Anyway, for those of you that have found the glossy screens to be OK, the new 27” iMac has an intriguing feature ... it has video in through its’ mini DisplayPort.  This means you can use the iMac as an external display, while the iMac itself continues to run.  Currently I have a Mac Mini sitting next to my desk that hosts my two websites.  The larger 27” iMac’s display which is a true 16:9 proportion intrigued me, so I decided switch out the 24” display and the mac mini, letting the new 27” iMac perform both functions.

Hooking it up was straight forward.  I specifically told the Apple Store sales person (2 of them to be exact) what I was hoping to do, and while they confirmed it would work, neither they nor myself was sharp enough to think about buying the appropriate cable.  A second trip to downtown Salt Lake City the following day was successful in acquiring the necessary cable, so I hooked the two computers together.  After plugging the cable into my MacBook Pro, I tried to wake it up with the external keyboard and mouse ... to no avail.  Finally I opened the laptop up, and immediately the screen went dark and the laptop then took over.

So the first negative is I can’t seem to find a way to leave the MacBook closed (clamshell mode).  Not a biggy, I just prefer the graphics card to be limited to one display for speeds sake.

Since I’ll be using this for Lightroom and Photoshop on occasion I then proceeded to calibrate the display.  That’s when I ran into the second glitch in my plan.

Once in display mode, I can’t seem to find a way to adjust the brightness.  There is no slider in the control panel, and the keyboard controls the MacBook’s display, not the external one.  So to adjust the brightness to an appropriate level for working on my images (about 120 cd/m2), I found I had to put the MacBook to sleep, then adjust the iMac’s brightness.  I had to go back and forth a couple of times until I was close enough to proceed making a profile. (After doing this I realized it would have been easier to just profile the iMac first which would have set the correct brightness, then switch over to the MacBook and profile it.  Whatever brightness is set while running as an iMac is maintained when it is used an external display).

Previous iMac’s have had problems with screen brightness ... you couldn’t dim them enough to match print density.  This model doesn’t have that problem.  Setting the screen to 120 cd/m2 was easy ... in fact you can dim it so far it almost goes black.

Bottom line is it works great as a monitor for the MacBook Pro.  The display isn’t quite as even as the 24” ... a little brighter in the corners, but it’s still very good.  The additional width is a dream for Photoshop and it’s pallets as well as Lightroom.  Also two Safari pages side by side work very well (or similar documents) without having to overlap.  I like the full 16:9 proportion.

The final downside is the two don’t share any other features ... keyboard, mouse, iSight camera, or audio.  Of course the laptop still provides the latter two if I want them, and all of the other devices I use are USB based so they all share a hub, meaning one other cable swap is all it takes to switch them.

So the iMac is now running as a web server, and if I need to perform some maintenance on it I can use it’s screen, or I can use a screen share utility when it is hooked to my MacBook Pro. 

As far as the iMac, for $1700 this is a pretty powerful machine.  3ghz dual core, 4 gigs of Ram, decent graphics card, and a 1 TB drive. Also you get a bluetooth keyboard and the new bluetooth magic mouse.  You can add more RAM, up to 16 gigs, so Photoshop and Lightroom will run very nicely. Performance will be infringing on venerable Mac Pro line. I expect an upgrade, possibly to even dual hex core processors isn’t far of for the Mac Pros. Of course if you are doing color critical work, you can connect the mini Displayport to another display, such as an Eizo.

If you are thinking about using this as a main workstation, you may want to take a look at the model that’s due to start shipping this month ... a quad core iMac for few hundred dollars more.