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Matsu
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2022-03-21, 12:15

So, I took a bit of a dive on Mac Studio display info. I think the panel is suitable for professional work, with a few caveats. Let's call it a premium panel implementation that lacks some of the very highest end features, but likely compensates for them in well decided ways. DPReview has a pretty good general write up.
  • It is not the LG ultrafine 5K panel, which is obvious in the video on at least a couple of Youtube reviews I watched. (and more on that later)
  • It is not a "true 10-bit" panel, but rather an 8 bit+FRC, albeit a very good one, color stability/accuracy is excellent already using preset calibrations, and can improved even more.
  • Panel uniformity is excellent.
  • No hardware LUT, but at least in MacOS, it has a comprehensive set of trim/adjustment controls that the display does store settings in it's own memory. They confirmed by making changes through a mac and the display carrying them over when connected to a PC.

A few other tidbits:
  • The power cord is removable. One reviewer just pulled it straight out, but Apple has a specialized tool to avoid breaking the connector. Hint, you could make your own tool with a soup can and a oil filter wrench. It's easy to imagine iFixit and the like with cord replacement kits for DIYers, eg, people who need a longer power cord for some sort of custom installation? From the pics it looks like a thick pressure fit gasket holds the power cord connector in place. The connector itself is just a shallow three prong purposely designed to fit within the display profile. It's not so much that it can't be pulled, it's that doing it ham handedly or too often would probably result in someone bending the pins.
  • HDR It's not an HDR certified panel, but... it seems to be able to display HDR600, and was able to show HDR content quite well compared to the LG Ultrafine 5K. This is the clearest evidence that neither panel, backlight or coatings are the same... Seemed from the test I saw that so long as you could control your room lighting, you could view HDR content correctly on it.
  • It has 64GB of memory in it. That seems enough to me to be able to add quite a robust set of features to it or turn it into a smart display, among whatever else Apple can think up.

My impressions from all this.

It got me to take a look at what's out there in display tech, and my biggest concerns with Apple's display has more to do with how I use displays. I use two displays. Two Apple displays is one way to go about it. That can be pricey, and the duplication of iSight and speakers is arguably wasted there. But there really aren't any other 5K choices out there, not at 27" or any other size, they seem to have all disappeared in favor of 4K or non-standard ultrawides. There's lots of good 4K panels at 27", but I'm not sure what it will be like in Mac OS filtering between an 218ppi screen on one side (Apple 5K) and a 164ppi screen on the other side (4K 27"). I use two 2560x1440 panels, so nothing changes tracking across the screens. When I'm plugged into a work laptop, I still have roughly the same ppi (1366x768 14" screen), but I tend to keep all my work on the 27" screen and just have the laptop open for teams chat and video. It gets kinda annoying when I drag something over and I hit the edge of the larger screen and have to mouse over to the shared edge or a portion of the window disappears or gets redrawn as I track into the smaller display. It's be nice if Apple could scale the smaller resolution display to present all the UI elements the same size (but more pixelated) rather than smoothing the higher res display. Basically if the UI could recognize that the physical dimensions of the screen are the same and let the mouse and windows move across 100% of the shared edge (but simply be more pixelated on the 5K screen and sharper on the 5K side, tricky when dealing with resized image and/or video windows perhaps??? Anyway, I don't know, having not tested mismatched displays in ages.

And speaking of 4k 27"... In a perfect world I'd go even bigger, but there's quite a bit of price difference between 27 and 32" prices, and after a careful look there might be some good budget choices at 27" 4K. I think HP is worth looking at here. They have a nicely priced 4K, 10-bit (8bit+FRC likely), matte, 600 nit, DCI-P3, 27" HDR600 rated display with pretty good reviews: HP Z27xs G3 goes for $674USD. HP's online presence is horribly disorganized, so getting good info from them isn't straightforward, but the reasonable sources I found indicate it's quite decent even in factory calibration. It's even attractive enough for a display...

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Last edited by Matsu : 2022-03-21 at 15:57.
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