[votoms888]

I just bought a 20" 2.16 iMac. I only have a few days left that I can exchange it for a 24". I will primarily be using it to watch HD movies. Is FW400 fast enough to watch an HD movie from? Or do I need the FW800 on the 24"? Please help as I don't have much time.

[Will C]

What format will your HD movies be? e.g. HD-DVD etc.

A vague answer but, it will depend on the format/amount of compression. Uncompressed will be a definite no no as the data rate is over 800Mbs but this is rare in the home enviroment and mostly encountered in high end editing.

[Personally I would go for the 24 inch model as it can display 1080 line HD (1920x1080 pixels) without scaling and I like the bigger screen]

[mduell]

FW400 is fine for playing HD content; Blu-Ray and HD-DVD top out at 30-50Mbps, and a lot of the HD content available is 20Mbps or less.

The reason I'd buy the 24" over the 20" is so you can watch HD (1080i and 1080p) content at full resolution rather than downgraded to the 20" iMac's resolution.