Apple's new 24inch LED Cinema Display

Posted by Stephan Kristyn on February 2nd, 2010 / No Comments

Today I went to the only Apple Store in Germany to take a look at the ACD 24″. The Store was extremely crouded and it was very hard to get my hands on the ACD. I could check it out for about 10 minutes. The Display looks and feels absolutely amazing. So in a way, I am sold.

A swift checkup of Video, Brightness and Text revealed more of its Qualities to me.

+ Build Quality is amazing

+ Video looked good and not very blurry with nice and very deep black levels. Blur was maybe a bit more than on an TN Panel

+ Text looked sharp, a lot sharper than on the 30″ ACD next to it. I observed sharp text also on the IPS Panel in the 2209WA by DELL

- Color reproduction was not the best of its class. I would say the DELL 2209WA with its comparable Inplane Switching Panel had more natural colors. Colors were only near natural on 60% brightness, on 100% brightness the colors were off scale. Blue was way to blueish, I guess this effect reduces the visible color range a lot.

- Brightness less than 100% was too low because of the whole reflection thing going on. So the reflections did not disturb me directly, but they indirectly worsened contrast a lot.

To sum it up, I would say for general purpose use and movies this screen is very nice. Given the quality of the exterior the price is ok. Extending the warranty to 3 years with Applecare would be a must-have. I read user reports of occasional dust patterns below the glass front.

Let’s get to the infamous but - if you need color accuracy run home and try forget the haptics of the ACD – you may need 2-3 glasses of whiskey. You got to stick to the ugly Eizos or NECs made out of plastics. Your work’s results will thank you later.

One more thing, the ACD comes with a mini display port, so to hook it up to your PC, you’ll need a Matrox Graphics Card with mini display port. If you want a 3D graphics card you’ll most likely be the first one on the net to try it.