Early hands-on review roundup of Apple's new 27-inch Retina iMac

It almost goes without saying: The new iMac has a stunning display. It's exactly as sharp as you'd expect, even from way off to the side.

While specs can give a rough impression of things, this is truly a screen that you need to look at in order to really understand just how much detail you get with it. Viewing photos on it, you suddenly appreciate the number of pixels and level of detail that a modern digital camera is capable of taking. You also realise that you've never seen the detail from your camera in this way before, with prints and existing displays simply not delivering.

We were taken through a series of sample shots, and they looked astounding. Every tiny bit of fine detail in every image was there in front of us. It completely gave us a new way of looking at photos; this is a screen that every photographer is going to want to have.

The Apple iMac with Retina display looks brilliant. I mean, of course it does: There are just too many freaking pixels here (and too much of Apple's reputation for excellence) for it to be anything but stellar... If you ask me, it's pretty jaw-dropping.

The big worry with a screen this good, and this high-res, is that it would cause performance problems. It's hard to say for sure in a demonstration, but based on what we've seen performance doesn't seem to be an issue. The iMac with Retina display comes with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB Fusion Drive, and it's upgradeable to a crazy degree - the model we saw was scrubbing seamlessly through dozens of clips of 4K video, moving through photos and edits with ease, and generally behaving like it wasn't also powering a 5K display.

When we clapped eyes on it at the launch event in Berlin, we were fully prepared to be underwhelmed, but after being shown a series of high-resolution images and videos, we were more than pleasantly surprised. The level of detail bursting from every image was quite astonishing.

First of all, Apple told me they re-architected the pixels at an organic level and switched to an oxide thin-film transistor, which Apple says allows the pixels to charge faster and hold their charge longer. They also replaced what's known as the Timing Controller. When you have so many millions of pixels, they need to know when to fire and, I'm guessing, not to fire. The controller also has more bandwidth than previous ones to handle all the pixel communication traffic.

Much more interesting is how Apple is driving it. Since no one has a 5K timing controller (TCON) yet, Apple went and built their own. This is the first time we're aware of Apple doing such a thing for a Mac, but it's likely they just haven't talked about it before. In any case, Apple was kind enough to confirm that they are driving the new iMac's display with a single TCON.