'mac Pro Or Imac 5k Better For \'photoshop\''

Photographers get excited about lenses and cameras, but it's not every day that a computer can get the entire photo industry buzzing like the new iMac 5k has. Obviously, the main draw to the computer is the insanely high resolution screen, but it takes a lot more than a pretty screen to justify the high price tag of this photo-editing powerhouse. In short, the iMac 5k is the finest photo editing computer ever created, and has won a permanent place at my photo editing station. However, it's not all roses and unicorns. Most photographers will be underwhelmed by the ultra high-resolution screen at first, and the bugginess and port placements will put off some photographers. Jim Harmer I've been using the iMac 5k for several weeks to get used to the computer before coming to a final recommendation since I new that hundreds of thousands of photographers will likely read this review as part of their buying decision.

The 3.3 GHz 8-core Mac Pro outperforms a maxed-out iMac, the iMac taking about 90% longer to finish. This is to be expected given the ~56GB memory size needed for this test and the 32GB in the iMac. DiglloydHuge Photoshop benchmark iMac 5K 4 GHz Radeon M295X vs 2013 Mac Pro 3.3 GHz 8-core D700.

I'm glad I waited and spent some time with the device, because it will let us take a much more in-depth look at the computer, starting with the screen and then looking at every other aspect of the device. But before we begin, I should say that this review really isn't intended to be controversial, but I fear that I'll offend the fanboys with my honest, real-world review of the display, and at the same time I'll offend the Windows users who will hate to hear how much I love this computer.

Mac theme for windows 10. The 5k Screen: All it's cracked up to be? I can't write about the screen on this computer without sounding entirely contradictory. After all, it's the best photo editing screen I've ever seen, and at the same time I think most photographers will only find a marginal difference between this screen and the previous generation iMac.

If you are currently using a 1080p screen on your photo editing machine, you'll see a night and day difference and you'll never be able to go back. However, if you've already been using a higher resolution screen like that of the previous iMac's 2560×1440 display, you'll likely not be able to even tell the difference until you really spend some time on the screen and pay attention to the finest details on a photo. Background for Non-Techies Screens are made up of pixels, and the number of pixels on a screen is the resolution.

An HDTV manufactured any time in the last few years is likely 1080p, meaning that the screen is comprised of 1920 columns of pixels along the long edge of the screen, and 1080 rows of pixels on the short edge. If you multiply those numbers together, you see that a typical HDTV has 2 million pixels. This is also common for computers manufactured in the last few years. It's likely that your laptop is 1080p if it's between 1 and 3 years old. Some computers, however, have higher resolution screens.

For instance, the previous generation iMac 27″ has a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels, which figures out to 3.6 megapixels. The iMac 5k crushes those numbers with a whopping resolution of 5120 x 2880 pixels, which is 14.7 megapixels.

Do the specs tell the real story? On paper, the resolution of the iMac 5k is a game-changer (I despise that word as it's usually used to over-hype incremental changes). Truly, it is. Allowing a photographer to see 14.7 million pixels in his or her photos would seem to be a massive improvement over the 3 megapixel images we have seen in days past. But the truth is that when I first used my 5k iMac, I was underwhelmed. At first, I had to squint and put my face right up next to the screen to even tell the difference between it and my 2013 iMac. I could see the difference, but it wasn't nearly as dramatic as I had expected.

In fact, I put the iMac 5k to the test and displayed 10 high resolution images to a group of about 10 people. Some of the guinea pigs are very experienced photographers with great technical knowledge, and others were casual photographers and even some non-photographers. I placed the 5k iMac side-by-side with the 2013 iMac and asked them to identify which screen was showing the 5k image, and which was displaying the lower resolution image. The results were absolutely shocking.