MacDirectory Magazine

Steiner Creative: Visual Artistry

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/500190

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58 MacDirectory CONTENTS DEPARTMENT background, using 0.5% less of the CPU while constantly monitoring all the drives' health and is ready to email me if it finds the slightest problem. The graphical interface makes it quite easy to perform the initial setup and get detailed information on all your attached storage. It turns out that how quiet the ThunderBay RAID is depends a great deal on the drives that are included. Mine shipped with a set of Toshibas that weren't quite a quiet as the Western Digitals that I've used in the past. The ThunderBay 4 does a good job of vibration isolation but I still found a long Thunderbolt cable and moved the drive off my desk and out of earshot. The ThunderBay/Retina Experience Booting to a (very sharp) white Apple logo on a black background, the Retina iMac tells you right away that you're in for a different experience. But that boot screen only stuck around for about fifteen seconds before revealing a 27-inch view of the setting sun on Half Dome that made me think I could count the needles on the fir trees at its base. Apple's proprietary timing controller gives the 5K display a notably smooth 60Hz refresh rate. Also, even with this many pixels, the system does remarkably well at making everything looking smooth and sharp, not just the bits that are Retina ready. It's obviously doing some very, very smart up-scaling and doing it far too fast to be noticed. My first thought was to take a look at some of my own work, so I fired-up Adobe Lightroom. In a moment I was scanning through my collection of raw images from my Nikon D300s, seeing a level of detail, dynamics and smooth tonal gradation as never before. In the develop mode, I could do anything I wanted with nary a stutter. Some photographers had reported some lag with the base-model Retina, but that was not at all the case with this system. Even diddling with a set of 32-megapixel test shots from a D810 were no problem, though it did take a second or so for an image to snap into full resolution when opened or zoomed upI launched Premiere Pro CC. The system sailed through SD and HD footage, rendering multi-layer effects with admirable alacrity. This would be beyond acceptable and well into the realm of fun. Though it's not a format I generally have the opportunity to work in, I loaded in some R3D 4K clips just to see what it was like and was very pleasantly surprised. Playback and even scrubbing were smooth and render times were reasonable. A good deal of credit here I believe goes to OWC's ThunderBay 4. Conclusions Just about everything on my OWC-assisted Retina iMac looks and feels better than just about any system I've used. Though it will be a while before I have a chance to exploit the 5K display for video work, it's a boon (if not a bit of an ego-boost) for my photography. In terms of the hardware and OS, Apple has done a masterful job of bringing ultra- high resolution to the masses with this new iMac. With the exception of the acoustics of the Toshiba drives, OWC's drive and dock really made moving the iMac a practical reality. The Retina iMac will let me and many freelancers like me into a high- performance, high-resolution world that we never expected to see so soon. REVIEW 58 MacDirectory Product: OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock (5 USB 3.0, 1 FireWire 800, 2 Thunderbolt 2, HDMI 4K, Gigabit Ethernet, Mic in, Audio/Line out) Made by: macsales.com Price: $299.99 Pros: Great combination of state- of-the-art and legacy ports; beautifully built and styled Cons: None noted Rating:

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