He says in the article that "Apple did a good job with their monitor", but what he fails to realize is that the panel in that monitor is made by Samsung, and is used in numerous other monitors, such as a bunch of Dell Ultrasharp monitors. These are the exact same monitor, except with a different frame and stand, and are available for a fraction of the cost.
While both Apple and Dell displays use LG panels, some even using the same base model (LM270WQ1), there are actually at least 10 variants of the LM270WQ1 alone which vary considerably with respect to backlight technology, brightness, color reproduction, etc.
(Hi there, I'm Clay, the creator of the picture frame mentioned here.)
You're correct that the same panel is in the Dell display, but I'm pretty sure it's made by LG, not Samsung.
I purchased one of the Dell displays for testing purposes, and unfortunately, for reasons I don't fully understand, the color on the Dell display is quite a bit worse, with non-uniform color over the display from left to right, and also variable gamma at different brightness levels. The iMac also supports finer-grained control of brightness, which you need for luminance matching. All of this makes the iMac and its display a better choice for this application.
He does not say this. In fact, at the end of the article, he writes that having the whole iMac is fairly impractical and having a smaller Android system on a chip would be the better solution.
Which monitor would you recommend that uses the same display as the 5k iMac? Apparently Samsung made one half a year ago that costs as much as the iMac itself.
Assuming some alternate monitor is equally good with colors and contrast/backlight. A simple raspberry pi should be able to do the rest of the computation needed for this.
His analysis assumes you're going to get up close to the picture to really examine the detail, up one foot away. The resolution requirements are based on that assumption. I think that's unrealistic, and a much cheaper monitor would be just as effective in creating the illusion.
