Thomas Boyd has posted results of his head-to-head comparison of two pro photo cataloging applications: Apple’s Aperture 3 and Adobe’s Lightroom 3. Seeing a bias in news and blog postings trumpeting Lightroom’s supposedly superior speed, Boyd has done his own tests, and found that Aperture 3 is much, much faster, using a MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM running an SSD – a fairly representative system for a serious Mac-based professional photographer.

“The rendering performance of Lightroom was dramatically slower than Aperture. Not only was rendering slow, there was a one or two second lag between the time of pushing the right arrow button and the time it took for the next image to appear…unrendered. It was excruciatingly slow. I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Aperture 3 workflow four times faster than Adobe Lightroom 3 [MacCreate.com]