Canon sensors capture reds way beyond was sRGB can handle (as do the sensors for other brands). Another myth is that AdobeRGB only gives you extra greens compared to sRGB. It actually gives you a lot more light and bright reds/oranges as well, although most current wide gamut monitors give you even more reds/oranges/purples than AdobeRGB can handle. But yeah sRGB clips reds horribly.


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## wopbv4 (Oct 17, 2014)

Jim Saunders said:


> Coldhands said:
> 
> 
> > Wide colour gamut? IPS? Matte screen? Unless the answer to all three is "yes", then the answer to the title of this post is "no".
> ...



Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite only supports 8bit/color channel (24 bit color). This is absolutely ridiculous as good monitors such as Eizo and Nec support 10 and 12 bit/color channel.

For those that push photoshop to the limit, such as working on detail in shadows, this results in banding.

A pc with proper graphics card and let's say EIZO CG276 will deliver proper colors. I know that the EIZO is only 2560 pixels


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## tolusina (Oct 17, 2014)

dilbert said:


> tolusina said:
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Your disclaimer appears to be a load of bull.


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## jrista (Oct 18, 2014)

Maui5150 said:


> It is a POS! Who cares about a 5K display if it is only sRGB
> 
> "5120‑by‑2880 resolution with support for millions of colors"
> 
> ...




Yeah, this is the bigger issue for me. If I am going to spend a lot of money on a new high resolution screen, I want it to be one of the high grade graphics design/photography displays like the NEC PAW line or Eizo ColorEdge. I won't spend a lot of money on a new screen until I can get at least 4k with at least 97% or more AdobeRGB coverage. I also don't think I could live without the really flat even rendering across the entire area of the screen or the clean, crisp colors from a hardware LUT.


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## tolusina (Oct 18, 2014)

jrista said:


> ..... I want it to be one of the high grade graphics design/photography displays like the NEC PAW line or Eizo ColorEdge. .....


Be warned, I have a PAW, the clean, crisp and brilliant colors are so brilliant they almost hurt to look at, a price in the quest for accuracy.


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Oct 18, 2014)

jrista said:


> Maui5150 said:
> 
> 
> > It is a POS! Who cares about a 5K display if it is only sRGB
> ...



You don't need Eizo or NEC for that these days. The Dell Premiere Color UP2414Q UHD screen has 99% AdobeRGB (plus a lot beyond AdobeRGB as well), high bit internal programmable LUT, screen uniformity compensation and it even uses variable direct current driving of the LED backlights instead of PWM. The 24" UHD display from NEC is not a PA series but EA so there is no way to internally calibrate its sRGB calibration mode and something else too was worse and it costs a lot more and it even uses PWM for brightness (although at least it uses a very high frequency). It's odd they didn't make it a PA series but only EA for their UHD display.


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## sarangiman (Oct 28, 2014)

LTRLI:

Do you use Windows or Mac? If the latter - how do you even profile the wide-gamut Dell displays? My understanding was that their internal LUTs are only addressable by the included software, which only runs on Windows.

Any other third-part software (like the excellent dispcalGUI/Argyll) would, AFAIK, not have access to the internal LUTs, which means it'll be making corrections to the 8-bit data, which is, of course, not so desirable (not when you have internal LUTs anyway).

I wish more displays would have user-addressable LUTs - please correct me if I'm wrong though re: 3rd party software accessing the LUTs of the Dell displays.

Also - has anyone *confirmed* that the Retina iMac is *not* wide-gamut? If they're using similar panels to the Dell 5K monitor, how is there a difference in gamut? Is it perhaps the same hardware but with a forced, limited gamut mode?

To be honest, I'm not that surprised Apple generally chooses to go for more standard gamut monitors, although I'm a big fan of wide gamut. The problem of the wide gamut displays is that a lot of times you end up editing in colors that aren't in sRGB (especially when working from Raw), that don't then convert well to sRGB for web output. So you get this massive color change to oranges/reds especially sometimes when you convert to sRGB for web. 

Also, profiling wide-gamut displays isn't so easy - if you use standard colorimeters, they need to have color correction matrices generated by a spectrophotometer to deal with the primaries of wide gamut displays (standard colorimeters expect different RGB primaries, and so can create very inaccurate profiles when profiling a wide gamut monitor). Or you *have* to use a spectrophotometer for profiling, which to me is not so ideal since they don't 'see' darks very well (unless the software is intelligent enough to increase the integration time during profiling for dark colors).

In fact, I've found that to make the best profiles for my Dell U2711, I've had to use a ColorMunki to create a color correction matrix for my i1 colorimeter, which I then use to actually profile (dispcalGUI lets you do all this). Otherwise, upping the integration times when profiling w/ the ColorMunki means it takes *forever* to make a profile. Whereas w/ the correction matrix, you just do that once, then every future profile generation step is quick w/ the i1 colorimeter.

I've verified that the results from ColorMunki+long integration times ends up creating roughly the same profile as the i1 colorimeter + the ColorMunki generated correction matrix.

How have others gotten around this profiling issue?

Apologies if I went a bit OT there...


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