So real you think you can touch it. That’s the only way to describe what it’s like to look at 4K imagery on Apple’s new $2,400 iMac With Retina 5K display.
Apple’s updated flagship computer features awesome power, from a 3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 to a 4GHz Core i7. But it’s the 5,120 x 2,880 screen that's the star of the show.
From the outside, the 27-inch all-in one iMac looks a lot like its predecessors, but one look at the screen — with the right imagery, of course — and you know this is something different. No matter how close I got to the screen (within millimeters), I couldn’t detect individual pixels.
To make what it’s touting as the World’s highest-resolution display, Apple had to perform some high-tech jujitsu and at a pixel level.
First of all, Apple told me they re-architected the pixels at an organic level and switched to an oxide thin-film transistor, which Apple says allows the pixels to charge faster and hold their charge longer. They also replaced what’s known as the Timing Controller. When you have so many millions of pixels, they need to know when to fire and, I’m guessing, not to fire. The controller also has more bandwidth than previous ones to handle all the pixel communication traffic.
Display aside, the new iMac also appears to be quite powerful.
I was able to scrub through 4K video in real time, without a hint of smudging or visual quality loss. Even with all that power, Apple claims the computer is 30% more power-efficient than previous models.
Apple also consistently touted the screen as 5 millimeters thick, but that’s only at the edge. It gets a lot thicker where the screen meets the base armature.
It’s far too early to say whether or not the iMac Retina is more powerful than comparably priced desktops and all-in-ones, but I can say that I’ve never seen such an awe-inspiring display on a desktop PC.
It's hard to describe that kind of resolution without being able to show it to you. So these photos will give you a first look — but even they might not be able to do it justice.
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