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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."
Thought it said digital pornography comparison. I've never clicked on a Slashdot story so fast in my life!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
Sure they appear to be slow, but that's because they're so fast that time slows down as a result of general relativity. Yeah that's it. I can't believe that you mindless Pee Cee thugs didn't know that.
Morons.
--Steve Jobs
Mac zealot here, wanted to know where the PC zealots were. I also bumped into the VAX/VMS zealots as well, they were hanging with the System V zealots, who were, in turn also hanging out with the BSD zealots.
I don't care what computer you use, why should you care what I use? Ahhh, PC zealot. In case you must know, i have a PowerBook G4, an RDI Powerlite, and a Sun Ultra Workstation.
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......
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.
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...
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 ?
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.
Macs are sooo warm, fuzzy, and cute! Who needs raw performance when your Mac can make SUCH a fashion statement. Take that Micheal Dell!
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.
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 ||
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 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.
Not magical- integrated. Macs have a system level technology called ColorSync, that can calibrate and store color profiles for all your output devices.
Add that to the limited hardware space Mac users have to account for- only certain types of monitors, video cards, etc- and the hooks the application developers build into their DTP apps, and you have an elegant way to make sure your puke green logo is the proper shade of puke green throughout the production process.
For instance, I develop for the Web- so I have embedded a ColorSync profile that makes my monitor look like a Windows machine (about 20% darker than a typical Mac). By propagating that profile through all my apps that support ColorSync, I can make sure that even if I specify a very light color, it will be properly compensated for and appear darker on my screen.
Windows users can do the same thing- Photoshop recently shook up their entire profile handling on both platforms, much to the concern of digital artists everywhere- but, as is usually the case, the implementation is not quite as elegant, and the results not as predictable.
That said, there's no reason why Windows can "never" reach a similar level of function. Never is a long time...
(p.s. Safari inline spellchecking in HTML forms is a great way NOT to look like a doofus when posting at 3:05 AM!)
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 $.
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.
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.
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.
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 .18) process, and eh voila, PowerPC 970
And will I need a soldering iron or do you think I'll manage with some tape, a conductive ink pen and a sharp knife...?
RMN
~~~