Apple introduced today a new family of iMacs exclusively with glossy screens.

The conventional wisdom is that LCD glossy screens are bad for photo-editing and soft-proofing. What do you think of this?

Will the rumored new cinema displays also be glossy only?

I compared them side by side with standard before buying my MBP. Went with the standard, but this old dog has problems with new tricks sometimes.

Laptops may be OK as they are not mission critical. Desktops are.

It will be interesting to learn from photographers who buy the new iMacs, calibrate them, do editing/soft-proofing and printing with them.

New iMacs with glossy screens only.

Glossy screens enhance colors and thus mess up color calibration.

Glossy screens enhance colors and thus mess up color calibration.

if the calibrator is seeing the colour through the glass, then 'enhancing' the colours won't affect calibration.

when the MacBook Pros were released, the only thing I heard of that might affect calibration was the reflectiveness of the glossy screen, reflecting light from in the room to the sensor but I haven't seen confirmation of this problem in the whole year that the MPPs have been available.

until someone actually calibrates a glossy screen, we won't know for sure how the glossy surface affects calibration.

As long as ambient light is controlled so no reflections into colorimeter, it should make no difference as the instrument is measuring the transmissive light of the screen.

The glossy screens on the laptops are also known to have a somewhat small "sweet spot" - you have to sit in just the right spot at the right angle to see the full dynamic range of the monitor, and see accurate representations of the images, etc. That would probably be the biggest concern to deal with, really....

Also, glossy is quite reflective of the surroundings...

That said, colors - especially darks and blacks - look great on the glossy monitors. And, no, their habit of "enhancing" colors shouldn't fool a colorimeter, so calibration shouldn't be too much of an issue...

My Toshiba has a glossy screen and I have had no problems with the GMB calibration. They sweet spot is *very* small for viewing on the 12" widescreen.

What about the eye?

Editing photos relies on that you can trust your eye. We know that there are many optical illusions that can fool the eye.

The reflections on a glossy screen could fool the eye, preventing to properly assess contrast and color...

If this is true this would mean to darken the room - the darkroom of the digital age.

Amid all the speculation here, has anyone yet received a glossy-screen iMac, calibarated it, and used it to produce prints? Until then, this is idle chatter!

Since my creaking dual G4 tower desperately needs to go into retirement, I'm more interested in the machine's performance suitability as a digital imaging workstation for LR, PS, iVMP/ExpressionMedia--the usual stuff we do.

The machine is available with up to 4GB RAM and 1 TB internal hard drive. Looks like it will support an external monitor in "extended desktop" mode (whatever that is). Seems to have enough FW and USB2.0 ports; would be nice if it had an eSATA port too. On the surface at least, it seems like it would be a most competent digital imaging platform, albeit at the cost of some expandability and flexibility, at significantly less cost than a MacPro tower.

This is true - but any viewing device can have reflections. My CRTs can certainly have them, as can matte finish LCDs. Just that super glossy screens seem to show them more strongly - they're direct reflections, rather than diffuse reflections.

Its also true that this is idle chatter until someone grabs one and starts using it and reports back

New iMac teardown:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...w_i macs.html

The 20" model uses a Philips LCD (LG Philips LM201 WE3). The glass overlay appears to be tinted.

Here is another link describing calibration results:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=24321625