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Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "Rob Galbraith posted a comparison among two Macs and two PCs. Both a high-end Mac and PC are included with somewhat surprising results given the number of Mac zealots who will claim otherwise... optimized for PC, Mac support second, Photoshop is faster, yada, yada, yada."
the "G5" isn't going to be multiple cores on one die,
.18) process, and eh voila, PowerPC 970
but it will be derived from IBMs multicore POWER4
The chip in question is of course the PowerPC 970 (that's PDF of the microprocessor forum presentation on the 970)
In short, take a power4, lop off core #2, reduce the amount of L2 cache, add an altivec execution unit, change the bus interface and make it on a smaller (.13 rather than
You can buy diffrent laptops from diffrent companies. There are probably hundreds of laptops on the market now from Transmeta powered toshiba librito which can get up to 14 hours of battery life, to devices like yours which are insanley powerfull.
You can't get a 14 hour mac, and you can't get mac as powerfull as your alienware notebook.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think print colour matching may not appear in the GIMP for some time. I could be way off because it was a while since I read about this and it was from a GIMP web page or news group so they know about it). As I remember, Adobe owns a certain patent on color space conversion. This means they can't put it in. Otherwise they'd have to pay for a patent license, and being a free project, they can't afford it. Also being a GNU project, they probably don't want to deal with patents at all.
RGB is an additive color model: 100% of R, G and B gives you white.
CMYK is a subtractive color model: 100% of C, M, Y and K gives you black. Now, as all printing involves taking a light substrate and adding color to it, all printing is based on subtractive models as there is no way, with current technology, to print RGB.
So, to recap, all printing is CMYK because, right now, that's the only cost-effective way to actually print. That may change in the future, butm for now, you need 1) a program which does CMYK and b) a platform which gives one accurate color rendition across different color spaces.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Windows has had ICC support for at least 7 years, when windows 95 came out.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
PC's do have correct color output, you just have to calibrate the card plus the monitor. Todays videocards all have software calibration tools for colors. Photoshop on the PC also lets you calibrate your monitor when you first start the program.
FYI: a lot of paperfocussed designers are already moved to PC's.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
That being said, you can read more of the discussions on Galbraith's site for some interesting back-and-forth regarding color management. Windows has been gaining quite a bit of ground in color management. For most people, I would say that color management software between Apple and Microsoft products are equivalent. On the hardware side, there is quite a bit of color calibration equipment now available for both Macintosh and Windows.
I'm curious how many magazine and newspaper editors you have seen that are really judging color on screen. In my experience, most editorial folks have no good color viewing conditions in their personal offices, let alone even minimally calibrated monitors. If you look at an image on a screen in a very brightly lit office with a three year old 20" monitor while wearing a heavily saturated shirt, it really doesn't matter if you are on an Apple or MS machine--your color judgement will be impaired. In contrast, our imaging department has color-controlled lighting booth and regularly calibrates (and replaces) their monitors.
Professionals do not always go over their images on Macs. I work at a large national weekly sports magazine. All of our photo editors edit images on Windows machines. Of our 15 photographers, around half use Macs and the rest use Windows. Our imaging department uses macs for production work partially due to page design software requirements. Similarly, our editorial department also uses macs because of other software requirements. Because of software requirements, all of our Macs currently run MacOS 9, not MacOS X. (Let's not even get into the server side.)
I went to the Fiesta Bowl a week ago or so. Of the photographers I saw in the press tent, around half were using Macs and half were using PCs running Windows.
So do "professionals always go over their images on a mac, just to see if it looks 'right'"? No, not really. Are there other advantages to running on Apple hardware and software rather than using WIndows and Intel hardware and software? It is definitely a topic worth debating. Galbraith has done a great job of stimulating discussion.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Windows bigot. (The Unix people call me a Windows bigot. The Windows people call me a Unix bigot. No one really wants to keep running MacOS 9.) However, I hate it when assertions are made regarding platforms that simply aren't true.
--Sam
http://www.robgalbraith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi ?ubb=get_topic&f=16&t=000631
According to this post the author says that windows XP was easier to get all his equipment working on than on his mac boxes.
Yet after this he still likes using macs better. So there must be something nice about them.
Guess what? All my company does is proffessional layout and photowork. We use Photoshop on all our machines.
Half of us use Macs (because of other software they need to use due to the drafting package the architecture firm we are associated with uses)
Half of us use PCs (because of other software we need to use for 3D rendering and animation, and compatibility with drafting packages from other architecture firms)
Now. Like I said, we do photowork and layout on both platforms. Both platforms are network printing to the same professional-level color printer. Guess what? We can make images look the same on print, display.....REGARDLESS of which machine we create them on.
Next time you go and babble about an industry and a use....make sure you actually know what you are talking about.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I think this one goes to show more the fact that the current mac processors have such a lame memory bus than anything else. Most of the tests involve moving around GB to no end and there the PCs have a clear advantage (thanks to Motorola's ignorance of things like DDR memory and the like).
The crippled DDR support of modern PowerMacs (and the last Powerbooks) helps only when doing a variety of memory tasks simultaneously, as the processors are still fed at single speed.
Linux may have had problems displaying fonts a few years ago, but XFree86 has added TrueType support and better fonts may be used instead of old crappy ones. Those problems have gone away. Not to mention that article is talking about Mozilla/Netscape and how they try to scale bit mapped fonts.
I'm running Linux/XFree86 with Mozilla using TrueType fonts now, and it looks great.
Several things:
1) Windows has a system wide colour compensation technology too. Most people don't take the time to learn about or use it, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
2) Mac do NOT only have to worry about certian types of monitors. Since Apple has branding and selling tube monitors, people have been forced to turn to 3rd party solutions (at least no prepress house I've ever been to will use TFTs for colour critical applications).
3) I find that by and large the colour problems cause by using PCs are form Mac people that don't really understand the way colour spaces work. First, PCs normally operate with a 9300k temperatore, Macs are normally 6500k. You either need to switch the mode on the monitor, or compensate for that. Then there's the gamma difference. PCs are 2.2, Macs are 1.8 (I think).
Really, if you understand how to setup a PC properly, it's not hard to get it's colour matched to what you are printing.
I owned a Libretto L2 and the battery life is about 2 hrs max. Using any power saving mode will make quite un-usable.
I manipulate very very large photoshop files (100 meg +). A dual g4 1gzh is plenty fast for this..
I usually am playing mp3s when working and its still fing.
And that OSX is realy stable. Plus the built in color matching in OSX is a blessing..Saves so much time when printing, I usually get what I expect out of the printer, which saves time ink and $.
For about 2.5 years I used a Nikon Coolpix 990 for all of our digital photography needs. Pretty much every picture required some time in Photoshop because of the poor placement of the flash in relation to the main lens, because of the Nikon's tendency to run red, and because of the useless red-eye reduction feature. I just replaced it with a Canon EOS D60, and of the 250 pictures I've taken since getting it, less than a dozen have required time in Photoshop. I'd toyed with a Canon Powershot G3, and it seemed like it'd require very little Photoshop time, too. So if you've got a good enough camera and know how to use it, your CPU's clock speed won't matter much at all. You'll be spending more time worrying about hard drive space and how to back up/archive everything.
2- Apple is the major (only) consumer of the PowerPC chip.
Your ignorance amazes me. There are numerous buyers of the PowerPC chip. Another poster mentioned some of them and I'll mention a couple more: Cisco, Nintendo (you've heard of the GameCube right) and Sony's next Playstation will have a PowerPC.
3- Apple-heads seem to be content with waiting for as long as it takes to get faster machines. As such, there's no significant pressure on Apple to improve immediately. They have people still quoting the Mhz myth and saying their G4 450 can kick a P4 3.04 (With rambus)'s ass.
Just because there are Mac users (or as you call them "Apple-heads") doesn't make them content with the current state of the PPC. But what this article doesn't really go into is why some people prefer the Mac over the PC in photography.
Ease of use, prefered applications and most importantly colour-management that is second to none. I don't care what these test prove, because if my image in the end comes out with different colours than it had to begin with the whole process would be for nothing.
Apple users are tired of laggin behind in speed, but what are the alternatives? Windows? Linux? Please.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Rob Galbraith is dumb and wrong to draw conclusions about platform superiority from benchmarks of the Canon File Viewer Utility. The slashdot comments here are equally irrelevant because none of you seem to be photographers that use this software (I see 0 comments discussing RAW image conversion out of 237).
;-)
Canon's RAW image convertor is a proprietary piece of software that turns the RAW data off the camera's CCD (or CMOS sensor in the case of the high end Canon SLRs) into TIFF or JPEG files.
Canon's RAW image conversion software is HORRIBLE on BOTH Mac and PC (measured by performance and UI). It has to be one of the most poorly written pieces of software I've ever used. Benchmarking a platform with this software is inane! It's like comparing two cars by screwing on concrete wheels.
Canon's software is obviously written by amateur programmers (or maybe even AN amateur programmer). It was poorly coded for the PC and, in turn, that bad code was then ported to the mac. Where Canon digital cameras are ingenious...the best of breed, their desktop software is clueless, worst of breed.
Further, the Canon File Viewer 1.1 code on the mac is not naitive, it's carbonized (and only just barely carbonized...it was released just a few months ago and has recieved no updates from its initial 1.1.1.22 version). The classic mode Canon RAW Image Convertor actually works better (from a UI and performance standpoint) on the Macintosh than the carbonized Canon File Viewer 1.1. (Im testing with a Powerbook G4 800).
Canon's horrible software has driven third parties to attempt to build better RAW image convertors. Alas, Canon has not released the algorithm for RAW image conversion to the public (nor licensed it commercially). This has left developers guessing how to decypher the RAW file format. No third party including Bibble (which Rob Galbraith uses as another benchmark...bonehead) has achieved any performance improvements over Canon's bad software because of its closed source nature.
The bottom line is that your OS selection should not be based on Rob Galbraiths data but on more refined aspects of each OS, like how productive you will be on each platform over a period of years.
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PS. You slashdotters enjoy your flame war about mac vs PC. An OS is what you make of it. I'm sure all of you have settled on a favourite platform already... so why are you arguing which is better? And if you haven't decided on a platform...I'll save you some time, buy an Apple G4 running OS X.
The tester, in an attempt to compare apples to apples (so to speak), only used software with versions on both platforms. Having ported a good deal of software to the Mac, I know that companies tend to treat their Mac versions as second class citizens. Often the Mac versions have an internal emulation layer of one kind or another.
In any case, what the tester was trying to do figure out which system was fastest. What he should have done was look for the fastest graphics software on each platform. On the Mac, I'm pretty sure that won't be software from the camera manufacturer. What needs to be tested is the speed of the task, regardless of which software performs it.
Quoting:
"Troy Dreier, writing for PC Magazine's First Looks section in the February 4 issue, calls the dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 "one fast machine."
In a benchmark in Adobe Photoshop, the magazine finds that cross-platform comparisons with a new 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Hyper-Threading, the G4 outpaces the PC in every test but one, the Gaussian Blur, in which the match was a draw.
He reports the G4 is faster at Sharpen Edges, Unsharp Mask, Despeckle, Convert to RGB, and Resize (presumably thanks to the Velocity Engine, and Photoshop's dual processing support and G4 optimization)."
Check it out at http://www.powerpage.org/story.lasso?newsID=10439
100% of C, M, Y and K gives you black
Well actually 100% K alone gives you blac K , 100% CMY gives you a dark grey in most real world output devices, hence the need for K.
A client of ours (Fortune 500) got in contact with Adobe because Illustrator 10 is so much slower than Illustrator 9. The Adobe rep admitted that the Mac versions of their programs are slow because they are written for Windows and ported to the Mac. They make sure the Windows version is fast, and the Mac version gets zero optimization.
The iBook lags behind in almost all applications and also takes longer to boot.
How do you know? If you're booting your iBook that often, you're doing something wrong.
I've booted this Mac one time for every kernel upgrade since I bought it, and one time for a kernel panic I got when running the original release of 10.2. I honestly can't tell you how long it takes this Mac to boot. Have no idea.
I write in my journal