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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."
Surprising? I think not. Every /. reader here knows that Apple has been dragging its ass in the sand in the processor race due to Motorola's lack of money/research/carbonated beverages, and this isn't going to change until IBM gets around to releasing the "G5" architecture, probably using multiple cores on chip. So this is all old hat until then, really.
There are countless articles on this subject. We know the PC's are faster. In some cases signficantly faster.
But there are a variety of reasons for choosing a machine and platform, speed is not necessarily only the thing that comes into play.
For example, I, for one, just how long the battery on that super 1337 Alienware notebook lasts. It's probably not anywhere close to the Powerbook.
Oh well.
But doesn't anyone else see that this is pointless? Use what you like to use......
If your life as a digital photographer revolves around menial tasks such as catalogging zillions of photos, sure, get a PC. But if you actually take decent photos and make something of them, get a Mac. Where are all the output and retouching related benchmarks? I want tests of RGB-->CMYK conversion, unsharp masks, gaussians, color correction (white/black levels, contrast, brightness, etc,) and other tools photographers actually use to prepare their photos for publishing...
Even if people use PC's for processing work, professionals always go over their images on a mac, just to see if it looks "right".
Oh yeah, I know the type: 'I learned everything I know 20 years ago, and I'm pretty fucking sure there is and will not be anything better'.
Petty assholes.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
I think this would be more interesting if the benchmark included a usabilty benchmark between teh two systems.
Meaning, start to finish, how long it took to setup each computer to be a good digital photography workstation, including color matching, scanner setup, etc. Plus, an examination of workflow on each system. Plus an examination on how much the operating system acted as a hinderance to actually getting work done.
Then I'd trust a benchmark. Processor speed and computational speed only extend so far. Windows vs. Mac is not a speed issue, but a usability and interface design issue. Regardless of speed, Mac OS X is more usable than Windows. It puts less obstacles to getting work done than Windows does.
You can't examine "performance" without measuring the performer's productivity, as that has as much to do with how fast a given system is as the processor speed.
As someone who studied photojournalism at RIT (I still prefer working with b/w prints in my basement darkroom), but ended up in the computer biz, I read your comparison article with interest.
I won't bother arguing the stats, because I concur that potential doesn't matter, real world performance in the tasks that you do on a daily basis is what is important to you.
I will say that usability is as important as raw benchmarks; I happen to find Macs more usable. Any time I spend struggling with a computer is time lost when it comes to getting my work done.
But the real point of my post is to ensure that folks here who are using Macs are aware that Apple has some very interesting machines due out before the end of the year that are surely going to garner attention in the speed department. Out goes the Motorola G4, in comes the PPC970 from IBM -- it is 100% compatible with any software your G4 runs, it just happens to benefit from the serious horsepower that IBM has developed for their high-end workstations and servers.
Yes, Macs are currently a bit slower than their PC counterparts at some tasks, but they remain more of a pleasure to use. Soon, you will have the best of both worlds in terms of ease of use, stylish design, and speed.
By "runs natively", one would assume the original poster meant "uses the native widgets for a given windowing environment". In that sense, the GIMP only "runs natively" in an environment where the "native" widget set is GTK, like GNOME. In Windows, the GTK widgets look like crap and many function differently (slightly or widely) from standard Win32 widgets. Same for GTK on the Mac, I would guess (I don't know about this, since I haven't used a Mac in years). Conversely, Photoshop on Windows looks like it was meant to be a Windows application, with the look and feel of a Windows app. Photoshop on Mac OS looks like it was meant to be a Mac application. The Windows version doesn't try to shoehorn in the Mac style of "one menu bar, many open windows, no container window", and the Mac version doesn't try to follow the MDI style of Windows.
PC's do not have correct color output, and never will. No matter high end the PC, the colors never look "right" or balenced on the screen.
Interesting... First of all, the word "never" here is pretty strong. You must have one hell of a crystal ball, right?
Second, I don't understand what are "right" or "balenced" (sic!) colors. The purpose of color-calibrating your equipment is to make sure that the colors on your original are the same as the colors on your monitor are the same as the colors on your print. That's it.
Third, there is no problem with calibrating a PC-based workflow so that it all works very, very nicely. The colors I see on my screen, for example, are a very close match for colors I get on my prints (they'll never be exactly the same since the monitor emits light and a print reflects it).
Fourth, the poster is probably unaware of the concept called "gamma" and thus is clueless that Macs by default have a gamma of 1.8 and PCs by default have a gamma of 2.2. Thus, without gamma correction, images produced on Macs will look wrong on PCs and vice versa. That does not mean, however, that Mac-produced images are somehow intrinsically better. It's just that if you want to look at them on a PC you need to gamma-correct them.
Fifth, the statement that no professionals do layout or photowork on PCs is obvious bullshit. It just ain't true.
Sigh.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The amount of support I have to give these people is minimal and is all application-related.
The other area I encounter non-technical people is the PC world and, of course, the level of support required is much higher. Each successive edition of Windows is more cluttered as standard, and the learning curve is often a major irritation for busy professionals. Things often don't just work out of the box. Only last week I spent a frustrating hour just trying to get two W2k notebooks to communicate properly over ethernet, whereas I don't even have to think about adding Appletalk boxes. OK so I'm stupid, but how many other people are out there who are just as stupid as I am, and also need to work with computers?
In short, I see no real change in the long term situation, which is:
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Apple does have Colorsync built in, which enables matching of scanner, monitor, and printer. Now, you *can* get software for the PC that does the same thing -- and it works well. However, the entire graphics and publishing industry is built around the Mac, Mac software, Mac color profiles, and Mac people who do things the Mac way. So unless your business is completely self contained, it doesn't make sense to use anything else. (If it is, fine, do what you want.)
You're rather missing the point.
The difference is more like that between your basic Ford Focus into which you can shove a 4 litre engine and make it go really fast, althought the ride will be less than smooth (PC + Windows) versus the stately Mercedes - sure it can't do 0-60 in It's a pleasure to use a Mac and a chore to use a PC (which is why I pay to do the former and get paid for the latter.)
The people who whine about Macs costing too much and going too slow just don't understand the difference between luxury (Mac) and utility (PC). Feel free to stick with your Ford, and I'll stick with my Merc.
...beats the hell out of pointing and clicking around GUI apps for repetitive tasks like the file conversions used in this test. Try doing that on a PC...
Indeed, a better comparison would be to Paint Shop Pro, which is in fact what I'd gues 90% of the Photoshop users actually should be using. I know so many people who just pirate Photoshop so they can feel "pro" and use "the best" that it's not even funny. Get over it!
Not to mention the GIMP looks horrible on every OS
Looks OK to me, running in GNOME on Linux (which is in fact its "native" OS) - note that screenshot is quite old now.
Considering that the GIMP will run on basically anything, and Photoshop runs on Windows or Mac OS (unless you count Wine), I think the:
I guess you get what you pay for though.
line is extremely old. No, hard to believe though it is, there's this thing called charity and it means sometimes you get something great for absolutely nothing.
Myself and a bunch of other N*X geeks at the local user group have bought iBooks in the last year and a half. There are reasons other than speed to buy mac over intel.
...every time the Mac vs. PC debate rolls around - I use (and support) both kinds of machine extensively in my job, and can conclusively say that by far the worst thing about either platform is the users.
Who still cares about speed with 1GHz+ processors ? 400MHz is fast enough for me, only people dealing with synthetic images need the fastest... I mean what difference does it if your filter applies in 6 seconds instead of 3 ?
blah
now come over to some outdated apple hardware, that is more than 6 months old and already updated by apple.
Now we'll run a bunch of tests which aren't really graphic design, but more just heavy processor benchmarking. Mix this with totally ignoring real world creation speeds in sight for things like continual rapid disc access.
Then look at what you are really getting, it's no suprise than a single 3.06GHz chip is out performing 2x1.25GHz(and despite multithreading, 2x1.25 isn't 2.5GHz, and will perform much slower than that). Now I look at the differences in times. Despite picking tasks which are more cpu dependant, the apple still performs comparably despite being a lower clocked cpu, and running on an OS that will not allow photoshop to use 100% cpu when other background tasks are in use.
Your graphic designer will argue that the mac is faster in real world design creation. Or alternatively if you are willing to take serious contrived tests, try the apple photoshop test script, which will leave a 1GHz powerbook outperforming the fastest pentium 4M (2.25GHz) by up to 40% in some tests.
I needn't bring in other real world graphic design issues such as windows inability to colour sync or high speed access to firewire and other important graphic design orientated technologies. Or perhaps the fact that the powerbook in question is already a 2 year old design, and even back then it still had a digital screen.
So I apologise to the boffins that think throwing me a bunch of contrived numbers will disprove my real world experiences.
This is a horrid way of justifying PC vs Mac... Macs don't benefit from speed, that's obvious... the 'mhz myth' campaign by apple is just a marketing ploy.
The real reason to use macs in digital editing is colour. The colour (yes, with a 'u') on macs is infinently closer to print than a PC is.
This is why apples are used in 99.9% of print shops, and PCs are used in more web design shops. If you aren't printing, then PCs are just fine. Soon as print comes into the question, you simply can't use PCs. You'll be printing, editing, printing editing, so often that it'll take a lot longer than waiting 2 extra seconds while exporting a file.
Anyone who works in printing will know what I mean if they ever tried putting a curve on a dcs file... PCS just can't get it right.
What's not elaborated on here is why many graphics pros choose the mac. It isn't for raw speed, but because they prefer the development environment the mac gives them over Windows. Even if something is faster on the latest cutting edge PC, if it is harder for the user to get what he needs done then it makes no difference. As a user of both OS X and Windows I can attest to this. The fastest PCs have been faster than their mac counterparts for a while now for some things. But I don't really care about that. OS X improves my workflow so much that it probably evens out in the end. To make a car analogy, do I have to buy a Ferrari just because its faster? I think I'll stick with my Rolls Royce.
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