“It is practically as bright (and more contrasty) than any of the previous iMacs—even Cinema Displays—and it looks astounding. It’s LED-driven so it comes to full luminescence immediately and takes up less power. It also has better side-to-side viewing angle as an IPS tech monitor; like the iMac 24 before it, it goes 178 degrees without much change in color accuracy or brightness. And here’s the kicker: Although it has 19% more area of LCD than the old 24-incher, it has an astounding 60% more pixels. That makes it more pixel dense than any of the Cinema Displays at 109ppi. And with a 2560×1440 resolution it has 90% of the dot count of a 30-inch cinema display. All these stats are great. They sound great, and they make for a powerful picture,” Lam reports.
Lam reports, “The iMac I’m testing is a 3.06GHz Core2Duo processor with 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 4670 graphics. Those are decent parts but not the highest-end quad-core i5/i7 chips or ATI Radeon 4850 GPU that will ship in iMacs in November. More importantly, the machine I have here that is shipping now is about on par with higher-end, custom-order machines from the last generation.”
Much more in the full review here.
Read the full review… It’s uneven
brightness in some areas! Not great news for an LED display
WANT.
Very soon.
@ Mark – You mean this paragraph?
I will feel guilty for mentioning this, because it’s ever so slight, but I’ll feel more guilty if I don’t mentioning it to you: The screen, when it’s white, has the tiniest bit of blotchiness to it. The backlighting is slightly uneven in my model. It had no impact on viewing quality once the screen was filled with an image other than one of pure white, so don’t sweat it.
Seems you misrepresented what he had to say there.
Ya still an issue when you think about it. It should be even as it is LED backlight.
Actually, lighting uniformity is extremely difficult to achieve on LED-backlit displays. The good news is, the discrepancies generally aren’t noticeable under normal usage conditions.
Contrasty?
I just bought and set up my new 27″ iMac. It will blow your mind, how beautiful the display looks when the startup ‘Welcome” presentation in all the languages of the world starts playing. Just beautiful. It mowed me down.
Nothing beats a Mac.
Nothing.
And it’s snappy too!
Give your FUD another retort. Surely you have something more to say about the whiteness issue. Or is recess over?
I have this iMac and it does show some very light gray blotchiness in the lower quarter of the screen on the white start up part. Once it gets past the white screen, the blotchiness disappears. I was unable to see it at any other times (and I tried). The display is absolutely gorgeous. I do end up using the magnification a lot because web page text gets smaller with all those extra pixels.
Maybe these monitors are LED edge lit. This is something I recently heard about in LCD TVs. I always thought the LEDs covered the back of the LCD panel, but apparently they do not in the edge lit type. I’ve heard that this type of TV can exhibit that unevenness in certain circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED-backlit_LCD_television
Racists! Always blaming whitey for being blotchy! I’m never coming back to MDN again!
I mean it!!!
What is with the push for brighter, brightest screens?
Because that can’t be good for your eyes. Burning a hole in your retina…
Nerds blinded by specs. Nerds = Bipolarity.
@ Yous,
Once the retinas are gone, glossy is no longer an issue.
I’m hoping that the i7 machines are terrific. i’d like that. . . . I ordered one yesterday.
Not having to buy a Mac Pro means I’ll be able to buy my first laptop sooner. Come on Intel, release those 32 nm. Nehalem mobile chips, and cheaper SSDs! Now, . . . do I want to go with the gorgeous little 13 inch MacBook Pro, or do I opt for more screen, GPU, processor and RAM?
What an awful choice to have to make!
Then again there’s the iPhone. I really don’t use a cell-phone that much, but there’s just so much more available on the iPhone.
Ordered both a 27 inch i7 Quad core, and a 13″ MBP…
Seems I no longer need to go with a tower.
Turning my dual 2.7 GHz G5 Power Mac into a home media server.
yippee!
The new iMacs use IPS technology. It pushes more light through the display, using more electrical power (so you won’t see this on the laptops; you’d need to get the iMac to experience the gorgeous new display).
The benefit of IPS is that you can have wider viewing angles because the liquid crystals are aligned in a more effective pattern for viewing.
Went and saw the new 27″ machine at Best Buy. Kinda disappointed. The display was bright, no doubt. It’s probably a function of that space, but the glare factor is pretty high on the glossy screen. I wasn’t necessarily a matte proponent before, but in a place with lighting like that, it’s mighty distracting.
And I looked at the new Magic Mouse. Epic fail. May be the worst mouse in the history of the concept. It’s too flat, the whole-body click is too light (just trying to rest a hand on it clicks it, and its too long to not rest your hand). I had hopes for the multi-touch mouse. I still do. I’m going to lay money on it that Microsoft or Logitech gets it right (just like they did the multi-button mouse). It may sound like a good idea to get rid of all the buttons, but in fact the button is too good, too right to give up for a concept. Touch pads can be okay for replacing a few functions, but not all of them.
Apple’s such a conundrum – they do some things so well, and some things just miss the mark.
@ Grrilla
I do hope you are wrong, but you are entitled to your opinion. I see mouse choices as being very personal so others may love it.