Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: Larry451 on July 04, 2012, 01:53:31 pm
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Hi,
I'm looking into buying a refurbished imac 21.5 2.8ghz i7 which has 4 usb, 1 firewire & 1 thunderbolt port. I will use the thunderbolt port for an external monitor & the firewire for my external seagate drive.. On to the question? is there such a thing as a splitter? or a way of using the thunderbolt port for an external drive (thunderbolt) + the monitor?
the other option is to buy a refurbished imac 27" which has two thunderbolt ports, seems like a large monitor just to put photoshop tools on it.
thanks
Larry.
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The 27" Imac is a really nice beast. The display easily covers the sRGB gamut as profiled.
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There aren't that many thunderbolt peripherals yet, but in theory they can be daisy chained, so if your hard drive has two ports you can attach your monitor to the drive. Check these drives (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/), for example. One feature mentioned is "video pass thru."
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The 27" version is the ONLY one with high performance and quality parts. It's not just a matter of inches or cpu speed. The smaller versions do not use good quality screens, just laptop panels. The CPUs are not full speed and have some features disabled. The 27" is the only model I would recommend to anyone doing editing.
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The smaller versions do not use good quality screens, just laptop panels.
Untrue.
21.5" iMacs have used IPS panels since at least model 10,1. My MBP does not have an IPS panel, and I believe the only Mac laptop that does is the new Retina model.
Check before typing …
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The 27" version is the ONLY one with high performance and quality parts. It's not just a matter of inches or cpu speed. The smaller versions do not use good quality screens, just laptop panels.
Completely false. Both the 21.5" iMac and the 27" iMac use high quality IPS panels. The only difference is their size regarding the display. There was a time MANY years back when Apple made a 17" iMac that did use an inferior display panel compared to the then 20" model. Since the elimination of the 17" iMac , all the displays have had high quality IPS (In Plane Switching) technology. Sadly, none of the Macbook pros have IPS panels except for the new Retina model and all iPads.
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Check before typing …
Never one of kaelaria's strong points, sadly, particularly if a denigratory remark about an Apple product is involved.
Jeremy
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Never one of kaelaria's strong points, sadly, particularly if a denigratory remark about an Apple product is involved.
Ah …
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How to tell what panel your Mac is using:
Open Terminal
Paste * ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6 * (omit asterisks)
Type return
You should get something like this: LM215WF3-SLA1 (with two more lines * Color LCD * and something like * imac:~ username$ *.
I searched for LM215WF3-SLA1 and found out that it is an LG panel. The search result (http://www.panelook.com/LM215WF3-SLA1_LG%20Display_21.5_LCM_parameter_4920.html). HTH.
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does this terminal command work for any external display? like an apple cinema...??
elo
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Paste * ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6 * (omit asterisks)
Good lord, I have been programming/using *nix systems for 17 years and I had never seen the xxd program. Fascinating that I should learn about it on the LuLa forums. Nice one-liner.
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checkd my apple cinema.. the command tells me the serial number of the monitor - which means nothing to any of the sites that come up in the searches.
However I know the spects says 16 million plus colours..
cheers elo
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does this terminal command work for any external display? like an apple cinema...??
elo
Haven’t tried that, yet. Maybe tonight.
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Understand that the IMAC screen may only meet sRGB standards. does this mean that proofing/editing with adobeRGB is irrelevant as it will not be displayed?
Therefore a professional monitor is still required?
does anyone know how to find out what standards a monitor does meet? (without reading manufacturers sheets?(which are not always easy to interpret))
cheers elo
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Understand that the IMAC screen may only meet sRGB standards. does this mean that proofing/editing with adobeRGB is irrelevant as it will not be displayed?
Therefore a professional monitor is still required?
does anyone know how to find out what standards a monitor does meet? (without reading manufacturers sheets?(which are not always easy to interpret))
If your display's gamut is only sRGB, then there is the possibility that you will not be able to display some colors from an image if they exceed the gamut covered by sRGB but are encompassed by Adobe RGB. Just in case, you can think of gamut like range. For example, sRGB may be have a range of 5 to 15 and Adobe RGB has a range of 2 to 20. This would mean a color such as 3 would exceed the range of what can be represented with the sRGB transformations.
To analyze the gamut covered by a monitor, you can use the ICC profile. Apple's built-in ColorSync Utility can be used for this purpose by first selecting the profile of the device, selecting "hold for comparison" using the down-pointing triangle near the upper-left of the graph, and then selecting a profile such as sRGB.
This isn't an issue of standards so much as it is of capabilities. Even the same monitor will have performance that generally worsens as it becomes older. If you regularly generate profiles you can track this decline in performance over time.