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Use PowerPC for a week?

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Wrote most of this up several days ago and then forgot to post it.

Admittedly veering a little bit from strictly PPC discussion:
 
When in photo classes, the WISDOM THAT CAME FROM UP ON HIGH, which I have never seen specific research to prove, is that LCDs of the time (2008 or so) drift in color. As they age, the drifting happens faster and more severely. At about three years of age, they drift so much and so fast that they become useless for color sensitive work within a few minutes. (Perhaps that was at the end of the third year.)
 
In particular, the advice was in the first year, calibrate about once a month. In the second year, calibrate about once a week, and in the third year, calibrate daily. Because LEDs are a much more stable, in theory you should be able to go longer between calibrations, and they should last much longer.

However, CRTs are similarly "unstable" to CCFL backlighting, and there's also the issue of physical of the phosphors wearing out over time, which could change or reduce the amount and accuracy of color a CRT can display over time. Whether a normal person doing office tasks will ever notice on a CRT otherwise in good health even in an improbably long time, I don't know.

About calibrating: 
My colorimeter, which is an i1 Display unit of some sort, which I bought in like 2007 or 2008, takes about 10 minutes to get and apply calibration. Calibrating daily would be annoying but not impossible. By the time you enter the fourth year and the monitor needs calibration approximately hourly, I'd be tossing it out or putting it on the desk of an assistant doing work that doesn't critically need accurate color. (Accountant, file/workflow wrangler who is merely moving files, craigslist)

About color rendition in general: 
Although LCD color rendition has never been the best it has been good enough for professional creatives working with color-sensitive material for on the order of about a decade or so now. The biggest problem has been that with LCD technology there's a relatively big rift between the middle and the top, even now. In 2008, I switched my own photo management/editing workflow over to some ThinkPads (First an R61 then a T400) and although they work fine for the task, the biggest problem I've had has always been with blues -- the displays on ThinkPads, though able to be calibrated, just wont' properly display certain ranges of blue. There'll be a beautiful deep blue sky that you know to be a really great gradient in a photo, and it'll just be a big blotch.
 
I have been meaning to test calibration drift on a new-ish LED backlit monitor. The calibration itself won't be that impressive, I'm pretty sure it's a 6-bit panel.
 
Today, it's easier than ever to find good panels, both in terms of appearance and in terms of systems (laptops, tablets, AIOs) that come pre-calibrated and in terms of displaying as much as possible of the selected gamut. Although there are still troubles displaying all of certain gamuts and it seems like we're moving away from Adobe RGB toward DCI-P3 as the preferred advanced color gamut.

 

bunnspecial

Well-known member
I am particular about color, and I use a couple of metrics.

Admittedly I use LCDs almost exclusively now, and I have a couple of metrics. At the end of the day, though, I want to lay a transparency on my light table, have it look the same on my screen, and have what I see on the screen(and what I see in the transparency) look the same in a print.

When I lay a 6x6 or 4x5 of Fuji Velvia on the light table, I have yet to find an LCD or LED display that can correctly render the reds as I see them on the transparency. It's a deficiency in the display, though, as the prints ultimately match the colors on the transparency better than on screen.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I haven't done a whole much in the realm of scanning and I've never manually processed color film, etc.

I haven't had trouble with reds, but I haven't looked at it.

Have you seen other displays that do render those reds correctly?

One other thing I'd be interested in -- have you looked at relatively recent iPads, certain iMacs, or PixelSense Surfaces? It would be really interesting to see what your take is on some of the newest displays that claim to be able to do wide gamut. It's only in the past few years that we're starting to see LCDs really approach most or even "very much of" (like 70% or more, IIRC) of sRGB, which itself isn't a very huge color gamut, so it's not super surprising to hear about this.

 

TheWhiteFalcon

Well-known member
I'd look at the 9.7" iPad Pro's display in particular, since DisplayMate called its screen "the best LCD ever made".

 
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johnklos

Well-known member
Just as a follow-up to this thread's original purpose, I've been inadvertently using a PowerPC machine for a couple of weeks without any issues.

Where I work I was issued a brand new MacBook Pro. I originally had problems because Profile Manager was used to load on settings which would put the machine to sleep regardless of what settings I changed, which is not good for someone who works primarily in shells. After reinstalling and disabling Profile Manager, I was happy for a few months.

Then, my machine started crashing. After the third, I backed up all my files and started using my 2008 17" MacBook Pro instead. The new MacBook Pro came back, so I started using it again.

Recently, I had Terminal crash several times while in the middle of important work. Then, the whole Mac locked up. Sorry, but that's not acceptable, so I backed up my files and gave the MacBook back again.

I'm in the process of porting code to a nice IBM Power 8 system, so in preparation I brought in an old dual processor Power Mac G5. I was going to install FreeBSD on it and use ocl-icd to provide OpenCL support, then test the same code on the Power 8 system with those fancy NVIDIA Tesla K80s.

Since I hadn't gotten around to installing FreeBSD yet, the system still had Leopard. So, when my laptop frustrated me for the last time, I connected the Power Mac, fired it up, downloaded TenFourFox and the latest WebKit, and started working.

At some point I completely forgot that I'm on a Power Mac. All web sites work (and no, I don't give the slightest damn about Flash - it's dead, and I'm happy). I'm using Slack through their web interface. I've got a dozen shells open on two 1080 monitors. I've got all of my usual Unix tools installed via NetBSD's pkgsrc.

I moved the OS to a 500 gig SSD, but other than that, I haven't touched it. It just runs. The only thing I can't do is run VirtualBox, but with a Xen server on the network, I don't even need that any more. I may just keep using it, or I might swap it for a quad G5 I still have. Viva la PowerPC!

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Neat that Slack works in the browser on that machine. Is that Safari, TFF, or something else?

 

johnklos

Well-known member
Neat that Slack works in the browser on that machine. Is that Safari, TFF, or something else?
Sorry - "WebKit" is a rather generic name which can be confusing without context. There's a browser project called "leopard-webkit" which is basically modern Safari backported to PowerPC:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/leopard-webkit/

It's 100% usable everywhere I've tried. I use this primarily and TenFourFox for logging in to Google, since I don't want to browse the Internet with the same browser that's logged in to Google.

 
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