imac screen vs cinema display?

trying to figure out what would be the best to get;
imac or a mini mac with the 20in cinema display...
im a photographer so the picture screen quality is very important!!
please help, im a bit confused and been thinking about it for weeks.
tnx

mini v imac

here's my two cents -

The Mac Mini has less processing power than an iMac. So if you're a photographer who's going to be doing some digital editing you might want the extra power.

I just bought a 24" iMac and the screen is absolutely amazing.

good luck!

The best way is to go see the for yourself. I think Best Buy has both on display these days.
I did some spec comparrisons from the Apple website. The 20" iMac and 20" Cinema screens have very similar specs. The resolution is the same which is really the most important thing i would have to say.
The iMac is a far superior computer over the mini for image manipulation. But the new glossy iMac screens can be a problem.

You may find that the glossy screen on an iMac produces less accurate color under your lighting conditions. Or you may just find the reflections distracting. Definitely take a look before you buy.

I'm an amateur photographer, and I just bought the 24in iMac. The screen, though glossy is amazing. I like it alot better than the matte screen on my old iMac. But your tastes may differ.

I'd recommend what others have said, and check them out in person.

The iMac uses a TN panel, the Cinema display uses S-IPS I think...
So the colour reproduction should be better on the cinema display.

Of course on the other hand the cinema displays haven't really been refreshed in some time, so the iMac's panel is probably more up-to-date...


http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/lcd-panel-types.php

bombat67 said:

The Mac Mini has less processing power than an iMac. So if you're a photographer who's going to be doing some digital editing you might want the extra power.

Click to expand...

I would have to agree with this. The accelerated GPU in the iMac will be able to offload a lot of the graphics work from the main CPU (if you're using applications like Aperture/Lightroom or Photoshop). With the Mini, the processing will be primarily handled by the main CPU, so operations will almost certainly take longer.

Also, the hard drive in the iMac is going to be faster (7200RPM vs 5400) and so any disc intensive operations (including any page swapping) will be notedly faster on the iMac. This can be solved by replacing the Mini's internal drive (if you're feeling industrious) with a faster 2.5" SATA drive (I believe 7200rpm drives are now available up to 200gb in size). I had thought that booting from an external firewire drive would increase performance, but this page shows that it's actually slower (FWIW, that link goes to a page that describes tethering an external SATA drive to the Mini. This nearly doubles the performance of read/write operations, but leaves a bit of a mess of cables).

By no means am I suggesting that the performance of the mini will suck, nor will it likely be unusable. Just simply, the iMac will be a fair bit faster.

I would agree with others you will get better performance out of the iMac. But if your doing photo work on it the cinema screen is considerably better than the 20 iMac. Go and look for yourself and they will be noticeably different, the 20 iMac's all get washed out colors at the bottoms of the screens, at least every one I have ever seen. Needless to say this will make doing photo work challenging. Do it for yourself go and set the ACD and the iMac to a solid medium gray background. I found the 24 inch iMacs didn't suffer the same color gradient problem, and not at all in the ACD's. If you go to apples discussions there are massive threads discussing the gradient problem in the imacs, especially the 20.
Don't get me wrong the iMac is a great machine for most average users that are not doing critical work, but if your needing something above whats become known as consumer quality you need to step it up a bit.

Michael415 said:

I would agree with others you will get better performance out of the iMac. But if your doing photo work on it the cinema screen is considerably better than the 20 iMac. Go and look for yourself and they will be noticeably different, the 20 iMac's all get washed out colors at the bottoms of the screens, at least every one I have ever seen. Needless to say this will make doing photo work challenging. Do it for yourself go and set the ACD and the iMac to a solid medium gray background. I found the 24 inch iMacs didn't suffer the same color gradient problem, and not at all in the ACD's. If you go to apples discussions there are massive threads discussing the gradient problem in the imacs, especially the 20.
Don't get me wrong the iMac is a great machine for most average users that are not doing critical work, but if your needing something above whats become known as consumer quality you need to step it up a bit.

Click to expand...

True, the 24" iMac screen is far superior to the 20" iMac screen. Plus the 24" has a lot more real-estate for imaging and all the toolbars.