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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."
MAC Vs. PC is the same as the silly East side West Side rap Thing, I have worked on both machines in photoshop for years they are exactly the same the PC just crashes more than the MAC on files over 100 MB I find. but That is probebly a programe related glitch.
Does it even compare to Photoshop where professionals are concerned?
Not really.. as great as the GIMP is, it still has a ways to go before it can pry photoshop out of the cold dead hands of the people who use photoshop what it is intended for rather than just for general cropping and resizing.
Not to mention the GIMP looks horrible on every OS due to the gtk widgets whereas photoshop is native to every OS it runs on and looks like a professional program. I guess you get what you pay for though.
okay if you can still play MP3's and run photoshop , who cares about which system is better ? Futhermore I have seen many rich guys with top tech machines that cant design to save there lives, there creative output rivals that of yack puke , but a guy with natural talent could make much more asthetically pleasing work on a 486 running photoshop 2, so shouldt the real debate be on does technolguy make up for bad asthetics or color blindness ?
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.
That's why if you ever go to a magazine's or newspaper's office, you will never see any layout or photowork being done on PC's, because the colors just aren't balenced. The only two systems I have seen get this right are Macs and Sgi's, and that is why they are still so widely used!
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".
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
A single company with a proprietary box vs. the PC world with huge third party support and development. That's like a technology race between a dictatorship and a capitalist state. The outcome is obvious. It's just a matter of time.
There will be plenty of time for smoking doobies when your living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.
I don't generally buy the fastest machine on the block, but Apple seems to be really falling behind. Their answer seems to have been to ship all Power Mac G4 towers as dual processor. But two slower processors are not as useful as one fast processor. And the heat sinks and noise on those G4 towers are even more ridiculous than on the Pentium 4's.
My "terribly slow" Dual 1 Ghz Macintosh is limited by its slowest part... me.
I keep the CPU meter running in the dock, and its twin towers of darkeness mock me..."what's the matter, buddy, can't even feed two glacial G4's? We're just sitting here, at 20% of capacity, while you try to decide which Actionscript to incorrectly code next..."
Even when I'm saving giant Photoshop files, checking 14 e-mail accounts and loading web pages into three different browsers (IE, Chimera, Safari), it still has one or two little dark blocks at the top of each meter. Probably just to piss me off.
Disclaimer: If I was a 3D or video artist, a 10% increase in speed could free up an hour a day. Since I'm not, even a 100% increase in speed would just mean my computer would have half as much to do while it waited for my sorry ass.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Okay, wait, so they compared a 3 GHz processor with a 1.25 GHz processor? Even though it's dual, it won't be used by everything that he does.. OS X itself uses the Duals, as does Photoshop, but his digicam software may not.
;)
Regardless, it really comes down to a personal choice. Are you strong enough to make the right one?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
RGB printing via lasers on photographic paper is pretty cheap - the place I last worked at was pulling in some phenomenal profits getting out posters faster than they'd ever done on inkjet or electrostatic short runs - and for less cost while still charging what the market would take. That was a few years ago, so the situation may have changed there.
The biggie though is the flexibility of paper - photographic paper all looked like photographic paper. Thick, somewhat glossy, and unfoldable. That leaves it kind of useless for magazines, flyers, brochures, letterheads, and... anything except short run displays. It didn't end up cost effective for large runs, such as the tens of thousands of posters made for say, a movie release.
Cyan is the absence of red, Yellow is the absence of blue, and magenta is the absense of green. Why is it so hard to convert colors?
Converting to a CMYK color space is not difficult. But you have to consider that as an additive model the color of the paper matters to the conversion, as does the ink used. You also have to provide a means for the user to adjust their monitor so what they see on the screen has some correspondence to what the final output looks like. A good CMYK conversion can save you hundreds of dollars per image in the fewer proofs you'll need before the final output looks good. You also really want to do this yourself because if you leave it up to the printshop you soon begin to believe that all their employees are color blind.
Photoshop has profiles for major printers with brand-name ink and paper plus less effective monitor profiles. It also has support for little sensors you stick on your monitor to measure it's whitepoint. This almost works, but you need very controlled lighting, and it still needs to be adjusted a bit because your eyes aren't standardized... (everyone sees additive and subtractive images differently, but how differently depends not only on the ambient lighting and the brightness of the monitor but your particular eyes too.)
So to sum up converting to a CMYK colorspace is not so hard, converting to the right one is a PiTA.
AMD has the same problem Apple and motorola used to have. When comparisons were made between the G3/G4 and the pentiums of the time, apple/Motorola said that MHz isn't everything to CPU performance. Unfortunately motorola stopped worrying about MHz and apple has tried to avoid comparisons. Avoiding the issue however is not the correct solution. Waiting for Motorola to come out with something new is not working. Apple needs to start shopping for another vendor for it's processors. Porting OS X to another processor is possible, but who knows how long apple will wait with Motorola.
check out the best blog ever:
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In addition to the article it would have been interesting if someone put together a test and compared "back for the buck" ratios of different platforms.
I recently bought an iBook and a Dell laptop for about the same price. The iBook lags behind in almost all applications and also takes longer to boot. I guess in the end, it is the design that you pay for when buying a Mac.
December 2002 I was asked to do a migration for a printing-company, where it's new PowerMac G4 dual 1GHz needed to be migrated from OS 9 to OS X. But this was impossible, since the company had decided not to switch to Adobe Indesign but stick with Quark XPress. Using Quark 5 in a Classic environment, with all of it's font- and colormanagement, would be terribly difficult.
Since there is still no carbonized or cocoa-version of Quark, the majority of companies is waiting with their migration. And since there aren't a lot of companies (*cough!*Customers that pay for their software *cough!*) using OS X and software, spending much time and money on OS X and AltiVec optimization is not highly important for commercial developers.
If OS X had a larger marketshare, I think the software would be much better optimized and the differences would be much smaller. For instance, see what Apple did with the Safari-browser !
(I don't say that a Mac with OS X would be faster than a PC though, since that is pure speculative and can't be tested !)
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
you should really hang around on OSNEWS. Every once and a while a comparison of different compilors does come around. Try this post as an example http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2376
It's a decent example of pentium 4 benchmarking using the Intel and Gcc compilers.
When i bought my powerbook with osx it was too soon, things didnt really roll until the 10.0.4 release. I was sucked in by their excellent marketing of the powerbook g4 running a gorgeous open sourceOS. Call me a sucker but apples marketing department sure knows what its doing! Still I felt resentment over buying (into) something that didn't live up to what I thought I would get.
But right now things are different. OSX is sweet, my powerbook g4 at 400mhz might not sound like a powerhouse but it's sexy. No matter what I run on it or do with it it conveys an image that I am stylish, that I value quality over other considerations such as cost and speed. That I think different. Even though I am a programmer I really noticed that this laptop made me stand out. If you're meeting creative people commercially the powerbook does the selling for you, it tells them you are no lummox. In many many fields the thing the apple brand means and conveys about its owner is a priceless add on.
I have to say i mostly run mandrake 9.0 cooker on the powerbook G4. With KDE 3.1 beta. People who have never seen osx but heard about it sometimes think Im running OSX and they comment on how beautiful it is. Yeah KDE 3.1 is gorgeous! It runs very well on the 400mhz G4. But all that's besides the point. (albeit it does show that its hardware rather than software that appeals!)
Apple did something with its brand that very very few companies have done. They created incredible value; Apple appeals to people. You dont get that with your dell or toshiba or even an alienware rig.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
"Not really.. as great as the GIMP is, it still has a ways to go before it can pry photoshop out of the cold dead hands of the people who use photoshop what it is intended for rather than just for general cropping and resizing."
I can vouch for that. Paying $150 every so often (plus the $600 tag to start) is somewhat painful, but my experiments with Gimp didn't prove fruitful enough for me.
Let me explain some things, though:
a.) I already have PS paid for. So for me to switch to Gimp, it has to be better. Price tag isn't everything.
b.) I already have a well established workflow with PS and no real bottlenecks (that I'm aware of) that Gimp has the opportunity to fix. So, for me to adopt it (or evaluate it) then they'd have to do something Photoshop doesn't do. I guess this makes me a Photoshop zealot. At least I'm honest!
c.) As long as Adobe keeps making really big updates to PS every year or so, they keep my attention. Gimp would have to ride that wave to keep me on board. So far, it feels like they're playing catch up.
I realize my reasons aren't entirely rational, but I can imagine that there's a significant portion of the PS population that shares or would share similar feelings.
Adoption of Gimp may happen in a year or two, particularly when Linux becomes more and more attractive to the digital artist. (Note: I'm not implying Gimp's only on Linux, but rather that Photoshop is not on Linux...) Today, though, it's not all that interesting in any way other than for the visionary. Us artists would just like to get our work done.
Having changed over (finally) from Mac OS 9.2.2. to OS X 10.2.3 on January 1, 2003, my memory of how Photoshop worked on MacOS 9 is fresh, and it is slower on OS X.
With OS X I'm often, very often, waiting for the machine on Photoshop operations that I never have in the past.
OS X is in it's infancy, still in some ways a beta test product.
A fast PC will beat current Macs in many things, at least until the PC gets its knickers in a knot and needs to be rebooted.
Apple does indeed need faster processors, and a lot of the kinks still need to be worked out of OS X and applications that work with it.
Does the fact a PC can do some things faster than my Macs bother me? Yup! Does that mean I'll be changing to a PC anytime soon? Nope!
I'm comfortable with my Macs and with my *nix server.
Tomas
They compared the very fastest notebook you can buy (when not running off battery), which only runs nearly that fast when tethered to wall outlet with cpu cooking at like 50W, to a PowerBook that is slower than any you can buy right now (20% lower clock rate and much less cache than currently available) and uses less than half the power.
What kind of comparison is that???
Looking at the charts, it appears that a current PowerBook would easily smoke the P4 book in speed alone. Even if you ignored the higher cache (which is not insignificant b/c altivec is severely handicapped by small caches), a 1GHz PowerBook would be about 25% faster than the one they tested. This would make it faster than any P4 book even when P4 plugged into wall cooking at like 50W.
Furthermore, PowerBooks with Radeon cards can run at full speed for hours on one battery, whereas P4 books will roast your nads for about an hour while running half speed and then die.
I've never owned an Apple product and certainly am not a mac zealot, but this test is ridiculously rigged. Nice way to get on Slashdot real easy.
Similar sounding process - but different place. The machines I used were Fuji's Pictrograph (I don't know if it was LED or Laser) and a Durst Lambda - a gigantic machine that could throw out photographic prints on 50" wide, 164foot long rolls at 2ft/minute. *snif*. it was a nice machine. -really- nice :)
here is a link...
The Mac OS X operating system and the software included is smart and allows you to work a lot faster.
So, OSX for the x86 would be the ultimate solution? Apple needs to release it, they may be onto a money-spinner...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Err. And would they be particularly wrong?
1- Apple has a small market share.
2- Apple is the major (only) consumer of the PowerPC chip.
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.
4- They're one of the biggest companies when it comes to cellphones, which are NOT a small market share.
5- Research and development is EXPENSIVE, and when you take 1-4 into consideration, why would a company want to put so much research and development into something that won't yeild significant return?
-Sara
Motorola builds them cool, light on the wattage and notches speed according to those first two criteria.
What do you think runs the pattern recognition software in modern drone aircraft and cruise missiles? Pentium 4's? Sparcs?
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Ignoring issues of comparing Apples to oranges... I expect the multi-processor PowerMac was chosen because there aren't any single-proc that go much over 1GHz, while the P4 is at 3GHz. I also understand the author was using current machines and so did not go with an older 1GHz P# (which would probably have included other older components). Can anyone with knowledge on Apple's multiprocessor tech and the software in question comment on whether said software would have effectively used both processors, if at all?
I had a friend that worked at adobe a few years ago that told me that they release 10-20 serial numbers into the wild for about all of their products so that kids resizing and cropping will choose their software. When the kids grow up, they'll know Photoshop/GoLive/Illustrator/whatever and will be more likley to purchase it or recommend it for purchase to their company. Nothing really lost as they wouldn't have bought the $500 package anyway. I believe macromedia came out a few years ago and said that they put together and distributed a full package version to pirate web sites to do the same. Now it's the most popular program going.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The point is the Alienware laptop kicked the desktop MAC's butt all over my screen. How would you like to see the desktop MAC's battery life comparison with the Alienware laptop?
I wouldn't wanna have one in my basement.
My Macs are Macs running OS X & OS 9.2. My PC is a server box running slackware. It might as well be invisible.
I don't like the x86 architecture. I definitely don't like Windows. I like Aqua. End of story.
The hardware'll get faster next week and the week after and the week after that. But I bought it when I needed it and when I could afford it and when it did what I needed. And with the style I wanted to do my work in.
That's what its about.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Don't be confused or misleading with the form factors -- the best-of-breed PC was represented by a laptop, and the similar-spec Mac was a desktop.
"continual rapid disc acces" scores are going to be quite similar. Laptop hard drives are somewhat crippled by their smaller platter size and lower rotational speeds, so if anything, the top-spec PC is hobbled in that respect.
You are right -- the 3.06GHz versus 2x1.25GHz comparison isn't fair -- the fastest PC processor has to go up against TWO of the fastest available G4 processors! Neither configuration is used on an OS that doesn't multitask. In both cases, background tasks would have taken away foreground application performance, not that there should have been any of note while benchmarking.
If Windows is unable to colour sync, an equally valid issue would be the question of why one would use an LCD in any situation where colour accuracy was important! Also, if you went through all the benchmarks, you'd see that there was a test using FireWire... which the Macs also lost. Perhaps the "digital screen" is a novel thing to you, but PC laptops have been doing the same for many, many years.
I sympathise with you, who thinks that spinning the numbers will somehow lead people to believe that you are indeed living in the real world.