iMac for prepress

[Colin Gilham]

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

[rath307]

We have 4 IMacs in production now. No issues as of late.

[mmarkidi]

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.

[Flexo Grunt]

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.

[jcone18]

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!

[Jackie]

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

[wonderings]

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:



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.

[Colin Gilham]

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?

[rich apollo]

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.

[jrpoole]

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