Apple 23" Cinema Display

Features of the Apple 23" Cinema Display

While the Apple 23" Cinema Display is certainly a high end product with an MSRP of $1299, it does not have many features. Most obviously lacking from the features list is the lack of adjustment options built into the display. Mac users can fully adjust the display from inside of the Mac OS environment. However, Windows based PC users can only adjust the brightness of the display. This seems almost a cruel joke Apple is playing on Windows based PC users. The Apple 23" Cinema Display is the only display in any price range I have used that offers no real adjustability.

Apple expects their Cinema Displays to be perfect right out of the box. Granted the display is pretty close to perfect without needing adjustments built in. However, if a user wants to be able to adjust the display to their viewing environment and does not work on a Mac, you are completely out of luck.

Brightness on the 23" Apple is good at 270 cd/m₂ and it has a contrast ratio of 400:1. That contrast ratio is well below the 1000:1 that my reference Eizo CE240W provides, as is the brightness of the Apple compared to the brightness of the Eizo at 450 cd/m₂ to the Apples 270 cd/m₂.

Native resolution on the 23" Apple is 1920 x 1200 with a 0.258mm pixel pitch. Viewing angles for the Apple display are good at 178 degrees both vertical and horizontal. The typical response time for the Apple display is 14 ms, which is fairly slow compared to the other displays on the market. Apple also added a built-in two port USB hub as well as a two port FireWire 400 hub to the display. A standard single link DVI port is required to drive the display. Vesa compatibility makes the Apple 23" Cinema Display wall mountable as well.

Apple 23" Cinema Display in Use

The lack of hardware controls for adjusting the Apple display is bothersome to me. At this price range, Windows users should be able to adjust colors, and calibrate the monitor as needed. Apple says their display works so well it needs no calibration, however, Mac users can calibrate and tweak the monitor from with the Mac OS. This is the single biggest flaw in the Apple Cinema Display design. Apple was correct in that the display needed no calibration out of the box on either the Mac Mini they sent along for testing or my Windows based test system. I personally would feel much better laying out $1300 for a display I knew I could tweak if I needed or wanted to.

For the actual testing of the Apple 23" Cinema Display I used several different benchmarks that would represent the normal usage of the display across a wide variety of users. I watched a movie on it, played some games on it as well as did some normal PC type stuff like web surfing. The tests were performed on my Windows system for the most part, except for the web browsing and movie watching which were performed on the Mac Mini as well. Test system specifications for the Windows PC are as follows:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
• RAM: OCZ DDR2 PC5400 2 x 1GB
• Mainboard: Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe
• Graphics Card: XFX 7950 GX2 XXX
• OS: Windows XP SP2

The Mac Mini was a Intel Core Duo 1.66 GHz powered system with 1GB of RAM and a 80 GB HDD running the latest Mac OS X version.

The first test I performed was watching a movie on the display. I watched the movie Underworld Evolution both via the Mac movie player and with my Windows PC running in dual screen side by side mode during the movie. On the Mac, the movie looked great with good color saturation's, grey levels and no ghosting or tearing noted. The same things can be said when I watched the movie on my windows system as well.

I used both my reference Eizo CE240W and the Apple 23" Cinema Display side by side. The most obvious thing was the increased brightness and contrast of the Eizo. The Apple display looked great, but the image was sharper and clearer on the Eizo. I noticed no video playback issues on the Windows system such as ghosting or smearing if the image.

After watching the movie on the display I fired up Oblivion for some game testing on the display. Again I ran dual display mode with the same game images on each screen. The Apple display performed flawlessly with no ghosting, despite that rather slow 14ms response time. I still preferred the image on my Eizo CE240W for the sharper contrast and brighter image, though it was very close.

After gaming on the 23" Apple, I used DisplayMate for some test screens via the applications LCD script. I ran through the entire script and didn't see any glaring issues short of two dead pixels. Dead pixels are not all that uncommon on LCD displays, but at this price range I would expect the display to have no dead pixels, as I think most users would. Not only were the pixels dead, but they were close together and right in the center of the screen where all the action happens.