New Apple 23" Cinema Display

Hey, this thing is really nice!

I'm in the process of waiting for a new computer. Why wait? The problem is two fold.

Fold One: The target (CPU advances) is moving so fast right now I want to wait for a quad core (Core 2 Quad).  I won't be able to wait for a true on die quad but maybe a Kentsfield will be ok.

Fold Two: Every time I price out a new system of my dreams, it is quite expensive.

The solution to these folds, attack from two directions.

Direction one, let time pass for the Core 2 Quads to come out at reasonable prices, maybe January or February 2007.

Direction two, well a big chunk of the price for systems I've been spec-ing has been a new display. Hey, displays aren't really evolving that fast and so, I can get one now that is all I will ever (till the next great thing) need. That way I spread the cost of the system over a few months and the new computer won't be quite so daunting.

My desires regarding a new display were to have a wide screen aspect ratio display. I really WANT/need the extra real estate. I'm forever finding myself with lots of windows open and being able to possibly see a few of them simultaneously will be a real benefit over having to constantly ALT-TAB through the or dive to the task bar, well that will be a nice change. In addition to a wide aspect ratio, I want more real estate physically meaning a bigger screen and programmatically a screen with more pixels to paint stuff onto.

I settled on three screens.

1. Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP Wide-Screen Black Flat Panel
2. Viewsonic VP2330wb
3. Apple 23" Cinema Display

Dell was excellent, especially the price.

Viewsonic was perhaps spec-ed best.

But, I live in a tiny outpost of civilization (Denver, Colorado) and apparently none of the big retailers here carry anything in the way of "large" displays except Apple, in their own stores.

Call me a coward but I just don't want to deal with a bad LCD without having a person I can frown at if I need some support. Apple stores have always treated me great so they won.

The cinema display LOOKS terrific. It may not match the contrast ratio of the others but when I stared into the display at the apple store it was quite nice. Apple is quite smart in that they let their customers roam the internet from any computer. So, I sidled up to the 23" display, downloaded a BIG PHOTO of mine (10megpix from a Nikon D200), fired up Photoshop and looked at the photo close up, backed up physically and peeked at it. Moved off axis (really a really minor issue with me as long as brightness is constant from the operator's position plus or minus 20° or so) and the screen remained nice and bright at extreme angles.

I then downloaded some desktop screen captures I left on one of my websites so I could see how my home desktop would be expanded upon with the new monitor. That was impressive. My old monitor is a Samsung Syncmaster 191T. Max resolution 1280x1024. New monitor 1920x1200. OH YEAH BABY! Screen real estate to burn. Well not really burn perhaps but it is impressively bigger.

I should have thought about this a bit more and taken a current desktop from the Samsung before I hauled it down. But I did take some "environmental" shots. You can click on the photos and download much larger versions of them to compare the desktops of the two displays.

In the lower right hand corner of each display is a bandwidth monitoring utility (DU Meter) stacked on an email checking program (ePrompter). These two programs are occupying the exact same number of Pixels on both displays, so you can easily see how much more pixel real estate is on the new display.

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Samsung 19" Syncmaster 191T

Apple 23" Cinema Display

And here is a desktop image screen captured off the new display:

The physical screen height on the Apple is 12.25" and on the Samsung it's 12.0". This is the measurement from the inside of the bezel edge (top to bottom). The Samsung can display 1024 pixels vertically, the Apple CD 1200 pixels. So the increased number of pixels means  the icons and displayed information on the new Apple display are smaller, specifically 0.85333 times the size of the information on the Samsung. I discarded the 1/4th inch and just did a pixel comparison since the monitors so closely resemble each other physically in height. I found my mental adjustment to this reduction in size TOTALLY acceptable. I was wary of this "problem". I've seen laptops with relatively small screens running 1600x1200 and I really would have had problems with that native resolution on a 15" screen. Running native at 1920x1200 on a 23" screen, I've had absolutely no problems with websites using tiny text. Everything is easily readable. The fonts below the icons (some of the smallest text I encounter on a daily basis) are easily read on the desktop. So, this slight reduction in physical size of displayed data is fine for these old eyes.

You can click on the desktop image above and download a full size image (1920x1200) to get a real feel for the size but I mercilessly compressed the JPG since the quality isn't specifically in question. Or if it is, just take my word for it until you can stop by an Apple Store, the images are EXCELLENT on the Apple display. Hmmm, come to think of it, a screen capture isn't telling you anything about display quality, just the size and distribution of data in that screen size and layout. Pixel pitch is nice, 0.25 MM. I view the display from a distance of ~ 28 to 30 inches. From that distance I can't make out the individual pixels. I can't even see them with a normal magnifying glass. However, with a loop the RGB patterns emerge.

Install

So, how about installation? Well, it was quite simple. In anticipation of having a new monitor I downloaded the latest drivers for my video card, an "ancient" Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB vram. I knew that the card would drive this display at its native resolution with the new drivers. I installed them prior to putting the new monitor in service.

The monitor bundles its DVI cable, power cord, a Firewire 400 and USB cable all into one cord. I threw the cable over the back of the desk crawled down under, disconnected the old monitor, installed the new DVI, USB, Firewire and Power cables. Physically ... finished.

I sat down in front of the new system, turned on the UPS. There are several of those touch sensitive switches to turn the monitor on and off and adjust the brightness. I  brushed the power switch and turned it on. Strangely, the monitor displayed a bunch of ugly vertical lines of different colors. My Dell XPS was in the boot process. I was surprised by those lines. So I purposely brushed the power switch and the monitor shut down obediently. Another touch and it came back on, but this time it was displaying the log-on screen. It looked like the computer/video card had discovered that the old settings (1280x1024) were incorrect as it was in a mode that looked like the standard VGA driver startup. Maybe 800x600, maybe 640x480. Not really sure. The aspect ratio was off and the width was being stretched to fill the entire screen. Booting continued normally after log-on and I was dumped onto my desktop after a while. I right-clicked the desktop, selected properties from the menu, selected the Settings tab and sure enough, the Samsung monitor was missing, but instead I was getting a "Plug and Play Monitor on Radeon 9800 Series" indicator. Ok, that's good I guess. I grabbed the screen rez slider, and swung it over to 1920x1200. Clicked OK, and the monitor blinked and dropped into native rez mode. It was a real delight to see everything sharpen up nicely and see all was as it should be.

So, setup... It's about as near to completely "Plug and Play" as you could ask for.

I played for a while then shut everything down. Then a cold restart. First I started the monitor, next the computer. I got those vertical lines again but when the boot process reached the place where the computer drops into the operating resolution (just before the log-on screen appears) everything straightened out. That was the last time the monitor was off. I'll have to try the cold start again sometime turning the monitor on after the computer has been working on boot. I have to believe that I can get the monitor to display vanilla video. It seemed to be doing that initially and someday I may need to enter the BIOS. Hmmm, still no luck. The Cinema Display doesn't seem to want to work with my Radeon until the card is flipped into native resolution. During a cold start firing the computer first then the monitor, I still get the lines. And during a warm reboot during a software update no visible stuff but the dreaded lines until the native resolution was initiated by the OS. Still haven't tried safe mode. That will come later.

So, what have I been doing for the past 6 hours?

Editing a bunch of photos for desktop wallpapers. I save photos in their high rez versions straight out of the camera so cropping out 16x10 aspect ratio photos in native resolution was no problem and in fact a pleasure to see the desktops become ever so much more vivid and sharp.

Updating a web site I manage.

The email grind.

And some news snooping, you know, Firefox with a bunch of news sites fired up.

I'm a happy camper. Editing in Photoshop is very nice. Photo editing will always benefit from more pixels displayed and larger images so you can see what you're doing. The website, well it requires me to open up a program, run some predictions on where a balloon might fly. Screen capture a bunch of windows, save a bunch of data. This was much nicer than having the more limited space of my previous monitor. I spread out the prediction program and web site manager on the same desktop with some room to spare and was dragging stuff around like a bandit. Nice! Email, well no real change there as it is pretty much a one or two window endeavor at most but the screen is very sharp and clear so perhaps ... no, no change there. Web browsing, well frankly in this instance I wasn't really pushing it. With a modern browser like Firefox you can open a bunch of pages in tabs within one window. So when I'm doing News, it is one instance of Firefox with lots of tabs. But, I can see that it is going to be fun. Hmmm, wait a second and take a look at this:

In the foreground, FrontPage making this web page, lower right with the pink background text is the prediction program. The radar display bottom center is a display from the prediction program as is the map lower left. Upper left is a Google search for EOSS, the balloon group I predict for and webmaster for, and upper right is the prediction webpage open in a firefox window with 7 other tabs active to show other pages of interest when discussing an upcoming balloon flight. While only the FrontPage window and the main prediction program are fully visible and not obscured by overlapping windows, All the other windows are very easy to distinguish and click into. So, this is really going to be a fun new environment for me to work in. Can't wait for a computer to match the spiffy new display.

And as a requiem for the old display, hey that thing is still FANTASTIC. In the next day or so I'll move it over to one of the older computers I have and it will be a huge improvement over the 17" CRT that seems to have big troubles with anything over 1024x768. Well not troubles, just that at 1280x1024 it looks very soft. So, for those of you out there who are Samsung LCD monitor fans, I'm with you folks. They make a great display. Thanks for years of excellent photon generation!