27" screen looks so perfect on paper...until you try it in store.

[rnb2]

I didn't really have to get used to my 2009 i7 27", as I have an unusually high tolerance for small type, especially for someone my age (just turned 44). I'm usually 24-30" from the screen, and have no problems reading anything at default font sizes.

I wouldn't trade the screen real estate for anything now - if I switched to a MacBook Pro, I'd need a 27" Cinema Display to go with it.

 

[Ravich]

A higher ppi means things are displayed smaller, this is what this thread is about. A high ppi may make you zoom in when you wouldn't on a lower ppi screen, which can become annoying.

Something that you would have to do.... once. In all your time owning the computer.

 

[scottsjack]

I plan on getting the 27" However, if the 21" had the option of 1GB or 2GB GPU I may consider the 21" but I need the large GPU!

Apple definitely should've done 1GB on all the iMacs and the higher ends on both size screens offer the 2 GB

Exactly! If the 21" was available with the top CPU and GPU as on the 27" it would be an incredible machine.

 

[Icaras]

Exactly! If the 21" was available with the top CPU and GPU as on the 27" it would be an incredible machine.

It already is an incredible machine...the recent benchmarks posted on these forums place the high end 21.5" BTO just below the top end 27" BTO.

Also keep in mind the GPU on the 21.5" has to do less work to push the 1080p display. I agree however though, that a 1 GB BTO on the GPU would have made it perfect, but the big jump to i7 quad for max BTO makes up for it IMO.

For the price of the SSD upgrade, the 21.5" is basically the same price as the high end 27" and that seals the deal for me.

For those reasons, I will be downsizing my 2010 27" to the 2011 21.5" once Lion hits. I use my Air as a secondary display so I will have plenty of desktop real estate to make up for shrinking my system.

 

[Terri French]

I had a bit of a hard time adjusting. I use reading glasses. I finally figured out that if I pushed the iMac further away and got some glasses that were the right strength for that distance that the screen became much better for me.

 

[rnb2]

I'm actually pondering going back on my earlier post about never giving up the 27" screen real estate. I can't bring myself to spend $2200 knowing that next year will almost certainly bring a much more dramatic redesign, but I can get most of the performance of the BTO 27" with a BTO 21.5" - I only lose a bit of processor speed, a smaller screen, and a less-powerful GPU (that still faster than the GPU in my 2009 i7).

As a stop-gap to hold me over until next year, this has a certain appeal.

 

[nutmac]

Lion is going to have resolution independence, like the iPhone. You might regret your decision in a few months... Don't believe me? Look it up.

Edit: Called HiDPI now...

Um no. HiDPI mode is like Retina Display in that it merely doubles the rendering. Pixel doubling 27" will reduce PPI (pixels per inch) from 109 to 54.5. Everything will be too large. Thus, HiDPI mode will require much higher resolution display, one with around 200 PPI.

As for screen being too large for browsing, just resize the browser window until it becomes comfortable for viewing.

 

[Benz63amg]

I'm actually pondering going back on my earlier post about never giving up the 27" screen real estate. I can't bring myself to spend $2200 knowing that next year will almost certainly bring a much more dramatic redesign, but I can get most of the performance of the BTO 27" with a BTO 21.5" - I only lose a bit of processor speed, a smaller screen, and a less-powerful GPU (that still faster than the GPU in my 2009 i7).

As a stop-gap to hold me over until next year, this has a certain appeal.

"only lose a bit of processor speed, a smaller screen, and a less-powerful GPU"

thats all u can loose though theres nothing else other than thats stuff, the 27 is so much better

 

[Icaras]

"only lose a bit of processor speed, a smaller screen, and a less-powerful GPU"

thats all u can loose though theres nothing else other than thats stuff, the 27 is so much better

Well according to these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware, the only thing that bests the top 21.5" BTO is the top 27" BTO.

Of course then it starts to boil down to personal preference...if you really do prefer the extra real estate of the 27" or if you don't mind staying at 1080p. But for almost $1000 less, the top 21.5" BTO seems like a winner to me.

 

[Mackilroy]

I love the 27-inch screen – I wish I had one. Having used it before it's almost a pain to go back to my 20-inch 1680x1050 display – the vastly greater resolution is quite nice. Once I get an external 27-inch display I'm not going back.

 

[tom vilsack]

firefox/contents/advanced/adjust min screen font 15-16

 

[Solublepeter]

Screen real-estate

I can understand some of the OPs point.

However i remember when i first tried 2 widescreen monitors with my PC it seemed like complete overkill, but i very quickly got used to it. Similarly when i went to 4 monitors last year it was initially overwhelming, but rapidly became "normal", although 3 would have been about right for most uses (mainly dual-screen coding, video editing or music, with reference material alongside)

My desk now has a pair of widescreens for the PC and a pair for the mac Mini i use for app development, the most annoying thing is that i keep trying to move windows from the PC pair to the mac pair sometimes

Peter

 

[bushman4]

The original poster is correct, the 27 resolution does make a lot of text too small to view from a normal distance. This is a very common complaint, and I hope apple a dresses this in the Lion release.

Have to agree with this. When you look at all the real estate and see the web page your eyes perceive the text as smaller than it is. It takes some getting used to and some people will use the zoom feature in safari which is helpful and compensates for this. Theres no question about it that 27" is superb.
Hope Lion addresses this issue which would be great.

 

[theSeb]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

I can understand some of the OPs point.

However i remember when i first tried 2 widescreen monitors with my PC it seemed like complete overkill, but i very quickly got used to it. Similarly when i went to 4 monitors last year it was initially overwhelming, but rapidly became "normal", although 3 would have been about right for most uses (mainly dual-screen coding, video editing or music, with reference material alongside)

My desk now has a pair of widescreens for the PC and a pair for the mac Mini i use for app development, the most annoying thing is that i keep trying to move windows from the PC pair to the mac pair sometimes

Peter
Soluble Apps
MailShot- Group Email where you want it- built right into your favourite apps!

Lol. I am guilty of the same thing. I've even tried to copy files or contents of the clipboard from one to the other.

 

[Piggie]

Just wait till Apple put "Pinch to Zoom" on the iMacs, then you will be happy

 

[Kendo]

Well after going back to Best Buy and testing out both sizes again, I may have been a little incorrect in my original post. When I stated that a certain size picture on the 21.5" screen is a lot smaller on the 27" screen, I think my eyes were playing tricks on me. Because the 27" screen has such large real estate, it is easy to perceive the picture being a lot smaller.

But when I used a ruler to measure the picture, it was only about 10% smaller on the 27" iMac. They definitely did bump up the resolution so it isn't the same proportion, but it isn't as dramatic as I once thought. Though depending on your view, 10% may be a lot. Who wouldn't want a 10% increase in salary.

The bad news is that since I am going with my original plan of buying the top end 27" iMac instead of the base 21.5" iMac, I have to spend $800 more now.