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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.
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.
I do layout and design for my university newspaper. (I'm also the EIC. Figure that one out.)
The editor before me bought a PC for layout, so that's what I had to use. Whenever I had to take files to a publishing house (including area newspapers) they complained to no end, pointing to all the Macs in their department.
Then I bought an Mac. Much better.
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
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.
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 $.
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.
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