Hi
My 27 imac is getting old and I need a replacement, want to stick with apple. I have it hooked to an Eizo monitor.
1. I was always told you can't calibrate an imac screen properly is that still true?
2. For Lroom, pshop and maybe some video editing in the future I want something quick without spending needlessly. I have lost touch with requirements and would appreciate advise on what is necessary for optimum performance.... Ram, processor, graphics card, i5,i7 or more.
Appreciate any help
Thanks
Shaun
Regarding the iMac display, it should be usable for fully color managed applications like photoshop after calibration and profiling. It might not be quite as good as the Eizo, but it should be ok.
The bigger issue is using a wide gamut Retina display iMac for video. Video applications are not fully color managed, or even, color managed at all. So, if you are color correcting for standard HDTV output, you will see colors much too saturated on your iMac display in video, even if you've calibrated/profiled your display with something like an iOne Display Pro device.
If your Eizo display is one that stores the calibration in the display, you can calibrate using the Color Navigator software to limit the display to REC709 color space (which you can not do on the iMac display). REC709 is the standard color space for HDTV. And this is still not the most accurate calibration for video. For that, one needs to create a 3D LUT calibration which one can use in Davinci Resolve output to the display over a Black Magic Decklink device such as the "mini monitor" for about $150. Or you can get a LUT box to store the 3D LUT calibration. I suspect that for you the 3D LUT calibration is a rabbit hole you might want to avoid, so for "ball park" accuracy, you can stick with the Eizo/ColorNavigator REC 709 Calibration for video.
As for the computer itself, I still use Photoshop and my Eizo display, with my 2013 MBP, 16GB ram, and it's fast enough usually. Though, since I now have a Windows workstation for video color correction, I sometimes use that with it's 128gb of RAM and $1000 graphics card. It's not as much faster as one might expect, but with 128GB of RAM I can keep open very large photographs without needing to access the cache disk which does help a little bit. But, saving large Photoshop files on the workstation doesn't seem all that different from saving from the MBP.
If you are working in 4K video, you may need the biggest baddest video graphics card you can afford. And that might mean getting the new Mac Pro instead... And a bigger bank account to go with it.