The Apple thread

[Cloudane]

Yeah it's not bad. It's just annoying with very faded colours which can be visible at the top of the screen and white at the bottom, or with photos of sunsets etc it can be lighter or darker by a couple of hours depending on the angle you view the LCD at (i.e. the exact height of your chair and whether you slouch) and whether the window is towards the top or bottom of the screen.

Most people seem to live with it... it's just a warning that if you notice such things, it will annoy the hell out of you.

[matt]

I saw what I think was this phenomeon on the 20" - but are there any photos for me to confirm?

The Air seemed underpowered to me, and the ramp up the other units in increasing speed was noticeable as I stepped through them all in speed order. The Mac Pro was understandably almost instantaneous. Didn't try the MacBook Pro as it's not even on my radar, even though I'd quite like to streamline my setup to something a little smaller than my G5 Tower.

So, my current preference is still imac but the 24" is just too big for me, so I was sort of hoping that the screen issue had been addressed. If it hasn't, then what about me saving some money and buying a fully spec'd "last years model" at a reduced rate or even second hand?

What's the benefits of these CPUs?

ps: I was using the Apple standard iPhoto demonstration photo set to do my testing. Scrolling the events thumbnail window as quickly as possible, scrolling to a specific event, across to a specific photo and then into that photo. The time it took to decode the 7.4MB jpg varied quite a lot.

[skab]

TN panel - 6 bits per pixel

TN panels are crappy enough and then they even "top" it by using a 6bit-panel? Holy fuck, how did that happen? This was one of the reasons I didn't buy an LCD till 2001, I wanted a panel with wide viewing angle and no less than 8bit/px colour resolution, which wasn't a given back then. I didn't expect those dark days to come back, but they are still/again using crap panels like that?

[Cloudane]

Yes, and this is Apple, who are supposed to be known for high quality. Sad isn't it

They're currently undergoing class action for claiming it's capable of "millions" of colours.

I love most of their hardware, and their support, but rather dislike their business practices.

[matt]

Is there any confirmation the 20" iMac are still using 6-bit panels?

Actually, is there any way to see which of their products use 6-bit panels?

[Cloudane]

I've yet to find any concrete evidence either way. People are 'saying' it's still the 6-bit TN though.

There's a long realist-vs-fanboy debate here, but nobody's answered the question yet:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=477116

[matt]

How do you test?

I'm quite happy to go to the store and run a test if that'll get to the bottom of it!

[tufty]

How do you test?

I'm quite happy to go to the store and run a test if that'll get to the bottom of it!

You open the machine, tear it down to the LCD panel, note the manufacturer's reference, and go check from the datasheet. The geniuses might be a little annoyed at that kind of behaviour.

I think it's pretty much a taken that the 20" has a 6+2 bit display, capable of 16.2 million colours through dithering as opposed to an 8 bit display capable of 16.7 million colours from the get-go. 16.2 million colours, no matter how it's produced, is "millions", which means that the class action suit is (quite rightly) liable to founder. It's a low end machine, and has a lower-cost panel in it to keep prices low and margins high.

Simon

[Kemper_Boyd]

Forget the hardware.

Try this URL in the store. You can examine the display quality.
But don't assume that 8 bit is always better than 6 bit. It's not
that simple. A well calibrated, fast 6 bit TN panel with effective
temporal dithering can be very good.

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

[Cloudane]

Forget the hardware.

Try this URL in the store. You can examine the display quality.
But don't assume that 8 bit is always better than 6 bit. It's not
that simple. A well calibrated, fast 6 bit TN panel with effective
temporal dithering can be very good.

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Yep that's a good site. I wouldn't worry too much about the 6-bit thing, but the major issue is the gradient. Who knows, they might have fixed it by now... if you want a quick check go to the single page version on that site and scroll down to the full screen grey, purple and blue. If it's anything like mine you will see the gradient right away. It's a big slap to the face style gradient on my Mac, and if I didn't know better I'd genuinely believe the original image was a gradient and not a solid colour.

Even my LCD at work, which is cheap/crap (cheapest they could get hold of, as per usual) doesn't particularly suffer from it, although the purple one is a bit more blue towards the top and a bit ruddier towards the bottom, and the 'lagom' test goes from green to yellow. This is the kind of thing that makes life difficult if you're trying to design a full screen interface or website or something with subtle colours.

TBH I think it's more of a manufacturing issue - common to that model - which causes some nasty backlight bleeding, rather than the much more subtle nature of TN panel viewing angles. I say this because when Windows (spit) is booting up and at the 'black screen' logo there is a heck of a lot of glowing and non-blackness going on towards the bottom of the screen. I've used *loads* of TN displays, and none of them look as horrific as the iMac 20". Who knows, they may have resolved the issue by now... I might even take mine in sometime...

[matt]

Anybody got a Time Capsule?

Thoughts?

[WiteWulf]

We got a couple to play with at work. It does exactly what it says on the tin wrt backups and 802.11n performance is excellent with Apple hardware but terrible with other vendors' kit. Backups start to get very slow when you've got more than 2 users trying to use it at the same time, though. If you want a workgroup solution for backing up Macs it's worth noting that you can share a folder or drive on a machine running Leopard server as a Time Machine drive.

[amanset]

We got a couple to play with at work. It does exactly what it says on the tin wrt backups and 802.11n performance is excellent with Apple hardware but terrible with other vendors' kit. Backups start to get very slow when you've got more than 2 users trying to use it at the same time, though. If you want a workgroup solution for backing up Macs it's worth noting that you can share a folder or drive on a machine running Leopard server as a Time Machine drive.

It doesn't need to be Leopard server. I have vanilla Leopard on my iMac and my iBook and the iBook happily backs up to the USB drive connected to the iMac.

[WiteWulf]

Yeah, you can do that but it's not quite the same. Leopard Server allows you to share a folder on a drive as a Time Machine volume rather than having to use a whole drive and sharing it as normal Leopard does.

[amanset]

Yeah, you can do that but it's not quite the same. Leopard Server allows you to share a folder on a drive as a Time Machine volume rather than having to use a whole drive and sharing it as normal Leopard does.

Ah I see.

Well they do recommend that the drive is dedicated to Time Machine ...