Retina MBP report

[billh]

Thank you Michael! I’ve been curious about using the Retina MBP for photos and video in place of my old Mac Pro 1,1 (I had hoped Apple would announce a new Mac Pro). The Mac Pro and LR4 take forever to display the D800E RAWs in 1:1 preview, and it is so slow I use my 2011 MacBook Pro for Premiere.

Do you know if the Retina MBP will run FCP 7?

It is also great to have the myriad suggestions and links you provided. I have a plethora of RAID drives, all of which use Firewire 800.

[michael]

Yes, it will run FCP7.

Michael

[dreed]

To be sure that I understand the implications of the Retina screen, when LR and PS are run today, do they open up and give you the high resolution screens (really small text plus really big image area) with which to edit and work with or the low resolution screens?

[John S C]

Apple have announced a Thunderbolt to Firewire800 adapter, alongside a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet connector. As yet only the Ethernet connector is available ( £25 from Apple store). The Firewire connector is rumored to be available in September.

It's a bit of a pain they didn't make them both available at the launch of the MBP retina

[dturina]

I dislike Apple's policy re: ports. I got stuck with mini display port instead of thunderbolt on 2010 Air, firewire is on the way out, usb3 was adopted by Apple much too late, and there are very few thunderbolt devices around.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find it annoying. At least they could have come out with all the necessary adapters and hubs when they decided to adopt thunderbolt as the way to go, and not being able to upgrade 2010 Air's mini display port to thunderbolt (and not being able to use the 27" thunderbolt display which at the moment seems to be the only one they make) looks like a very big mess. Are they even thinking about it?

[Hans Kruse]

Nice review. From a photographers viewpoint a couple of points would have been of interest.

1) What is the performance using Lightroom 4 and especially how does the SSD help here.

2) How large a gamut is the retina display giving? Is it close to sRGB as the previous MBP displays or it is closer to Adobe RGB?

I also got the new MBP 2012, but not the retina display version. Why?

A fully configured MBP retina version (since it is not upgradable) would cost me about 50% more than the MBP 15" antiglare 1680x1050 display, 750GB 7200rpm drive, i7 2.6Ghz 8GB RAM.
I like to edit on a large display which is a 30" display with a resolution of 2560x1600 and a color gamut of close to Adobe RGB. Also I expected it would take quite some time until the apps were upgrade to fully take advantage of the retina display, but we will see. I also expected that prices on SSD drives to go down and I could replace the internal drive with an SSD drive and possibly also the DVD drive with SSD. I like to not be dependent on external drives except for backup when I'm out. In the office I plug in a FW800 drive and with the USB3 ports I can also use fast USB 3 drives. Also I can add 16GB RAM when the prices come down for the new 1600Mhz 8GB RAM blocks. ....but it is not a retina display and I surely lusted for that too but was a bit disappointed to learn that I had to get also SSD only and a non-upgradable machine. So for me the retirna display will be next time I upgrade my MBP.

I had a MBP from 2009 with a 2.8Ghz Core2 Duo, 8GB ram and 750GB 7200rpm HD. I find the new MBP screaming in performance in comparison. I think that in some cases with Lightroom SSD would make sense but for most operations I don't see it. I have been watching cpu graphs and disk i/o while doing certain operations. While editing there is certainly no benefit. In 1:1 preview generation my feel is that there would some gain like 50% or maybe more since there are quite some gaps when the cpu cores are not all busy, however it is not quite clear if some of these gaps are due to single threading and not just waiting for I/O. So compared to the MBP from 2009 this is a huge upgrade and Lightroom 4.1 flies with it.

[Hans Kruse]

I dislike Apple's policy re: ports. I got stuck with mini display port instead of thunderbolt on 2010 Air, firewire is on the way out, usb3 was adopted by Apple much too late, and there are very few thunderbolt devices around.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find it annoying. At least they could have come out with all the necessary adapters and hubs when they decided to adopt thunderbolt as the way to go, and not being able to upgrade 2010 Air's mini display port to thunderbolt (and not being able to use the 27" thunderbolt display which at the moment seems to be the only one they make) looks like a very big mess. Are they even thinking about it?

I can follow your thoughts for sure, but as nice the 27" Apple display is, it has one thing that is a no no for me, which is the glas covered display. My wife has it and she loves it but for photo editing I much prefer a non glass covered display. I also chose my new MBP with the anti-glare display (as I did on the old 2009 MBP). So when it comes to the point when I replace my 5 year old HP LP3065 30" display I will not choose the Apple 27" although it does look nice. I was happy to see that the old display adapter for dual DVI works also now on the thunderbolt/display port on the new MBP. On the new MBP I have FW, USB 2/3 ports som I'm happy with that. If you do serious photo editing get the new MBP 15" instead of the MB air There is no comparison in performance.

[Zerui]

Thank you Michael for a convincing review.
Do you have information on the Retina display gamut.  Srgb ?   Argb ?
Thanks
Goff

[michael]

To be sure that I understand the implications of the Retina screen, when LR and PS are run today, do they open up and give you the high resolution screens (really small text plus really big image area) with which to edit and work with or the low resolution screens?

All programs that are not Retina ware simply run in pixel doubling mode. They look normal. If you run SwitchResX you can choose any resolution you like, but of course menues and text will be small.

Michael

[dturina]

I can follow your thoughts for sure, but as nice the 27" Apple display is, it has one thing that is a no no for me, which is the glas covered display.

Yes, the glossy screen is not a good thing. Fortunately, since 13" Air they started using anti-glare coating on the displays, so hopefully this will be introduced to their entire product line, because producing a glossy screen without coating is just ridiculous. I do prefer a coated glossy to matte, though, because matte reduces contrast too much for my taste.

If you do serious photo editing get the new MBP 15" instead of the MB air There is no comparison in performance.

I might, because I need to replace my desktop this year and replacing both with a single computer does have a certain appeal, and my wife is certainly lobbying for this option because then she'll get my 13" Air.
On the other hand, I'd like to see what the new iMac will be like, and I really like the Air. I don't rely on complicated photo editing, I just adjust a few things in the raw converter and sharpen it for the desired medium, so I don't need a super-powerful machine for anything other than the panoramas. I do need a mouse and a big IPS screen when I work with the photos, though, so I really need at least some parts of a desktop system.

[michael]

Thank you Michael for a convincing review.
Do you have information on the Retina display gamut.  Srgb ?   Argb ?
Thanks
Goff

Similar to Srgb. I've just added a plot to the report.

Michael

[digitaldog]

2) How large a gamut is the retina display giving? Is it close to sRGB as the previous MBP displays or it is closer to Adobe RGB?

My understanding from someone who managed to profile one is it is pretty close to sRGB.

[Hans Kruse]

For those who are interested I made a little performance test of 1:1 preview generation. I took 20 RAW files from my Canon 1Ds mkIII (21MP) and used my normal import preset which includes sharpening, lens correction, process version 2012 and a calibrated profile for the camera.

This took very close to 3 seconds per RAW file each time I repeated this test. I then took lens correction out and the time was essentially the same. Then I change to PV2010 and the time then went down to about 2.5 seconds per RAW file. I also made this test on heavily edited files (a number of grad filters, but no complicated brushes) and the time went up to about 4.7 seconds per RAW file (which of course would vary with the amount of editing).

I also repeated the test on the old 2009 2.8Ghz, 8GB RAM 750GB 7200 rpm MBP and the time per RAW file was about 12 seconds or 4x longer. Note that the new machine is 2.6hz i7 quad core (turbo boost and hyperthreading) and old one two cores.

I also have a 2011 MBP 13" i5 2.3Ghz (used for music play) which I could test also, but have not done so far.

[Hans Kruse]

My understanding from someone who managed to profile one is it is pretty close to sRGB.

Thanks and here is the profiling from both the old MBP 2009 display and the 30" HP monitor. It looks to me from Michaels graph that the new retina is somewhere in between the two.

[digitaldog]

Thanks and here is the profiling from both the old MBP 2009 display and the 30" HP monitor. It looks to me from Michaels graph that the new retina is somewhere in between the two.

I’d really like to see the profiles off this new display technology generated by a Spectrophotometer, not a colorimeter who’s filters may or may not handle this new product correctly!

[Hans Kruse]

I also have a 2011 MBP 13" i5 2.3Ghz (used for music play) which I could test also, but have not done so far.

I repeated the test on this machine and the time was 6 seconds per RAW file (compared to 3 seconds on the new 15" MBP as mentioned previously).

[Robert-Peter Westphal]

Similar to Srgb. I've just added a plot to the report.

Michael

Hello,

that's a little disapointing. My Dell Precision notebook shows, admittadely only at full HD resolution, a tiny less than Adobe RGB with it's IPS-panel.

So the question is - is it better to abdicate from resolution or from color-gamut ? I've got no clear answewr to this question.

Robert

[michael]

It would be great to have both, but since LR4's soft proofing allows both screen and print gamut evaluation having only sRGB isn't all that limiting.

Michael

[Tariq]

Hello,

that's a little disapointing. My Dell Precision notebook shows, admittadely only at full HD resolution, a tiny less than Adobe RGB with it's IPS-panel.

So the question is - is it better to abdicate from resolution or from color-gamut ? I've got no clear answewr to this question.

Robert

I would take as close to AdobeRGB gamut as possible over resolution for photo editing (as long as the resolution was at least say 900 to 1080 on the short side) any day as you really do not want to be doing any serious editing at SRGB or lower.  I suspect most folks would still not be doing serious editing on their small Retina Macbook displays/ laptops anyway though.  Then the question becomes, why spend the bucks on the Retina MBP when one could buy something lighter and/or cheaper for on thr go?  Heck, for around $1100 bucks now, one can even get a very nice IPS ultrabook in the Asus Zenbook Prime (basically like a Macbook Air with a better IPS screen).

The larger question (if I understand the software resolution side of the Retina Macbook Pro) - is if these very hi resolution screens become more popular - will photographers begin providing hi resolution images on their websites for better native Retina resolution viewing (and do these images then have to be specially tagged to do this?) or simply have their lower resolution images interpolated/ scaled up by the software (which while the Retina Macbook Pro does a good job at, photographic images still show some artifacts from the interpolation).

 

[kaelaria]

Anand has the full comparison on the display here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/5

Also note - the Retina screen is neither gloss nor matte, it has NO protective panel at all - it's raw LCD.