Those Apple Cinema Displays are magnificent. The other day, I happened to walk by a downtown medical/dental/not sure what/ office , that had a (what looked like a 23-inch) ACD in operation, and it immediately caught my eye. There are not many ACDs in use, but the ones that are out there are remarkable … they seem to have a ‘not-of-this-world’ quality about them, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that makes them so distinctive.
Monitors are usually evaluated on the basis of pixel response time, brightness, viewing angle, contrast ratio and color reproduction. In almost all of these areas, the specs for the Cinema Display are very good, but not extraordinary :
- 16ms pixel response
- 270 cd/m2brightness
- 170 degree viewing angle
- 400:1 contrast ratio
- 16.7 million colors (24-bit color depth)
The source of the ethereal qualities of the Cinema Displays must lie elsewhere – perhaps from some synergistic combination of the following :
- SWOP certified to a tolerance of 2.5 delta-E
- A wide color gamut – larger than a CRT
- 100 pixels/inch, finer than almost all LCDs
- 0.250 mm pixel pitch (for the 30-inch ACD)
- A certain “je ne sais quoi” quality in the area of luminescence and clarity
Many reviewers associate the following words with the Cinema Display : “Amazing”, “Awesome”, “Stunning” — and from what I have seen, I would agree. I’m looking forward to the possibility of using a 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display for a short time …. with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels, and a price of about $3000, it makes for quite a monitor.
The 30-inch model also requires a NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL in order to drive those 4 million pixels …. adds about $600 to the cost.
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By the way, what’s the biggest Apple Cinema display that’s been released by this point?
i think more tech reviewers should take into account that “je ne sais quoi” quality that many outstanding devices share.