I have a base model M4 Mac Mini which was a no-brainer purchase.
Currently my wife is using a 2019 5K 27" iMac for photo editing. It's decent, I upgraded it to 32GB of ram and am using an NVMe on thunderbolt in lieu of its built-in fusion drive.
It's a great web browsing machine but it is just too sluggish for the full frame Sony camera files we use. Even though I'd prefer an M4 pro I'm sure the M4 base model will still fly for photo editing. The problem is I want to keep the budget low but I just know that I won't get good colors out of even high end third party displays -- I'd like to see if I can keep the apple display magic.
The 5K IPS displays are some of the best. I'd totally gut this 2019 iMac to do this. I know the risks and it's a medium size project to gut the iMac and install a display driver board, but i think this 2019 unit works too well to butcher yet. I'm looking at older iMacs from the earlier lineup that still have the great 5K display to do this with. AFAIK earlier non 5K Macs supported target display mode, which would be nice, but since any of these affordable machines I'm considering would be dog slow I'm fine with shelling $150 for the display board and gutting it and possibly shoehorning the mac mini inside to keep it tidy.
The main remaining questions:
- Will the use of these display boards ruin the Apple display tuning magic and make colors as "bad" as a typical third party display? That would put me off this path.
- Are all the 5K iMac displays made equal? If so I could try to save some money to try to get a 2014 or 2015 model. The 2019 iMac 5K display is just as good as any modern display. I have plenty of OLED displays now. This thing can keep up just fine with all of them...
Currently my wife is using a 2019 5K 27" iMac for photo editing. It's decent, I upgraded it to 32GB of ram and am using an NVMe on thunderbolt in lieu of its built-in fusion drive.
It's a great web browsing machine but it is just too sluggish for the full frame Sony camera files we use. Even though I'd prefer an M4 pro I'm sure the M4 base model will still fly for photo editing. The problem is I want to keep the budget low but I just know that I won't get good colors out of even high end third party displays -- I'd like to see if I can keep the apple display magic.
The 5K IPS displays are some of the best. I'd totally gut this 2019 iMac to do this. I know the risks and it's a medium size project to gut the iMac and install a display driver board, but i think this 2019 unit works too well to butcher yet. I'm looking at older iMacs from the earlier lineup that still have the great 5K display to do this with. AFAIK earlier non 5K Macs supported target display mode, which would be nice, but since any of these affordable machines I'm considering would be dog slow I'm fine with shelling $150 for the display board and gutting it and possibly shoehorning the mac mini inside to keep it tidy.
The main remaining questions:
- Will the use of these display boards ruin the Apple display tuning magic and make colors as "bad" as a typical third party display? That would put me off this path.
- Are all the 5K iMac displays made equal? If so I could try to save some money to try to get a 2014 or 2015 model. The 2019 iMac 5K display is just as good as any modern display. I have plenty of OLED displays now. This thing can keep up just fine with all of them...
