Apple’s brand new Retina 5K display shows seven times more detail than 1080p HD, and nearly three times more than a 15in Retina MacBook Pro. And it comes with a free iMac.
It’s true: when you look at the prices emerging for other makers’ 5K monitors, they’re similar to what Apple is charging for the new 5K iMac. That’s not to say it’s cheap; but its apparent £550 premium over the basic 27in model is only £240 once you adjust all the specifications to match (even then, the 5K has a slightly faster CPU).
And when you see this screen, £240 is suddenly not going to seem like a lot of money. The obvious question about the Retina display, with its fourfold increase in pixel count, is: can you tell the difference? We saw it for the first time, at Apple’s invitation, in the new conferencing annexe to the Apple Store on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, which is as good a place as any to see a thing but offered no previous Macs to compare with. Even so: yes, we could see the difference. Such a huge display with such a complete absence of pixellation is quite something to behold.
IT’S NOT JUST the incredibly fine dot pitch, either. Thanks to a new panel construction, the image is right there, laminated to the other side of the wafer-thin protective glass. You can very nearly touch it. And thanks to a plasma deposition process more typical of camera lenses than monitors, the surface is less reflective; this is still not a matt screen, but the mirror effect is noticeably less distracting.
To further boost the sense of hyperreality, the LCD has even deeper blacks and better colour. Our colleagues in the PC Pro labs measured its gamut at a decent 99.5% of sRGB (and Apple says every unit is calibrated to ensure accuracy). Contrast, at 1,197:1, beat the existing 27in by 33%, and brightness exceeded many TVs, let alone monitors, at 446cd/m2. Here, though, a concern was raised.
A high-end screen will deviate no more than 2-5% in brightness across its area. PC Pro’s 5K iMac was around 10% dimmer at the left and right than in the middle. That means the same tone would look slightly different depending on its screen position. Nothing you’d notice in general use, and it might settle down over time, but for colour-critical photo or video work it seems as if it could be better.
Then again… could it? Standard 27in screens of higher quality than Apple’s start at over £1,000; the top graphics brands haven’t released 5K units yet, but when they do, the prices will make the 5K iMac look like an impulse buy. For the money, this screen is going to make the vast majority of creative pros very happy indeed.
APPLE HAS CHOSEN not to give the groundbreaking 5K a brand new case, instead retaining the sculptural 2012 design, with its gracefully bulging rear and knife-edge profile. Except for the screen and upgraded Thunderbolt ports, this is essentially the same machine as the regular 27in iMac, which remains on sale from £1,449.
CPU speeds differ, though, and the standard iMacs have NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics, while the 5K model uses AMD’s Radeon R9. In both cases, as usual, Apple has chosen the mobile ‘M’ variants, which trade some performance for lower power draw and heat.
Although you might guess the 5K screen would need a different class of GPU, these NVIDIA and AMD parts are rivals in a roughly similar price and performance bracket. It’s not clear if Apple’s reason for going with AMD is technical or commercial. The GPUs in the Mac Pro are also from AMD.
Apple provided us with a 5K iMac in its base configuration for testing. This had a 3.5GHz quad-core Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB Fusion Drive. A Core i5 is underwhelming in a machine at this price, the first hint that the base configuration, despite its attractive price tag, may not be the one you should buy.
Still, the iMac tore through most of our tests. In Final Cut Pro X, our Core i7 Retina MacBook Pro transcoded a 4K project for upload to YouTube in one hour, 22 minutes and 45 seconds (marginally faster than a Mac Pro, a quirk we’ve noted before). The iMac beat it by 1 min 29 secs.
HandBrake is an app that makes intensive use of available CPU cores to transcode video, so here the 8- and 12-core Mac Pros beat all comers. But the Retina iMac’s time was almost identical to the quad-core Mac Pro, whose Xeon chip has a 0.2GHz faster clock speed than the iMac’s Core i5.
In Cinebench’s OpenGL graphics test, the iMac again beat the Mac Pro. But Cinebench hadn’t been updated for the Mac Pro’s dual graphics cards. Although a Mac Pro with two D700 GPUs managed 87.7 frames per second and the iMac’s Radeon R9 M290X 91fps, in the latest apps you’d get better results from the Pro.
The 5K iMac’s AMD Radeon R9 GPU marginally improved on the GeForce GTX 775M in last year’s best off-theshelf 27in iMac, which rendered at 88.4fps, but fell behind the 780M, that model’s top build-to-order option, which hit 104.3fps. Specifying the M295X GPU for an extra £200 should push the 5K back up there, but we have still to test that option.
14 million pixels add up to a lot more work for the GPU in all tasks. Yet we found the base 5K iMac very responsive. Even with Final Cut showing a 4K project at 100% (leaving enough space for editing tools, though you’d still want a second screen for a heavily populated timeline), the Viewer updated quickly as we scrubbed through, and there was only a small delay when we added more than a handful of effects.
Responsiveness is helped by the inclusion of a Fusion Drive as standard. Unchanged in specification since its introduction in 2012, this consists of a meagre 128GB of fast flash memory (also known as a solid state drive, or SSD) linked to a hard drive; the first files you store go on the SSD, and once it gets near capacity, OS X automatically manages what gets relegated to the slower HD.
A machine aimed at creative pros, however, is likely to have more than 128GB thrown at it straight away, reducing the benefit. If you’re in the habit of storing your work on fast external drives, and only system essentials on your internal, that’ll help; but then you might do even better with the 256GB pure SSD option, at the same price. Doubling that adds £240.
What has changed since 2012 is Apple’s switch to a PCI Express (PCIe) connection for the flash memory, which explains the incredibly fast transfer rates in our storage tests.
What you Won’t be doing at 5K resolution is playing games. As amazing as that would look, it’s not viable yet; even if you could get a playable frame rate in visually rich games like 2013’s Tomb Raider (you can’t), you wouldn’t see great results, because the textures in most games aren’t made for this resolution.
When we set Tomb Raider to its Low quality preset and ran it at the 5K iMac’s native 5120 × 2800 pixels, the maximum and average frame rates reported by its own benchmark were just 26.4 and 19.2fps. Reducing the resolution to 3200 × 1800 boosted the minimum frame rate to 34.4, over the accepted comfort threshold of 30fps. Raising the quality to Normal at this resolution dropped the minimum back to 25.5fps and the average to 36.
At 2560 × 1440 – standard 27in iMac resolution, using four of the 5K’s pixels for every one in the game – we got 40fps minimum and an average of 53.9fps, the sort of rate at which a game feels fluid. Even when we raised all other graphics settings to maximum, the frame rate held above 30fps, with an average of 42.8.
When ordering, you can upgrade from the 3.4GHz i5 to a 4.0GHz i7 CPU and from an M290X with 2GB to an M295X with 4GB of video RAM, each for £200. We haven’t yet been able to test the benefits. As with previous top-end iMacs, creative power users will want both. While the i5 is more adequate than we expected, the i7 is the obvious allround upgrade.
Who needs 5K? You know, cramming a 4K preview and timeline into one screen (one that’s not quite up to grading quality at that) maybe isn’t the perfect NLE setup. But this machine does have compelling appeal for video editors. More broadly, you get greater clarity in any task, app support permitting.
With 14 megapixels on screen at once, Photoshop feels quite different. Super-fine type rendering brings InDesign pages closer to the real thing. The iMac, overall, is an even greater joy to use.