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New imac owner- simply buyer's remorse or huge mistake?


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Just got the latest and best! Imac 27 inch 3.4 Ghz, retina display monitor and 24 G of ram!

 

Cost a small fortune, but the ease and efficiency should pay off in the long run.

 

But now, I am comparing the newest imac system with my old, archaic Vista pc- both running simultaneously. I have DPP running in both, the much older version in the pc, and the last upgrade running on the Imac.

 

My pc monitor blew out btw, so just to get it going again, I bought an old monitor in a yard sale for just one dollar, Works great.

 

I want to see how much faster I can work with image processing in Imac. I plan on getting the Creative Cloud later but first for now, I'll use DPP.

 

Results:  The ancient pc dinosaur is so much faster! Why is that? The image files are the same, I sized the images on the viewing screen to the same size, all variables seem to be the same. Yet, DPP adjustments on the Imac are so much slower. Move the adjustment sliders and there is a frustrating several second delay to see the results on the final image. You think you got the image perfect, but then later as the adjustment results arrive, you realize you don't. Becomes a guessing game. Whereas with the ancient, supposedly sluggish PC, the adjustment results come instantly and seamlessly, smooth all the way with  no guessing.

 

So am I missing something, need to tweak something, or is this an expected characteristic of Imac? 

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Maybe it's DPP and not the iMac thats so slow.

 

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/News/News-Post.aspx?News=11277

 

 

  • DPP 4 is very buggy and its perfomance is unbearably slow. We have experienced multipleprogram crashes. Image adjustments do not update quickly enough. While batch processing images, DPP 4 sometimes becomes unusable in its busy state.
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Sounds like a graphics issue if the sliders are sluggish. There may be a performance tab for allowing GPU access which is not set in the iMac.

 

If you do go CC then graphics enabling will become an even bigger issue for Photoshop

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you may have a memory leak from a programme

 

eg, it states its using xxx MB/GB, but actually the program is buggy and using more, but not reporting it,

also viruses can do this,

 

it basically means, when your doing a task, and its finished, sometime programs manage this badly, and keep hold of the memory instead of releasing back into the shared pool to be available again for another program / task.

 

thats the general issue, and just a suggestion, i have never used a mac.

 

but as many have said, if its under warrenty and help is available, no harm in using it, but it could be software or hardware based. my money is on software, hardware is usually "dumb", either works as should or not at all, its very rare in my experience it is inbetween, and hware is matched quite well these days by the makers.

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Thank you for all the replies.

 

I have concluded the issue (minor as it is, actually) was simply due to DPP software quirkiness. Still a wonderful program now, just my expectations were pretty high. I did see that the navigation pane does react instantly (though it renders so small on the enlarged 27 inch screen) whereas the slider movement results in the full frame image view, whether jpeg or RAW, took about 4 or 5 seconds to show. A little patience needed. 

 

Yet I tried similar adjustments in the iPhoto program included with the iMac, and saw immediate response with the enlarged image. So my fears of thinking sluggish issues might continue to plague me after committing to CC are most probably unwarranted. 

 

In the process, I learned a bunch of other features and techniques anyway, so all for the better.

All this new stuff takes some getting used too.

 

As an aside, I did recently have a chance to fire a few shots with Canon's new 1D X that a friend generously lent me (I held it with both hands at all times).

 

Wow, the results from the technical pov were fantastic ! Absolutely zero noise in the shadows at 800 ISO. Maybe some indications only when the RAW was enlarged to about 400%, and the shadows lightened. 

Only 18 megapixels, so in response to an earlier thread I started, I think the ONLY two variables to consider for technical perfection in 35 digital are lens quality and digital noise, It's not really more megapixels, at least for enlargements BEFORE the point where pixelation may start to become an issue, Thoughts? 

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Once you are on CC, you'll be fine. I switched from PC to iMac years ago, and got hooked. I'm on my 2nd one now, not because the other one failed, but because I wanted the bigger everything.

I don't suffer crashes and freeze ups like I did with the PC. And that last PC was a gaming one with best graphics card and all the stuff to make it fast.

Betty

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I had not realized earlier, but Adobe offers a one month free trial of CC. So I downloaded LR and PS last night, and all runs perfectly.

Good to know, you are in for a treat.  Happy learning curve.  :D

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Once you are on CC, you'll be fine. I switched from PC to iMac years ago, and got hooked. I'm on my 2nd one now, not because the other one failed, but because I wanted the bigger everything.

I don't suffer crashes and freeze ups like I did with the PC. And that last PC was a gaming one with best graphics card and all the stuff to make it fast.

Betty

 

I must be a lucky one. I have a bottom of the line ACER (cost me $349), and once I added another 4GB of RAM (an additional $49) , I have no crash or freeze issues. Those are usually caused by a lack of RAM.  On Sunday I had 32 RAW images loaded into PS without a hitch.  To rationalize spending a couple of grand on a laptop just to process images these days just seems like throwing money away to me.

 

Jill

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you can never have too much ram or storage imo. im guessing everyone knows about storage on here, as we create large files, but just as important is the transfer into programs of them large files.

 

i remember having (first pc), with 16mb of ram and 2.1GB of storage, thinking wow thats lots,

within 2 years i upgraded same pc with 64mb ram and 6gb hdd added.

 

running a pc now with a solid state main drive (windows and progs on it), and large normal (spinning disks) for storage. and 16gb of (fast speed) Ram, all water cooled, and even this is 3 years old

i tend to take the view of, changing out every 3 years (like people do with cars).

 

solid state is really the way forward of fast processing of large files, into the programs, and lots of ram to breath. also looking at the speed of RAM / drives helps too - afterall no good having a fast hard disk if the ram cant load from it fast enough - you create a bottleneck. and vice versa, fast ram but slow to write back to disk storage.

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you can never have too much ram or storage imo. im guessing everyone knows about storage on here, as we create large files, but just as important is the transfer into programs of them large files.

 

i remember having (first pc), with 16mb of ram and 2.1GB of storage, thinking wow thats lots,

within 2 years i upgraded same pc with 64mb ram and 6gb hdd added.

 

running a pc now with a solid state main drive (windows and progs on it), and large normal (spinning disks) for storage. and 16gb of (fast speed) Ram, all water cooled, and even this is 3 years old

i tend to take the view of, changing out every 3 years (like people do with cars).

 

solid state is really the way forward of fast processing of large files, into the programs, and lots of ram to breath. also looking at the speed of RAM / drives helps too - afterall no good having a fast hard disk if the ram cant load from it fast enough - you create a bottleneck. and vice versa, fast ram but slow to write back to disk storage.

 

 

Wow!

 

Not to give away my age but my first "computer" had 64k of RAM.  That's kilobytes, not gigabytes LOL (it was an Atari 800XL with a cassette tape drive).

 

I've learned a way around that replace a computer every three year nonsense....

 

I have a NAS Device I store all of my files on.  Six Drives constantly mirroring each other in stripe configuration mode.  No issues when a drive crashes.

 

I buy the best computer I can afford - and I use it for as long as I can.  My desktop is currently 6 years old and it's just as fast (or faster) than most other items out there.  Last year, I shopped around....couldn't find much improvement so I skipped the upgrade.  If it isn't broken, then no need to fix it.

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going from 64k upwards, good old "moores law" in practice!

 

intel's founder / chief engineer once said he expected number of transistors on a chip to double roughly every 2 years. and so far its still working.

he said this in the 60s i believe.

 

so not long before we are using TB of RAM lol.

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