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iMac - Viewing Distance. 21.5 or 27?

Z

Zelnaga

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 4, 2010
235
68
Hi guys, im currently considering an iMac, as my PC is showing is showing its age. Im looking to buy an iMac for my next computer, and so long as it plays the upcoming Starcraft 2 and able to handle photoshopping and other everyday tasks then ill happy. Im currently looking at the high-end 21.5 or the high end 27 iMac. I probably spend 70% of my time watching anime on my computer, and with that, they contain subtitles so i have to be able to view the subtitles below aswell as watch the video, but 27 might be too hughe for me, as I dont have much floor space in my room for me to sit right back. Even though Id like to be at my desk when I watch it rather than sitting right back.

I was wondering if anyone has an iMac 27 and watching subtitled anime? Is it great? or do you have to sit right back? Whats your experience?
 
I have an iMac 27 i7 and my usage matches your pretty well..here's my thoughts:

Starcraft 2 beta looks and plays great at native resolution (2560 x 1440). No complaints.

I watch anime via crunchyroll, dvds, and blu-ray on the imac and its great up close. In fact... the SMPTE/THX viewing distance for a 27in screen is about 3 to 4 feet.
http://myhometheater.homestead.com/viewingdistancecalculator.html
And don't worry, plenty of room for subtitles.

I don't use photoshop that much but I do use picasa with no problems. On the video side I've used Sony Vegas and iMovie to edit 1080p footage no problem.
 
I watch lots of Anime on my 27" iMac and I love it. The only pain in the butt initially was gearing up the proper viewers ie: VLC. Some of the Codex would not play with WMV.

It's very nice. I do find that I need to scroll slowly though if I am trying to skip the intro. Mac doesn't like that much. Also depends on media viewer too.

WW
 
You'll want to get the 27" iMac with 4850 gpu to successfully play starcraft2 maxed out at native resolution-- even run it on windows7 rather than osx (10.6.4 will focus on graphics drivers so hopefully it will narrow the gap in the two operating systems with graphics performance)

As I said in a couple other threads, my numbers:

On osx: native resolution and max settings spare portraits to 2d: 15fps
On windows: native resolution and max settings spare portraits to 2d: 30fps

Those numbers are without anti-aliasing, but starcraft2 has very fine models, so anti-aliasing isn't necessary at all-- the game looks stunning.

Due to blizzard's engineering of their gpu-hungry shaders, you can get away with shaders to medium and not lose much quality at all, but gain 40fps on both operating systems. (do note that medium shaders also take away ambient lighting)


As for anime, I watch 2 series of it-- bleach and naruto. Both look great on the 27" iMac. I came from a 20" iMac, but never once thought 27" would be too big-- you'll get used to the size within days, and it'll be the perfect size for anime watching. Never had a problem with subtitles, especially if I'm a bit further away from the computer.
 
i have the 21.5" with the 4870 gpu, and i find that if i'm watching any of my Japanese gundam series at my desk, its just about perfect, size/resolution for me ant the subtitles are a pretty good size as well. I thought that the 27" would be far to big after going to the apple store and physically seeing it.

Another thing you have to take into account is scaling, the only anime I have in HD 1080p is Gundam 00, and because the 21.5" native res is also 1920x1080, it looks perfect (with 1-1 pixle mapping). I have a few series ripped from dvd to 720x576 (anamorphic) and they look OK scaled up to full screen when sitting at the desk watching it. However, some of my series are tv rips or vhs rips at around or lower than 640x480, and when your sitting at the desk and blow them up to full screen they just look plain nasty. Obviously the further you are away the less you'll notice, but i like watching them at my desk as well.
 
millar876 said:
i have the 21.5" with the 4870 gpu, and i find that if i'm watching any of my Japanese gundam series at my desk, its just about perfect, size/resolution for me ant the subtitles are a pretty good size as well. I thought that the 27" would be far to big after going to the apple store and physically seeing it.

Another thing you have to take into account is scaling, the only anime I have in HD 1080p is Gundam 00, and because the 21.5" native res is also 1920x1080, it looks perfect (with 1-1 pixle mapping). I have a few series ripped from dvd to 720x576 (anamorphic) and they look OK scaled up to full screen when sitting at the desk watching it. However, some of my series are tv rips or vhs rips at around or lower than 640x480, and when your sitting at the desk and blow them up to full screen they just look plain nasty. Obviously the further you are away the less you'll notice, but i like watching them at my desk as well.
Click to expand...

Thats the main factor really, and also you mentioned a good point about the resoultion. I dont stream, but I download most of my anime, and wondering if some anime shows looks a bit 'blocky' as the video will be stretched. I dont download much HD or HQ anime, they tend to be SD.
 
'blocky' just depends on how bad the codec used to compress the anime was.
most older codecs, at low bitrates, will show lots of macroblocks, which are the 16x16 pixel blocks you see on highly compressed material. Newer compressors like h264, and its open source version x264 have deblocking filters that smooth macroblocks out.
 
i dont have an imac but i do have a mac mini and i use it to watch anime and love it. for some reason sometimes it handles the encodes i have better than my machine that i use to encode it with from my collection on a harddrive i thne transfer it to my server to stream it to the mac mini and some times when i have a lot of encoding going i use the mini for that as well and i can watch and encode anime at the same time
 
IMO the 21.5" will do just fine. I've tried a 27" iMac and it's fantastic. If you can afford the 27" - go for it. If not, the 21.5" will do just fine.
 
for watching something with subtitles, it doesn't make a difference.


anime is for moist people lol
 
Choices! Are you guys using VLC or another video player for mac? Anyone running parellel and using Windows? I love CCCP and media player classic, and have a personal dispise towards VLC (especially thier interface). What are the performance like?

Im probably leaning towards the 21.5 slightly, though the C2D processors are putting me off slightly, but that shouldnt really affect what I do, with what Im going to use the computer for, would it?
 
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