iMac for prepress

Colin Gilham

Active member
Hi all,

I need to replace our pair of very old Macs as they’re really struggling now. It would help my case for funds greatly if I didn’t need to go for Mac Pros. I’m seeing Imacs more and more in prepress installations and I’m thinking of going for them instead.

We’re doing very little in the way of intensive graphic work these days, mainly it's just production work - preflighting, opening & editing PDFs and the odd bit of Quark/InDesign/Photoshop work. We still want the displays to be relatively colour accurate so would like to profile them.

Anyone have any opinions?

Colin
 
I use an iMac w/ OS 10.5 for prepress for 2 years now and it works (almost) like a charm.

The only production problem I have is that when I'm searching for previous jobs, my finder window occasionally cannot see into the folder copied to our server by another older Mac (one in particular). No permissions warnings, no rhyme or reason. This is a biggie in a production environment.

Our Mac tech found that this was a known problem that would be addressed in the future. Our work-around is to go over to the other Mac and place it into my dropbox from another computer. It only happens occasionally, and we have yet to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

But this iMac is powerful enough to push the multi-tasking to the hilt.
 
I worked for a very large printing corporation, and we have been using imacs corporate wide for the last few years. Ran all major graphic programs, also Prinergy and Nexus. No problems to really speak of.
 
The Imacs should work fine. The only thing you may encounter in the future is the lack of ability to upgrade. Even a low end mac Pro now can be upgraded later to extend the life of the machine. As Adobe "improves" it's programs with more designer friendly functions that will no doubt make use of all of your available hardware the Imac may need to be replaced sooner than the Mac Pro. Short term vs. Long term!
 
I run on an iMac with all the Adobe Products, Pitstop and Prinergy with no problems. We are mostly a PDF workflow shop, so the massive amount of computer power that used to be required to render Photoshop files and other Large Native documents is just not required any more.

I'm still on Leopard so my only caveat with a new iMac is to see if there are any compatibility issues with Snow Leopard. But that seems like a topic for another thread.

Jackie
 
The Imacs should work fine. The only thing you may encounter in the future is the lack of ability to upgrade. Even a low end mac Pro now can be upgraded later to extend the life of the machine. As Adobe "improves" it's programs with more designer friendly functions that will no doubt make use of all of your available hardware the Imac may need to be replaced sooner than the Mac Pro. Short term vs. Long term!

Even with the Mac Pro's your still limited when it comes to the processor... unless they made some big changes I wasn't aware of. The only thing you can really do yourself on the iMac is change the ram yourself. We have a 24 inch iMac prev gen running Snow Leopard, its runs great, no complaints and a nice step up from the aging Dual 2ghz G5. I put a 1 terabyte hard drive in, well my Mac store did that, which should be enough room for the life of this computer. I bought this:

voyagerswitch_q.jpg


Allows me to drop in hard drives as I need for backups or if I need to drop in a hard drive from an older computer. I am very happy with the setup and its performance, I would definitely buy another one. I have an i5 iMac at home and those things are even snappier, I almost want to replace my MBP with it, but I love having a laptop to much.
 
Thanks for all the responses so far.

I'm not too worried about expansion. We've always maxed out our Power Macs in the past so they're as futureproof as poss from the start and that's always served us well.

The display & calibration question seems to be more of a tricky one though. Some think Mac mini + external display (such as NEC) which is better for colour consistency, others are happy with the imac display.

We're not into hardcore colour correction but like any printer when we need colour accuracy we need to know it's there.

Any comments?
 
The iMac monitors are not "high-end", but are serviceable. You can run a second (more upscale) display if you find the need.

We've got a couple of iMacs running for PrePress. They're okay, but I'd rather have Mac Pros. The bus is slower, they don't accept as much RAM, as you indicated the displays aren't top-notch. I'll be replacing these this year (hopefully) and I'll probably go with new iMacs. The new machines are a lot beefier. My only reservation is that glossy display. I have a MacBook and I'm not fond of the glossy display.

So, in short, the iMacs will work - Mac Pros will work better.
 
imac Monitors not good for profiling

imac Monitors not good for profiling

Hi all, Just stumbled upon this forum and thought I would put my 2 pence in. I would not get an iMac if you are looking to get good colour accuracy from the monitor.

The iMacs do not have the abilty to change RGB levels nor contrast using a 3rd party calibrators. i.e eye-one you can only change brightness which isn't much use if you are trying to run to ISO. The main problem is the monitors are far to vibrant and glossy and even using 3rd party software such as shades just doesn't cut it. You can go through the Macs own calibrator application but this is all by eye and obviously isn't accurate.

iMac screens are great for watching movies or viewing your holiday snaps but not colour accuracy for print



If I was in your position I would invest the the Mac Mini and get external monitors.

Erb Digital
 
The iMacs do not have the abilty to change RGB levels nor contrast using a 3rd party calibrators. i.e eye-one you can only change brightness which isn't much use if you are trying to run to ISO.]

No sure this is much different from stand alone Apple Cinema Displays in this regard. I don't have an iMac, but have heard tell that they are on par with ACDs as far as color accuracy, for what that's worth. As far as the ability to change RGB levels, on a typical LCD, the only element for true adjustment is the backlight (via brightness) as they are digital and have no electron guns as in a CRT monitor. Any RGB control is essentially "augmenting" the RGB values sent to the monitor.
 
I am in charge of a small prepress dept. and just traded in our PowerMac G5 for a new iMac 27" this past December. I am running Snow Leopard and it has 8GB of RAM. I can't express enough how this computer is the best computer I have ever used. It is absolutely incredible. I have used both Macs and PCs over the past 15+ years. I don't even think about the performance, it's just fast. Runs all Adobe software perfectly, even Photoshop. I also have Parallels running Windows XP, so I am able to open Word and Publisher files to convert them to PDFs. The screen is actually very accurate to our Canon color copiers and our Ryobi press, no complaints. Upgrading iMac..... we never upgraded the PowerMacs, not sure what the fuss is about. 27" display, 8GB RAM and 2TB of storage should be plenty and the best part is all cost just under $2,500, a lot cheaper than a Mac Pro! Probably the only complaint is that the wireless mouse drains about two AA batteries a month!
 
Hi all, Just stumbled upon this forum and thought I would put my 2 pence in. I would not get an iMac if you are looking to get good colour accuracy from the monitor.

The iMacs do not have the abilty to change RGB levels nor contrast using a 3rd party calibrators. i.e eye-one you can only change brightness which isn't much use if you are trying to run to ISO. The main problem is the monitors are far to vibrant and glossy and even using 3rd party software such as shades just doesn't cut it. You can go through the Macs own calibrator application but this is all by eye and obviously isn't accurate.


The latest iMacs use the same type of S-IPS screen that the current ACDs use. Earlier versions used cheaper TN panels that didn't give the greatest color accuracy.

These screens also work fine with any modern hardware and software calibration package. I've calibrated a bunch with ColorEyes Display, and while they don't stack up to an Eizo they can get pretty close if the glossy screen doesn't bother you. Granted that can be a big issue, though. When calibrating these, does help a lot to turn down the room lighting, since there's an extra layer of glass between the sensor and the panel, which can introduce error.

As meddington mentioned the controls on this or any other DDC monitor are handled digitally, so you don't need to adjust any manual settings.

Shawn
 
Hi all, Just stumbled upon this forum and thought I would put my 2 pence in. I would not get an iMac if you are looking to get good colour accuracy from the monitor.

The iMacs do not have the abilty to change RGB levels nor contrast using a 3rd party calibrators. i.e eye-one you can only change brightness which isn't much use if you are trying to run to ISO. The main problem is the monitors are far to vibrant and glossy and even using 3rd party software such as shades just doesn't cut it. You can go through the Macs own calibrator application but this is all by eye and obviously isn't accurate.

iMac screens are great for watching movies or viewing your holiday snaps but not colour accuracy for print



If I was in your position I would invest the the Mac Mini and get external monitors.

Erb Digital

jrpoole, bang on! I just put my 2c worth (LOL...$2), in here:

http://printplanet.com/forums/color-management/22386-what-best-color-accurate-monitor-out-there/2

Nothing gets me wound up more than people saying what's in an ACD, or an iMac, display-wise. They are, I take it, depending on tear-down info. they've gleaned from the 'net somewhere. Certainly haven't got that info from Apple! And if it were true, Apple could change it on the production line tomorrow...and not have to tell anyone....because they didn't tell any one in the 1st place. Meh.

Get the latest Mini...and a DELL U2410. Get minimum RAM, pec it up to 8GB from OWC, make sure the HDD is 500GB. Spec the CPU up to the faster one when ordering. Period. Or full-stop, as we say here.
 
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We replaced 2 G4s with Mac minis a couple months ago.
No problems running full CS4 suite, just make sure you get at least 4GB RAM.
 
We replaced 2 G4s with Mac minis a couple months ago.
No problems running full CS4 suite, just make sure you get at least 4GB RAM.

I wish they would make a Mac Mini Pro. an i5 chip at least and dedicated video would be a huge hit in my opinion. There is a real gap that needs to be filled between the Mac Pro and the Mini. I currently just us a MacBook pro and plug into an external screen. I dont need a portable laptop as I have an iPad for all that. The price point is better for me with a MacBook pro with the specs I want, the Mac Pro is much to expensive leaving no in between options other then an iMac. I love the iMac, but I have a very nice screen already and dont want that huge thing on my desk. Use a 27 inch i5 iMac at home, just wish the same specs could be had without the screen.
 
I love working on the iMac. I have been using the white 20" model for at least the last five years (2 different companies). I haven't had any issues as far as the software. The only issue I have had is the DVD drive crapped out in the model I am on now. It happens. Other than that, great machine and I really beat it up too.
 

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