Photography By Christos Blog

I have been using the new 2.4 Ghz 24″ iMac for over two weeks now and I must admit, I’m really liking it. Now the reason why I switched to a Mac is rather very simple, after spending close to 20 years with Microsoft, I started with Windows for Workgroups I have grown very tired of it and bored. I needed something to challenge me, it’s kinda like photography, if you do the same thing over and over again you get bored and the inspiration is gone. Simple enough reason for me to change. Plus I HATE Vista it’s such a hog……..
I will be giving you my view regarding the Mac so just keep in mind that I’m not a technical writer, which is a good thing but I’m sure I may not be able to get all my points across. So here are my findings regarding the new 24” iMac.

Installation
My iMac came installed with Tiger on it, I don’t remember the actual version number and the CD with Leopard was in the box. I installed Tiger and downloaded all the updates, and then I proceeded to install Leopard. Everything was going well until the last reboot where I had to login again. And guess what I experienced the same issue that many people have which was you lose your admin privileges and the root account password was reset. So that means I wasn’t able to login, and yes this is documented by Apple. No big deal for me since I didn’t have any data that I needed. I just proceeded in re-installing straight to Leopard and everything was fine. Here is a link with the issues many users have experienced during the upgrade, note that many of them have updates available, Leopard install issues and resolutions.

Networking
This was a breeze to setup and get working, well to a certain extent. For some reason my iMac wasn’t able to obtain an IP address from my broadband router. Now being the genius that I am I didn’t spend that much time in trying to get it to work. I went to the Linksys site to see if my broadband router was compatible with my new sweet iMac, it wasn’t. No big deal for me, since my router was about 5 years old and on it’s way out, I had to reset the router at least once a day to get it working on my Windows machine, so another trip to the computer store. I ended purchasing a wireless D-Link router that was compatible, once I set up the router itself my new iMac obtained an IP and surfing I went. Cool.

Printing.
No go here My HP Laserjet 1020 is not compatible, so I have to go out and buy a new printer.

Hardware:
The Screen. Ok on many photography forums, photographers seem to have a love hate relationship with the new glossy iMac screens. This is a personal preference that you just may have to visit an Apple store to see for yourself. Me personally I don’t mind since I don’t have a large window directly behind me where I edit so the reflectivenes is minimal.
But the screen is BRIGHT holy cow is it bright even if you lower the brightness to its lowest setting it is still way to bright for photo editing, but it sure rocks for an average user. I do recommend that you go download this little utility called Shades, its free software that lowers the screen brightness even further. Now that solved the brightness problem.
The keyboard. This new keyboard takes some getting used too, it feels like a large laptop keyboard. So if you like laptop keyboards, you will like the new iMac one. But the spacing of the keys feels weird and what I have noticed is an increase in spelling errors, and god knows I make enough of them already.

Memory, I purchased my new Mac with the default memory of 1GB, I wanted to upgrade the memory to the maximum allowed of 4GB but Apple wanted $850.00 for the memory, that is insane. I ended up purchasing the memory from Crucial for about $200.00 including shipping.

Let’s talk about photo editing here.
Between the screen brightness and how contrasty (sp) the screen is I thought I would have a problem with editing but in reality I got used to it very quickly. After I calibrated my monitor, I compared some of my sample prints to what the jpegs look like on screen and they are pretty much a match. So off to edit an entire event I went, since I shoot in jpeg and use Lightroom for about 95% of my editing I just kept an eye on the histogram for exposure and brightness. For contrast I bumped it up enough until it looked like it was too much. I sent the entire proof order to get printed and when I received the proofs back I was very pleased with the results. Now if you are doing super critical color corrections, this iMac is not for you, but on the other hand if your doing that level of color correcting you wouldn’t even be looking at an iMac.

Productivity.
The last ties I have to Microsoft now are that I use Office 2004 for Mac overall this was very easy getting used to since most of the menus are pretty much the same. The default OS installation has a trial of Office so I recommend you try before you buy, otherwise go with Pages and Numbers, it’s cheaper. As a note my sister purchased the student teacher edition since she is a student and gave it to me as a gift. You can review my previous post on how I moved my mail to Entourage, ps the only WTF with Entourage is that you are not able to select a word in an email and make it into a hyperlink, what the hell they were thinking. But it does auto create full links if you post the full URL.

My conclusions:
Ok this post is getting longer then what I wanted so let me wrap it up, but I also have a lot more to say so I wont take any more of your time. Overall I’m very exited about the switch and I’m really liking it. So if you are considering a Mac I say go for it, it’s fun. In today’s technological world, I can see why a Mac can really organize your entire digital life, between pictures, video and music everything is already there and at you finger tips. Want to create a cool slideshow go right ahead, want to edit a DVD with your recent holiday, go ahead it’s in their, want to manage you images go ahead it’s in their. Ok about managing pictures I don’t use iPhoto yet expect for family snapshots, I use Photo Mechanic, remember I have different needs.

A couple of more items that may interest you without going into details,
Burning software for a Mac Toast
Data replication and synchronization for a Mac.

If anyone has any particular questions, just send me an e-mail.

Christos