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> Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display Review
Welcome
to the Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display Review page:
In short I returned
my 23" Apple Cinema Display and got back the 20" Apple Cinema display I had bought
the day before. The 20" was so good, so I reasoned - wow, go get the 23" it will
be even better - wrong. The 23" Apple Cinema Display did actually run under Windows
XP but the color fidelity was 0/10. It is almost as if the 23" display is built
at a lower standard, or that there is no Quality assurance with this product.
This was due to 3 things. 1) a pink color cast to all neutral grey/white areas.
2) A noticeable squeeze effect at the edges where the display looked like it an
LCD being squashed. In these edge areas the color of white or grey changed to
green and was darker. I also noticed a minor shift in hue on many of the grey
pixels across the screen from left to right edges. 3) A noticeable blur compared
to the 20".
My work station area is a mixed Mac/PC affair to maximize
productivity and cross platform work. I already run a first generation polycarbonate
style 23" Cinema HD for OSX - 2 years now with no drama. I use the PC in Photoshop
and wanted a top quality display for scanning Velvia and manipulating large files
of 60Mb or more with quick response. I installed a new silver 20" Apple Cinema
display to run under Windows XP SP2 using an ATI Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Atlantis
256Mb graphics card and an ASUS A7V8X mainboard. It is a good card for the 20"
and the 23" Apple Cinema Displays. The Asus BIOS had to be set to activate the
AGP 8x first. The only fault with this combination was that during a hot-restart,
the display would remain off (black) and I had to shut down first, then start.
Once the display was in this "apple sleep mode - cannot be woken by XP" I could
not tell where the XP launch was at and after pressing the restart switch the
BIOS would halt at the error report page (I was guessing, the Cinema display was
black) so it required a full power-off - disconnect the apple display from the
PC card and then start everything again. Otherwise the results were 5 star for
the 20" with excellent color accuracy and evenness, brightness and sharpness.
I am very experienced with color accuracy in Photoshop and usually have a neutral
desktop background so as not to bias any colors which appear on screen around
the Photoshop scans I am working on. I found under windows XP that the Adobe gamma
panel was not as good as the ATI color panel (right click desktop/properties/settings/advanced/color)
where I could make more precise corrections to the lower/mid/upper ranges of the
gamma curve by eye. So far the 20" Apple Cinema display was fantastic and I was
again marveling at how well Apple engineers can build or subcontract others to
built their gear. Time to rush back to the store and get the BIG brother. Wrong
- trouble came to town. See 1/2/3 above. I thought the problem was the Ati 9600XT
card - so I switched over the display to run as a second monitor on my Mac Ati9000.
So now I had the two 23" displays running side by side, one brand new and silver
and the other two years old with 60 hours a week under the hood - that's a lot
of hours. Well it was then I knew that the NEW 23" Apple Cinema Display was going
straight back to the store. It seems obvious that the display was being squashed
at the edges thereby changing the colors in a kind of Newton Ring effect you get
with a cheap digital watch.
So I am back using the 20" Apple Cinema Display
under Windows XP and all is well - 10/10. This is a perfect way to make Windows
XP feel like a friend, even when running right next to my old 23" HD in OSX 10.3.
By the way the Ati 9600XT 256Mb is very fast in 2D using Photoshop CS. My warning
to buyers of the 23" Apple Cinema Display is that you should be very careful.
Don't be fooled by the default blue desktop and fancy visuals they run in the
retail environment. Check the product in store in a cool and calm way. Open an
Application that uses white/grey like Safari and go to google.com. Set the screen
to full width, then check out the fidelity of the grey/white at the edges. Interestingly
when I reported this problem to the store they did not even question the fault,
or open the box, the guy looked a bit sheepish - mumbled some thing which was
hard to hear. It sounded like "yeah we have had this problem before".
Buy
the Apple Cinema 23" HD Flat-Panel Display
