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5K iMac vs ... non-5K iMac impressions (image)

People also forget that "retina" is largely a marketing term. I could care less about whether my eyes can discern a pixel at a certain distance. What I do care about, as a photographer, is having the most dense sharpest pixels possible so that my on screen image will closer resemble a very high DPI print. The more dense the screen pixels, the easier it is to tell if focus really is tack sharp. I can also fit more of my photo on the screen at a time at it's native resolution. And yes, when editing and tweaking detail, I am usually under 12 inches from the screen so I need as much resolution and pixel density as possible. The 27 inch screen also makes it much easier to see detail at 217-220 PPI than a 15 inch Macbook at the same PPI.

So maybe standing 10 feet away the 1440p and the 2880p screens look the same but at a very close distance this is simply not true. There is a huge difference.
 
senseless said:
I was wondering this myself. I usually lean back nearly 3 feet from my 27" screen and don't think it's going to be that much of a difference to me. Not enough to buy a new computer for this reason alone.
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I sold my iMac mostly because I could not stand the blurriness of the screen compared to my retina iMac. But then again, perception may vary.
 
leman said:
I sold my iMac mostly because I could not stand the blurriness of the screen compared to my retina iMac. But then again, perception may vary.
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Same here I sold the 27 thunderbolt display as soon as I got a 15' retina Macbook Pro and I started looking for 4k monitors. I could not stand the blurriness on screen either.
 
nrubenstein said:
It depends on your vision. For me, the difference is brutally apparent. I can easily see the pixel steps in each letter from my normal viewing distance. It's very annoying, especially compared to the iPad and iPhone, which are also in front of me. I've been ready to order a Retina iMac for years. (My Late 2009 27" is otherwise perfectly fine to use with an SSD installed.)

I will grant, however, that the difference is less extreme for many other people.
Click to expand...

Your vision sounds suspiciously similar to mine. :)
 
Expected as much. I would find a way to get this in a heartbeat if they changed the case design of the iMac as well (smaller chin, thinner bezel?). Since they didn't, it would be the same thing I have now except with 4x the res and about $1,700 less in my bank account.

I can totally see Apple dropping the price of the 5K base model and having an updated design 11 1/2 months from now when we reach the 3 year anniversary of the current case design...which is usually when Apple decides to update it. If that happens, early adopters will have "the old model" just a year in and will lose a large chunk of equity in the machine when Apple drops the price. I'll wait for that to happen.
 
PatriotInvasion said:
Expected as much. I would find a way to get this in a heartbeat if they changed the case design of the iMac as well (smaller chin, thinner bezel?). Since they didn't, it would be the same thing I have now except with 4x the res and about $1,700 less in my bank account.

I can totally see Apple dropping the price of the 5K base model and having an updated design 11 1/2 months from now when we reach the 3 year anniversary of the current case design...which is usually when Apple decides to update it. If that happens, early adopters will have "the old model" just a year in and will lose a large chunk of equity in the machine when Apple drops the price. I'll wait for that to happen.
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You can just sell it a week before the new model announcement and upgrade to the latest and greatest for little money.
 
Bottom line....this is the best desktop display I;ve ever looked at.

And Yes I have one now.
 
I played with one at the Apple Store while I was getting a new airport extreme.

Obviously the screen looks super-nice, but on the base model there were definitely some things that seem to cause UI hiccups/lag. Maybe these would be solved by going with the 4GB graphics option.


1) Invoking Mission Control with FCP playing a video - didn't even try to animate it, just displayed all the windows after a short pause. Slightly worse when using a scaled resolution mode.

2) Same with Logic Pro but to a lesser extent

3) Aperture: zooming in and scrolling around an image was pretty jerky. Lightroom tends to perform even worse at this on the same system, so beware if you use LR

4) Some jerkiness switching between spaces when either FCP or Logic are running in full screen (I didn't have both apps running at the same time btw)

For web scrolling and most other stuff it was very fluid and smooth, and gawd the colors are superb.

If you're used to looking at a 13" or 15" rMBP it's pretty much the same, just bigger. But bigness goes a long way.
 
Chris Blount said:
Agree. I'm quite happy with my 2013 iMac display. After looking at both side-by-side, it really is a stretch to upgrade on just 5K alone (unless of course you want upgraded internal components as well).

This kind of reminds be when I went from a 65" 1080p display in my living room to a 4K display. While the resolution is definitely better, from a distance, its not a huge difference HOWEVER, the color saturation is amazing on 4K TV's. That was enough for me. The picture really does look very good.

Now back to the Apple 5K display. While in the store yesterday, I was comparing the color quality between the two displays. While very good, still not a HUGE difference. That part turned me off a bit. I was expecting at least a reasonable jump in color quality like I did with my 65" 4K display. A bit disappointed in that part. Just goes to show how great the pre-5K displays are on the iMacs.
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I have to say I really thought Apple would lower the price of their other 27" displays more to differentiate the two. There is only about a $630 difference between a refurb 2013 i5 and a stock 2014 Retina i5.

I thought the refurbs would be price even lower but their still holding high.
 
curtoise said:
Great, getting closer to order one, just out of curiosity what storage option do you have now on the 5k iMac?
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I picked the 1 TB Fusion Drive.

I've been using 3rd party SSDs in my Macs for the last few years, and I wanted to give Fusion a try. So far I've only filled it with 50 GB of data so its still basically an SSD.

I probably should have gone with the 256 SSD instead, but that BTO option was going to take longer and I couldn't wait.

Either way, I've been wanting to give Fusion Drive a shot since the first day it was announced.
 
Padmini said:
I picked the 1 TB Fusion Drive.

I've been using 3rd party SSDs in my Macs for the last few years, and I wanted to give Fusion a try. So far I've only filled it with 50 GB of data so its still basically an SSD.

I probably should have gone with the 256 SSD instead, but that BTO option was going to take longer and I couldn't wait.

Either way, I've been wanting to give Fusion Drive a shot since the first day it was announced.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I think I'm going to go with 256 SSD and then a thunderbolt or usb3 enclosure with a 512 ssd , I have one now with a cheap $18 enclosure and the read-writes are about 400 MB/s, not bad at all
 
It's interesting. I went to a site where you could generate the distance where pixels resolve for various displays, based on common understandings of that at 20/20 vision (and I realize there's debate to a certain extent about that).

You get retina at 16.1" on the riMac; 32" on a regular iMac, 11" on my iPhone 5 (http://isthisretina.com).

But I don't think this tells the whole picture (heh). I think some of the experience depends on field of view, and whether you're focusing in on a smaller space, and other rather intangible qualities. I noticed that in setting up home theater stuff; I could calculate that there shouldn't be much difference since the pixels couldn't be resolved, but the higher density still looked better, even as I tried to account for brightness, etc. But maybe it was the $$ influencing me.
 
curtoise said:
You can just sell it a week before the new model announcement and upgrade to the latest and greatest for little money.
Click to expand...

Easy to do with an iPhone or iPad, but the amount of people looking to spend $2,000 on a used desktop computer online is a much smaller segment of the population. Most of which are looking to get a crazy deal with low ball offers. I've sold an iMac before online but it wasn't easy.
 
CausticPuppy said:
I played with one at the Apple Store while I was getting a new airport extreme.

Obviously the screen looks super-nice, but on the base model there were definitely some things that seem to cause UI hiccups/lag. Maybe these would be solved by going with the 4GB graphics option.


1) Invoking Mission Control with FCP playing a video - didn't even try to animate it, just displayed all the windows after a short pause. Slightly worse when using a scaled resolution mode.

2) Same with Logic Pro but to a lesser extent

3) Aperture: zooming in and scrolling around an image was pretty jerky. Lightroom tends to perform even worse at this on the same system, so beware if you use LR

.
Click to expand...

What is Lightroom doing on a demo iMac along with Aperture?
 
WOW! Thanks OP.:eek:
I was waiting for more info from reviewers on it and I am surprised to see there just aren't' that many GOOD reviews.
I just might pull the trigger sooner than later on this awesomeness.
 
lcseds said:
What is Lightroom doing on a demo iMac along with Aperture?
Click to expand...

It wasn't.

I have both LR and Aperture on my rMBP.

On my system, LR is slower than Aperture for scrolling around and general UI responsiveness.

So, my conclusion would be that the same would apply to the retina iMac. There's nothing in LR that will magically take advantage of the additional GPU power because there's absolutely no GPU acceleration in LR.
 
PatriotInvasion said:
Easy to do with an iPhone or iPad, but the amount of people looking to spend $2,000 on a used desktop computer online is a much smaller segment of the population. Most of which are looking to get a crazy deal with low ball offers. I've sold an iMac before online but it wasn't easy.
Click to expand...

I've never had an issue selling a Mac online, I just sold a 2011 MBP with 16GB ram and 256 SSD (upgraded myself) for $1300.
 
curtoise said:
I've never had an issue selling a Mac online, I just sold a 2011 MBP with 16GB ram and 256 SSD (upgraded myself) for $1300.
Click to expand...

Ebay or Craigslist? I prefer to do everything in person so I'm usually limited to Craigslist which brings with it a number of risks and challenges.
 
CausticPuppy said:
I played with one at the Apple Store while I was getting a new airport extreme.

Obviously the screen looks super-nice, but on the base model there were definitely some things that seem to cause UI hiccups/lag. Maybe these would be solved by going with the 4GB graphics option.


1) Invoking Mission Control with FCP playing a video - didn't even try to animate it, just displayed all the windows after a short pause. Slightly worse when using a scaled resolution mode.

2) Same with Logic Pro but to a lesser extent

3) Aperture: zooming in and scrolling around an image was pretty jerky. Lightroom tends to perform even worse at this on the same system, so beware if you use LR

4) Some jerkiness switching between spaces when either FCP or Logic are running in full screen (I didn't have both apps running at the same time btw)

For web scrolling and most other stuff it was very fluid and smooth, and gawd the colors are superb.

If you're used to looking at a 13" or 15" rMBP it's pretty much the same, just bigger. But bigness goes a long way.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't an 8Gb RAM base model anything run like a dog if you had Aperture, Logic Pro, and FCPX going?
 
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