I've spoken to a few more people about the methods used by both Vista OS and now the Apple OS and was pointed to this page: <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Technology_Overview/GraphicsTechnologies/chapter_4_section_2.html> which explains: "Quartz 2D Features provides many important features to user applications, including the following: Anti-aliasing for all graphics and text" more on anti-aliasing is to be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing now that is downright depressing! "Anti-aliasing for all graphics and text" *all* and the mac geeks I've spoken to confirmed this, but I'd like to know more because this removes the current mac OS from the image editing ranks for me altogether if that is actually the case Anti-aliasing basically translates as 'fuzzing up the jaggedy bits in an image to make them look more realistic' For the viewer of the screen doing this trick, that makes images look nice to them - but it's NOT what you'd want as an image editor! You upsample your image, it looks nice to you, you load it to the web and to everyone whos operating system diplays images as 2D (75+% of the world) sees jaggies or artifacts that your operating systems graphics rendering hid from you! For theWindows users you can easily see an example of this, play any old 3D game and hit print screen .. finish the game, open an image editor and hit paste - look at the resulting image .. does it look at all like it did in the game? no. it IS however exactly all the information that was being fed through the graphics engine, however anti-aliasing and other 3D engine tools were being employed to make it look more realistic - and that's the crux of it - it ('it' being the actual image data) was being prettied up by the graphics engine. For the whole operating system to be rendering images in such a way as to make them look prettier is a nice idea but NOT for people doing image editing! We need to see what's actually there, not an interpretation!! No point using an optmized 2D card under such an operating system eiter, if the potential benefits are being eliminated by the OS now seriously, this strikes me as a huge flaw in the apple (marketing?) design - the backbone of these computers was always image pros, for the apple industry to have compromised their designs this way is as bad as the Vista graphics engine design. karl
