Monitor like an iMac‘s?
tsroemi
Posts: 2,896
Hi all, I‘m not sure if this is the right forum or if I should be posting in the technical thread so mods please correct if necessary! - I‘m looking for help with choosing a monitor to connect my eGPU to. The thing is, I worked with DS on an iMac almost the whole of this year, and while I am now finally fed up with the tedious Mac / iRay issues and have moved all things 3d to my Windows laptop which I can use with an NVidia eGPU, I‘m still madly in love with that monitor of the iMac. It is just so brilliant in my opinion, although it‘s not even the Retina version, it was a dream looking at really. So I would very much want something like that to connect to my Windows setup now. Unfortunately, my iMac is not one of those that can be set up as an external monitor, so I don‘t have that option.
So my question is to those who know both iMacs and Windows PCs: Which monitor(s) are the most alike the iMac‘s? I am using a 2015 iMac I think, with the smaller 21.5 monitor, no Retina, just 4k I reckon. Any help would really be greatly appreciated!
Thanks, Tina
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Comments
Plenty of 4K monitors to choose from. Plenty of reviews of same. Google is your friend.
No, I must have gotten this across totally wrong, sorry - of course I know how to find any one 4k monitor online or in the store, that‘s not what this is about. I‘m looking for a monitor with the same color brilliance as the iMac, I‘m not sure which property this is technically related to. Maybe it‘s due to the material of which the screen is made or something like that, I really don‘t know unfortunately. That‘s why I‘m asking for help, see. I just know that the iMac‘s monitor has an amazing depth and luminance that i have not seen in any monitor in the store yet, no matter which resolution.
It's probably shockingly pricy, but Apple does make an external monitor. It's a 32-inch one, and Retina, so I suspect it would be very pricy indeed.
The Apple site also seems to be offering a 27-inch LG monitor, so that line might be worth checking out as well.
Color brilliance is not something for which there is a metric. That's subjective. IMO the Mac displays are shockingly bad for the prices but I see what actual professional displays look like when I get them for customers.
If you want a 4k display with some high percentage coverage of the sRGB then you can find that. If you want a specific pixel density you can easily find that (the Retina branding was originally just about an HD display with a high pixel density but that was back when HD displays were a new thing). About the only thing you will struggle to find is the weird resolution, "5k", that Apple has been selling.
So figure out what you really mean and then you can do your shopping as an informed consumer. That will help you cut the cord to Apple once and for all.
Thanks for the info! I've seen the LG monitor and now I'm reading that LG is apparently actually building Apple's displays. However, they seem to be very specifically designed for Apple. For the LG on the website, there is no mentioning at all that it would work as intended with a Windows PC, so I'm a bit hesitant. Price is hefty as well ...
The weird thing is, I'm seeing quite a few requests like mine online - Where can I get a monitor like the iMac's for Windows, basically - and a lot of answers, but nobody seems to be able to pinpoint down the exact specifics that make the iMac monitor look so pleasing. And again, I'm not even talking about the Retina and 5k one, just the 'basic' 4k version of 2015. It seems to be a mixture of all sorts of things rather.
Maybe that's the problem really. I actually AM an informed consumer, see, I've looked at literally dozens of displays, compared specs etc., but like I posted above, no one seems to be quite able to pinpoint the specific effect that I - and a lot of other people on the web - are looking for. This is why I came here, because I was hoping there might be someone with experience working with both iMac and Windows here, who maybe just happened to have stumbled over a display that is alike the iMac's.
By the way, it's actually not quite so 'shockingly bad', neither the screen nor the computer as a whole - that entirely depends on what you are looking for. For me, with its in-built Iris graphics, it was doing a better and faster job at DAZ stills rendering with the CPU and also at the Iray preview then my Windows laptop with Intel HD, but a much better CPU and double the RAM does now. I would have loved to stay on the Mac and use my eGPU from there, it's just that Apple, NVidia and DAZ as well are for whatever reason sworn to prevent just that ;-)
Beats me but this reviewer points out some stuff you may know. My Mac Mini languishes in its box. So I can't tell you anything.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/20678597/lg-ultrafine-4k-2019-mac-monitor-review-price-specs-features
Thanks, that was real helpful! I hadn't seen that specific review before, only lots of rather negative (but less clear) comments on the LG. Looks like it's not a good choice all in all ... Oh blasted, why must Apple make such beautiful hardware and then prevent us from using it with the beautiful software that we want to use? If only the target display mode was working on my iMac, then there wouldn't be any problem at all. But that's been discontinued, probably because it was just a tad too useful ...
At the prices Apple charges shockingly bad was me being nice. A 27" 4k IPS display for $700? I'm, not going to waste time looking up the real stats but the only input is USB C and its an IPS panel and its not HDR cert of any kind. At that size and cost you can certainly get better than that. As a matter of fact its hard to find a 27" ips at $700 to compare it to. You're of course welcome to search yourself and see for yourself.
Apple does not have some secret sauce they're not sharing with the rest of the world. They don'tt make any hardware of any kind. They have other companies make everything they sell. Their monitors are all made by companies like LG (LG might make all of their monitors I cannot be bothered to verify) and they are not in any way special. If you just find out what it is you want you can buy it.
As to comparing a thin and light laptop to another thin and light for job neither is suited for does not prove a thing except that you were using HW unsuited for the job.
BTW you are apparently comparing a newer Intel laptop, the Xe graphics one, against an older Intel laptop, the HD graphics one. How is that even a fair comparison? Are you under the impression that "Iris" graphics is an Apple thing? Just because Apple slaps a MacBook logo on the outside doesn't change the hardware on the inside. A Macbook is an Intel laptop.
CNet ran a review titled "Apple Pro Display XDR: Why $5,000 is an insanely good deal and could change our future screens". So, the answer to is it worth it comes out as, compared to what?
I'd also like to find a monitor that looked as good as the old Apple Cinema displays and the iMacs I've used. I didn't even need 4K. The low-end 21.5" iMac I used at work *might* have been 4K but I retired in Feb and can't check. I haven't looked in a while but when I did nothing came close. The monitors others raved about looked like crap when I saw them in person. I chalked it up to three things hampering my efforts: (1) I was comparing the expensive Apple monitors to much less expensive third-party monitors; (2) the iMac monitors had glass between the panel and the viewer while, I believe, the competition I looked at all used some kind of plastic; (3) I believe that Apple didn't (doesn't?) use an anti-glare coating on their iMacs. Many people really hated the glare you'd get on them. Personally, I'll take that glare (and be careful with my lighting) if that's what it takes to get a display that looks that good.
I wouldn't mind seeing a short list of recommendations that I could try to look at after the current plague is over.
You're being quite aggressive here, don't you think? Why? Also, I'm sorry but you seem to be getting a few things wrong. For instance, I'm not talking about a MacBook but an iMac so I'm not comparing two laptops, however thin, but a (albeit slim) desktop and a laptop. And the Intel chip I'm talking about is the plain ol' HD one in my Windows laptop, while the Iris chip in the iMac is even older, the iMac being of 2015. Yes I am aware that the recent Macs are basically Intel machines, but I don't see how that relates to anything I've said really. This is not meant to be a discussion 'Windows ./. Mac', okay? Also, when I said 'not bad' I was, rather plainly I thought, talking about the iMac, not the LG display which I said was rather pricey, just like you did. So we were actually saying the same thing concerning the display.
There are not so few people out there who do claim that while Apple for sure has no 'secret sauce' of any kind and doesn't produce any hardware themselves (which I never claimed they did, by the way), they do hold their hardware producers to much stricter guidelines than other companies and do match hardware and software very closely. These might indeed be reasons why their hardware has a certain appeal. To be very clear here, I'm not the average consumer who's just after the shiny apple logo, I've been working with computers for about 25 years now, am CompTIA certified and administering an university institute, although I might not have much specific knowledge on displays because I never needed it before. My Elitebook does a good job working with DAZ when it's connected to the eGPU, all I want now is to be able to either use the iMac's display along with that or a display like the iMac's. And as I said, I HAVE been comparing specs and displays online and offline, and there was not one I found, no matter what the specs, that matched the iMac. This is exactly the reason why I'm so much at a loss here.
So let's please just stop the Apple bashing, this is really not what this was meant to be about. If you can advice me on which monitor might do the job from your point of view, I will gladly -seriously!- look into it. If not, well, then maybe someone else can. Alrighty?
I think your iMac at work might possibly be the one I have right here, funny! - By now, I also tend to think it has to do somewhat at least with the glass. Ans when you mentioned the missing anti-glare I remembered a laptop I had years and years ago which also achieved a nicely brilliant display by not using anti-glare. So these are probably really important points. Bad thing is, I haven't seen ANY glass coated, no anti-glare display at all EVER in the available stores I strolled through, except for the iMacs. So how to find out? I don't feel like ordering ten displays just to be sending them all back ...
Gosh, I'm buying CARS for that price ... Insane sure is the right word here!
Would you be suprised to know that the cell phone you are probably using had it's communications chips developed on workstations that cost $80,000, and that was a deal? It depends on what you are doing, and the profits you can make. Of course there are cheaper monitors, but there are FAR more expensive monitors too.
Not at all surprised. But I'm a hobbyist when it comes to 3d, and this is far out of my price range. The complete iMac cost about 1200,- if I remember correctly, so I feel a display to replace it should not be more than half that price, roundabouts. This is how much I'd be willing to spend on it at least.
Oh, and I'm usually inhereting my cell phones from my dad so mine right now feels like it was probably developed a hundred years ago on a room-sized mainframe which cost 800,000 and had IBM printed on it ... ;-)
It may be color settings. Some monitor display black extremely well, hence images look crisper and clearer. Some can display lot of color e.g. same sky monitor A will display almost original color but monitor B will display bluish color. It all depends various factors. Thus finding perfect monitors are hard, even there are monitors which tend to display wrong size e.g. an normal size paper at100% zoom will looks like a newspaper.
Hence in future try at least more than 10 monitors and buy 1 which is best according to you.
More than you'd ever want to know, Tina
https://pcmonitors.info/articles/matte-vs-glossy-monitors/
Thanks for your ideas, the black range is definitely important! And yes, it seems really hard to find a good display. I've only used laptops for years before 2020 so I didn't quite realize just HOW hard it would be. I'm also especially handicapped because I cannot use any display which utilizes PWM (you know, that almost imperceptible flickering) to regulate its brightness, as that gives me migraines. Another reason why I love the iMac display so, it never caused that.
Very interesting reading, thanks once more! I'm actually bookmarking this one. The fashion in the stores where I live sadly seems to be definitely anti-glare, like I wrote before, couldn't find any glossy display in like four stores. God, all this just because Apple and NVidia can't play nicely together, or Apple just keep their most useful display features like target mode ...
So you're comparing a desktop cpu to a mobile CPU? I'll be as nice and possible and just say that's not a comparison any should ever make.
No they do not hold their HW producers to higher standards. they hold them to lower standards as far as anyone can tell. What they primarily do is require that most of the components be unique to them so no one can source those parts to repair them.
None matched teh specs of a 5 year old iMac? You're kidding right? Name the spec you can't find. Just name it already! Pick the monitor size you want and the spec you want. I build systems all the time and I build for guys who want pro systems include pro calibrated monitors. You want a film monitor I'll get you one. You'll pay $10k but you'll get it and it won't be a PoS Apple one.
I believe the only thing the OP is comparing is the display on the iMac versus what she's seen available as an external monitor. Taking a quick look at specs I see the following for the 2019 (iMac19,2) and 2017 (iMac18,2) iMacs:
21.5-inch (diagonal) Retina 4K display with IPS technology
Display Glass Standard
Brightness 500 cd/m2
Pixel Density 219 ppi
Color Gamut Wide color gamut (P3)
Resolutions 4096 by 2304 pixels
So I guess that spec without a matte coating for under $600 might be what she's looking for. Shouldn't be difficult at all given Apple's prices and I'd like to see some suggestions also. (I'd like DVI inputs but everyone else these days seems to be using some flavor of HDMI, so whatever.)
Thanks.
500 nit screen is no problem. Any HDR cert screen will do 500 nits (1 nit = 1 cd/m^2)
The color gamut is not defined so I can't help. How much of the DCI-P3 does it cover? Saying it covers the DCI-P3 without saying how much is useless. Literally every monitor covers some percentage of the DCI-P3. This is an example of Apple assuming their customers not knowing what the specs are about. color gamut specs say which gamut(s) and what percentage of the gamut the panel covers. The really good ones even show the test result, a sort of triangular color pattern image. The even better ones include color calibration equipment in the box so you can calibrate it yourself periodically because all monitors drift over time.
So after some looking around this is a reasonable monitor at 27"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MKT1W65?tag=price145310f-20&ascsubtag=wtbs_5f87cd72c5e35e41801dd8c6
It's HDR 400 which is 500 nits. It doesn't specifiy its DCI-P3 gamut (that's pretty uncommon on monitors not meant for film production) but its 99% sRGB and factory calibrated so for Daz use or any sort of print/web work that is what you want.
Thanks. I'll add it to a list of monitors to look at after the COVID threat passes.
I notice that the LG 27UL850-W is only 400-nits and not even 100% of sRGB. I'll probably want something better but I don't know if that matters to tsroemi.
I did find a couple reviews that talked about the iMac display.
- One had an image of the color gamut comparing it to sRGB, Adobe RGB, and some web SWOP v2 thing: <https://blog.conradchavez.com/2015/10/26/a-look-at-the-p3-color-gamut-of-the-imac-display-retina-late-2015/> ; and (if I do this right and the target site allows it) the image is:
Another review for the 2019 iMac <https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/apple-imac-2019-screen> ; said that the iMac Display P3 gamut covers 142.7% of sRGB, 98.3% or Adobe RGB, 101.1% of DCI P3. And also provided the following info:
Black Level: 0.5106
Contrast Ratio: 1009.2:1
Colour Temp: 6525K
Looks like the x-rite i1Display Studio color calibration thingy isn't all that expensive so I might look into picking one of those up next year.
Thanks again.
- Eric
Nothing ever covers 100% of any gamut and that chart is not accurate.
HDR 400 is 500 nits