Drew Strickland has a disastrous review of the Canon 5D MkII video capabilities. I think he was expecting magic to occur, but it didn’t, so he’s whining. Could it just be a ruse to get page hits? Plenty of people are upset at the spam he sends out, so it’s possible.

Tags: Canon, 5D, Video, Whiners

There’s nothing like the glossy/matte screen argument to rile everyone up.

The new MacBooks and MacBook pros have glossy screens only and this makes them useless for photo work, so the argument goes. The reflections are horrid and you can’t work with that. There are people huffing and puffing and threatening to stomp off to Windows land.

Garbage.

If you’re relying on laptops to do precision color work you’re already in a world of hurt. They don’t display colors well because they have six bits per color, not eight, and rely on temporal dithering to get the extra two bits. Plus they have narrow viewing angles and you can’t control the brightness enough. And that screen is tiny.

I can and do edit photos on my MacBook (early 2008, glossy). It’s mobile and I can angle the screen any way I like to get rid of reflections. It does fine for what I want it to do. But I’m not doing precision anything. And if I were I’d be looking at the curves, correcting with gray cards, watching RGB values and other numbers and not worrying a hoot about what I see on the screen except for the composition of the image and what is happening on people’s faces.

If you expect perfect color you can actually see, then you’re living in fairy land. If your environment is well-controlled and you have an expensive, calibrated monitor, you can get somewhere close. And you can do that with a MacBook or any other Mac. Just plug the monitor in. You’ve always been able to do this, and you can still do this with the new MacBooks. You can even convert a glossy screen to a matte one by adding a film. If your environment is suitable for working with color then there will be no reflections and it won’t matter anyway.

But anyone else who views your images will see something different anyway. They are not using calibrated monitors, all the software is set up for different gammas, and/or ignores the embedded profiles. Even the people who look at prints won’t view them under the right light unless you control that as well. Shockingly, since many images will be views on laptops, they’ll be seen on small, imperfect, glossy screens!

The real complaint goes like this: I have to impress people who don’t understand color with screen images or else they won’t buy from me. With a matte screen I was able to get away with not controlling my viewing environment, but now it looks like I’ll have to deal with that. Curse you Apple for ignoring my cheapness even though I’m a tiny fraction of your customer base.

I do all my serious editing on my 24” iMac (Intel, matte screen) because the screen is large, bright, and really nice, and the computer fast. But it wouldn’t matter if it were glossy. I do all of that editing after sun-down with the room lights off. It’s not calibrated except by eye, and it works for me. If I change what I do and want to meet a fixed set of standards then I expect to have to change things accordingly.

Tags: Screens, Glossy, Matte, Apple, MacBook Pro, MacBook, Whiners