Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: Apple, iMac, 24-inch
Categories: Hardware
Display and Graphics
The iMac’s 24” display renders colours very lively offers good contrast. It handles dark tones just as well as lighter, vibrant colours. Subjectively, no colour seems to dominate the others. On paper, the iMac’s large display seems to make it an obvious choice as a Home Theater PC. Indeed, together with Front Row, the Apple makes movie nights a very enjoyable experience. Nonetheless there is some room for improvement.
With its native resolution of 1920 x 1200 the display provides more pixels than would be required for Full-HD. Since the ATI graphics chip also offers hardware accelerated playback of HD movies, the absence of a Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive is a bit of a disappointment. Instead, Apple chose to go with a conventional DVD drive. The problem is that with such a high-res display, standard DVDs are really pushed to their limit where image quality is concerned. Encoding artefacts become glaringly obvious on the large screen. If the movie is encoded well, the image quality is excellent, though.
Using a glossy display is also an ambivalent decision on Apple’s part. The advantage of lively and vibrant colours and high contrasts are partially offset by the distraction of seeing yourself and your surroundings mirrored on the screen, especially in darker scenes. At any rate you’ll have to pay special attention to where you set up the iMac. Definitely avoid having a window or direct light sources at your back, or you will find them reflected on the display’s glossy surface.
Interpolation is also handled quite well by the display. That’s a good thing, too, as the Mobility Radeon 2600 Pro is only able to provide playable frame rates at lower resolutions. On the other hand, the iMac was never designed or advertised as a gaming machine, which is borne out by a 3DMark ’06 score of 4546 at 1024 x 768 pixels. Still, at this price point we can’t help but feel that a brawnier graphics solution wouldn’t have been too much to expect. Rumour has it that new Penryn-based iMacs aren’t too far off. With any luck, they’ll also bring Apple’s desktop computer a GPU upgrade. Then again, Apple has a reputation for being especially, let’s say, “conservative” in their choice of graphics chips.
The large display offers an average brightness of 307 cd/m². Subjectively, the distribution of brightness is quite good. The sole exception is a distractingly bright spot at the bottom right corner of the screen where the backlight bleeds through. This is especially apparent in very dark scenes. Possibly, this is an idiosyncrasy of our review sample, though. We measured the black level to be 0.55 cd/m² at full brightness.
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Heesh, you can keep your £1,149.00, I'll spend it on two faster pcs instead...
rtfm,
You're not the target market. iMacs are not for gamers who want a big noisy box that you can put great honkin video cards into - they're for people who want a silent, slim computer that won't look out of place on the coffee table in the lounge "that just works". Like a laptop, you can?t upgrade the video card or swap the internal screen or CPU, but like a laptop, you *can* upgrade the internal HD or RAM, plug in Firewire or USB external drives, connect an external screen as big as you like etc.
We have the 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM 24 incher iMac with 3 EyeTV digital TV tuners in our lounge acting as our home media centre with the optical audio-out plugged into our home theatre sound system and data projector for when we have larger groups watching movies and it works a treat.
For those who are in this demographic, compare the iMac to other PCs in the same form factor - the Del XPS One or the Gateway One or the Sony VAIO LT19U and it comes in cheaper, faster and better looking and with the ability to run Windows and Mac OS X natively and it?s not a bad choice.
Here's a classic quote from Cnet about the Dell XPS One vs the iMac:
"You know your performance is in trouble when your gaming scores are slower than a Mac's. But on every test, from music encoding to photo editing to multitasking, the XPS One falls behind the iMac that costs $750 less."
Horses for courses and each to his or her own.
-Mart
simple equation live on true to a next generation of apple produects.
Overprice + underspec = rip off crappy products
+if you want apple media centre then why wouldnt you get a Mac Mini or Apple TV and hook it up to a TV designed to be a TV, on the grpund that the apple screen would poudce a high enough contrast ration. Althoguh i would still get a Vista Box with Media Centre (or Myth TV with Linux
and keep saving money.
PC users when are you going to understand; MAC is a whole package, You got the beautiful operating system, you got well design pieces of hardware with features that PC vendors don't even think of implementing into there system. You may said but Mac users don't have the advantages of upgrading to the latest hardware but I will tell you a prefer a video card with a well written driver, that it would let me play the game without any glitches; you can keep your latest hardware with half cook drivers that all it will give you is a headache.
Why do you think XP and Vista run so smooth on MAC hardware.... This is something for PC users to think about.
I got a PC at home and a Mac and let me tell you life is soooo much easier with a MAC.
I think I'll frame these comments, they illustrate how hard it is to roll square rocks. The PC guys are right, from their point of view. Macs are more expensive than a 4 fan beige box and the $ is their priority. Mac guys have their priority; design, usability and silence are valid priorities. This isn't team sports, people. Both sides manage sound like cranky old a$$.
It’s known that if you pay a Mac price for PC parts you will end up with a better PC system. Design / Silent has its price.
And as for usability – you’re talking about operating system Vs operating system.
I like mine with a little less DRM. So neither win. And if you don't know what DRM is then go learn.
1. I like Macs, but not the price.
2. (XP) I’ve no love for it; but it pays the bills.
3. Ubuntu, I love the free price. Not ready for prime time.
I find it amusing that a mac fanboy has taken the time to tell me that apple "just works" as opposed to the big, nasty noisy PC (because they're all like that kids).
Well that's not been my experience. Try and connect to a network printer on a mac, just try it... then learn how to re-write FreeBSD just to get it working, even HP's awful PC software does a better job. Try using an Outlook archive, ooops you can't. Try playing a game that looks like it was made in the last ten years, nothing. Try using around 90% of the software on the market today...
If you're the sort of person who hasn't got requirements above reading a website, more money than sense and have decisions easily swayed by marketing then buy a mac be become part of the moron club.
Then spend your time trying to convert others, hopefully this will give you more chance of finding someone out there who you can help you use your 'computer', you know, for when you finally get around to writing that novel you've been telling the girls about (they don't believe you by the way).
i dont see the arguement. mac=nice looking, works out of the box...
pc=(can be)nice looking, works out of the box, plays games+hd video.
to me, a mac is more of a status icon (to some anyway) and a pc is something that does the job. you can get pc's that "just work", and likewise i know a family friend who has had a terrible experience with his 24" imac.
personally i dont see the problem with having a simple cable runnning from a quiet box under my table (a pc) to my screen, its just not that big a deal. my pc is also sufficiently good looking and unobtrusive that i would put it in my living room. so for me, the mac has absolutely no plus points. however...since i do lots of audio work, maybe a mac pro and pro-tools hd would be attractive, but again, mac pro is basically just a pc with osx (not all in one, nice and powerful, does what i want) so there is not much there either...
wow a low end pc for £1,149.00
I agree with some of the comments... People that are obsess with PC and can't see anything out they need to open there eyes these are new days.
People are happy to pay more for a well design piece of hardware.. Anyway is not all about the hardware is the whole package that make Mac a good system.. Software and hardware go hand in hand.
read this article it may change your mind.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cu [...] pple.ars/1
I cant believe there are people out there that still dont get this.... MAC HARDWARE ISN'T BETTER THAN PC HARDWARE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!
Both PC's and Mac's get the same ram the same motherboards and now they even use the same damned processors, EVERYTHING and i mean everything is the god damn same except for the freaking case it goes in and what OS it runs, so people who dont wanna play games can get a mac it'll make no difference and people who get a PC can pretty much do everything, yeah it doesnt have some of the software but boooohooooo cry it off and go find 1 of the hundreds of versions of the same software...this isn't about which side is better anymore, its just who has the bigger ego...
Regarding cost, remember PC's are worth very little second hand. Buy an iMac, sell it in 3 year's time and you've got a large chunk of cash towards a new one.
To use a car term, PC's are generally 'depreciation disasters' and the only way to avoid losing money is to upgrade the mobo, CPU, memory and GPU every couple of years. Fine for Tom's Hardware readers, but not for a large chunk of the PC market.
I always find it amusing that you mac owners think PC's come in a build it yourself kit or somthing without working video drivers.
"Why do you think XP and Vista run so smooth on MAC hardware.... This is something for PC users to think about"
er yeah let me think about that.. er mabey it is because a Mac is basicly entirely PC hardware, in a different BOX. Hell I got OS X booting on my PC for a laugh once.