Will there ever be a 30" Cinema Display again?

S

shurcooL

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 12, 2007
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What do you guys think?

I really don't like the 27" size/resolution because you're paying so much money, yet you're still getting something 1-size-down from the biggest screen/resolution available.

Plus vertical room is very important these days of web-browsing, and the OS X dock takes up more vertical space unless you move it.
 
shurcooL said:
What do you guys think?

I really don't like the 27" size/resolution because you're paying so much money, yet you're still getting something 1-size-down from the biggest screen/resolution available.

Plus vertical room is very important these days of web-browsing, and the OS X dock takes up more vertical space unless you move it.
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I see your qualms about the step down in resolution. But the dock is easily fixable by having it auto-hide or scaling it down in size.
 
1440 is still vertically taller than every other display on the market other than 30" monitors. Look I understand the argument up to a certain degree, but while I'm using my 13" MBP with an 800 pixel vertical resolution I don't think I'm super awesome because I'm viewing a webpage in 16:10.
While using a 27" iMac I had the same lament, but honestly after a day or so of usage, I realized it was fine and complaining wasn't going to make my monitor get any bigger.

2560x1440 is more than enough for any form of web browsing. Heck, most webpages are still optimized for 800x600 or 1024x768. If you must have 30", there are other alternatives rather than Apple...
 
I think Apple showed their true colours here first - the only 'Pros' they've ever satisfyingly catered for are those who don't really know what they're doing. These drones will happily (or in some cases only slightly begrudgingly) migrate to the 27's. The inexorable march of Apple towards the sole manufacture of shiny consumer tat.

Anyone else have temperature related issues by the way? Squirrelly operation in temps under 13-14C? Also resolution / distortion issues when using the Apple dual-link DisplayPort adapter? Apple come bottom of the heap for me in terms of display reliability as well (piss-poor computer reliability is a given) but these are annoying small banes in the use of the ACD30's that I haven't been able to successfully Applecare away.
 
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Ronco, are you going to keep buying Macs/Apple products?
 
450 said:
Ronco, are you going to keep buying Macs/Apple products?
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As long as I have some degree of dependency on OSX, yeah - I just replaced a whole bunch of XServes with racked Pros's (ironically, just before the news about the XServe - part of the reason I did it is that the Pro's would be easier to unload when - or if - I'm done with OS X). Or until Hackintoshing gets native-identical in terms of stability / supportability and I can reasonably confidently run production OS X on hardware worth a damn instad of the shiny glorified home computers that Apple cranks out.
 
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Ronco said:
As long as I have some degree of dependency on OSX, yeah - I just replaced a whole bunch of XServes with racked Pros's (ironically, just before the news about the XServe - part of the reason I did it is that the Pro's would be easier to unload when - or if - I'm done with OS X). Or until Hackintoshing gets native-identical in terms of stability / supportability and I can reasonably confidently run production OS X on hardware worth a damn instad of the shiny glorified home computers that Apple cranks out.
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They'll probably virtualize OSX Server eventually.
 
aznx said:
They'll probably virtualize OSX Server eventually.
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It's already virtualised. The licensing/etc issues - i.e. you can only run OS X Server on Apple hardware, even if virtualised - remain.
I would love to run it on my BladeSystems / Proliants. Having said that the servers/Pro's are the least of the problems (well, I hope in the case of the Pro's) as they're in a controlled environment. It's more the shitty front-end hardware - the Pro's when used as a workstation included - that I have daily issues with.
 
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I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath. I really like the 27" due to its higher pixel density (I know this annoys some people but I like it) and the fact that it gives a lower cost alternative for a huge display. I used to have two 24" displays for Final Cut, now I just use a single 27" even though I still have access to another 24". It is practically like having dual 24" displays in FCP, now I just keep my 24" NEC dedicated to my PC.

That said, it is a shame that Apple is flat out getting out of the 30" LCD market, especially since the 30" ACD is still one of the most color accurate standard gamut LCDs out there.
 
I'm not a fan of 16:9 replacing 16:10 generally but I actually prefer 27" 2560x1440 to 30" 2560x1600. I find it very difficult to use the vertical real estate without bothering either my eyes or neck at 24" 1920x1200 or higher when at or a little beyond arms length to the display. Moving it further away is not an option with the DPI and lack of any resolution independent interfaces in OS X or Windows yet.

That said the wider displays tend to make white glow and viewing angle shifts all that much noticeable when viewed from the center directly on as you would in normal usage. I can only imagine how awful gamma shifting and black crush would be if these panels were PVA instead of IPS.
 
Serpico said:
That said, it is a shame that Apple is flat out getting out of the 30" LCD market, especially since the 30" ACD is still one of the most color accurate standard gamut LCDs out there.
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I don't know where people get this from - whether they just parrot the marketing that Apple reels out. I've accumulated multiple 23 and 30-inchers over the years (this year I had a huge clear-out of most of them as I reduced my OS X desktop count) and some of them vary so much as to be impossible to calibrate to equivalence. Much rarer to have that situation with similar (PVA in some cases) monitors from Dell, HP and Eizo. It's been especially bad on the 23's, but you'll hear the same talk about 'the most colour accurate standard gamut monitor out there'. They're OK in terms of performance, worse than most in terms of reliability - an Apple logo doesn't imbue magical properties on them.
 
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Ronco - Just going off of personal experience, and the experience of friends in the post-production world. I can't recall ever hearing a negative thing about them. I'm specifically talking about the 30" btw, I have zero experience with the 23" ACD. I myself went with an NEC 2490WUXi when I got my own monitor in that size range.

Either way, the huge influx of wide gamut monitors over the last few years has made me appreciate displays like the 30" ACD and olders Dells even more. Color accuracy and awareness in applications is finally getting better, but we are still a few years away from a time when more than a narrow subset of applications and games will work properly with wide gamut monitors. Fortunately you have the pro PA series NECs with what I understand is good sRGB emulation that can be calibrated within hardware. Of course, you'll be paying the price for it with the 24" and 27" ranging from $1000-$1500.
 
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Serpico said:
Ronco - Just going off of personal experience, and the experience of friends in the post-production world. I can't recall ever hearing a negative thing about them. I'm specifically talking about the 30" btw, I have zero experience with the 23" ACD. I myself went with an NEC 2490WUXi when I got my own monitor in that size range.
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The question is, how many of your friends run them in dual+ configurations. Home is the only scenario I have a single 30-inch monitor hanging off one PC/Mac. I don't really have huge image quality issues with them, but the BS sprouted by many Macheads about how these come precalibrated is utter nonsense for starters - and they can be shockingly unreliable, at least to those used to other prosumer monitors.
 
Ronco said:
The question is, how many of your friends run them in dual+ configurations. Home is the only scenario I have a single 30-inch monitor hanging off one PC/Mac. I don't really have huge image quality issues with them, but the BS sprouted by many Macheads about how these come precalibrated is utter nonsense for starters - and they can be shockingly unreliable, at least to those used to other prosumer monitors.
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I'm talking about post-production houses, and I honestly can't remember seeing two 30" LCDs in one setup. Multiple 24" displays, sure, but I can't recall seeing multiple 30-inchers.

Also, when did I ever talk about the 30" ACDs being perfectly pre-calibrated, and how is not-perfect pre-calibration a negative? Any serious color work is going to need hardware calibration on their monitors, that is a given. They do have a nice flat gamma and soft accurate color/skin tone, that's what people like about it. Again, out-of-the-box calibration isn't a negative since it is required anyway. In doing telecine color correction for video, post-houses have moved from CRTs to plasmas (you aren't going to get comparable color accuracy or black level with an LCD), and you can bet that even those professionally targeted plasmas require massive amounts of calibration in order to get them in line with each other, much moreso than the out-of-the-box color you get with a high end Dell or Apple LCD. That doesn't automatically mean that those plasmas are bad, and in the end it is worth that effort.
 
No - I was just referencing an oft-quoted fallacy from those who believe anything with an Apple logo on it has fairy dust sprinkled on it.
 
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