Photographer Fazal Majid has published his initial impressions of Apple’s Aperture software.

“Aperture is not the lightning-fast RAW converter we have been dreaming of. Importing RAW files is quite a sluggish affair, taking 2 minutes 15 seconds to import a 665MB folder with 86 Canon Rebel XT CR2 RAW files. In comparison, Bridge takes about a minute to generate thumbnails and previews for the same images. The comparison is not entirely fair, as Aperture’s import process yields high-resolution previews that allow you to magnify the image to see actual pixels with the loupe tool, whereas Bridge’s previews are medium resolution at best. The CPU utilization on my dual G5 is far from pegged however, which suggests the import process was not particularly tuned for SMP or multi-core systems, nor that it even leverages OS X’s multithreading.”

Website: Apple Aperture First Impressions