Slashdot Mirror
Photog Rob Galbraith Rates MacBook Pro Display "Not Acceptable"
An anonymous reader writes "Professional digital photographer and website publisher Rob Galbraith has performed both objective and subjective tests on laptop displays, finding that the late-2008 Macbook Pro glossy displays are 'deep into the not acceptable category' when used in ambient light environments. The Apple notebook came in dead last for color accuracy, and second to last in viewing angles (besting only the Dell Mini 9). He concludes: 'Macs are no longer at the top of the laptop display heap in our minds.'"
I wonder if they will test the macbook pro 17" which has a $50 matte option?
Is this one of those words that has surreptitiously entered our language like "blog" or was the title just cut-off?
Apple has now offered us a pay-to-play 'option' which fixes the display they broke in the first place (you can get matte as an option on the new 17" Macbook Pro for I think $50 but I'm not sure).
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
For f' sake, whoever modded this flamebait needs their head read. Read the summary. A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER has done extensive testing and both SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE (quantitative) tests. He use to like Mac notebooks, but the latest crop doesn't suit a pro photographer. What do the fanbois want before they'll consider an opinion they don't like? A goddamn scientific study?
For the last time Flamebait does not simply mean someone's said something that you disagree with or find inconvenient. Grow up people!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Then there's this gem:
From earlier:
Basically, if you hate glossy screens, and it would appear these individuals do, the glossy can be a deal-breaker. Which anyone with half a brain could have told you without the trollish tone
FWIW, the 17-inch MBP comes with a matte-screen option. Time will tell if such an option trickles back down to the 15".
Apple is running away from the niche markets (like imaging) that sustained them through their dark days as fast as they can. The new unibody Macbooks (and the 24" ADC^H^H^HMini-DisplayPort external LCD) are slightly faster but in many ways less functional than the models they replaced. Glossy is a bug, not a feature.
Meanwhile, HP and Dell are shipping laptops with RGB LED-backlit displays with 105% NTSC color gamut. Apple is slipping, badly, from this user's perspective.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Why make it a feature when it can be a "special bonus" or an "extra"?
Plus... haven't you heard of "downgrading to XP" costs for Vista laptops and desktops?
"Downgrading" is the new "works out of the box".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Photog" is as much of a real word describing "A person who takes photographs" as "sandw" is a word used to describe "Two or more slices of bread with a filling such as meat or cheese placed between them".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Have bad angles and limited colors. They all suck, some more or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD#TN
And they are used in virtually all laptops.
Just when wide gamut LCDs are approaching the range of colors once possible on CRTs, Apple has taken yet another step backwards with their new LED backlight displays.
My LED MacBook has a spectacularly bad display, so I went to visit the local Apple store to see if this was typical. Sadly it is, and what's more, it looks like all of Apple's LED displays are vastly inferior to that of my old iMac G5. (which has an S-IPS panel and conventional fluorescent backlight)
Color wise, the LED MacBook Pro and Cinema Display are better than the MacBook, but they are all shamefully bad, and definitely worthy of a "worst in the industry" rating. (at least color-wise)
Even if they did prefer CRTs, it's mighty hard to find a laptop that offers a CRT option these days.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Sounds to me like they deliberately choose an option with hope of failure. The matte display has been an option since the previous macbook introduction.
Yes, because someone who concluded 18 months ago that "Apple was making one of the finest laptop screens we'd seen for use in a pro digital photography workflow." is bound to be setting Apple up for failure.
Thank you for reaffirming my belief in self-delusional fanboi nature.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I think you mean English 3.0, American is English 2.0.
Hi. I am an Apple apologist and I despise the glossy screens.
They're fine on low-end laptops and 20" iMacs. If you're a pro photographer or a serious graphic artist you should probably stay away from such consumer-level hardware. These glossy abominations have no business being on MacBook Pros or LED Cinema Displays. Some of us have invested lots of money into color calibration devices and don't want this trendy bullshit ruining the color correction workflow that has worked for so long.
Right now I'm in a market for a 15" MBP to replace a PPC Powerbook but the glossy screen is preventing me from purchasing it. For starters, glossy screens are unusable in a properly illuminated room with unequal multiple light sources. Its even worse outside on a sunny day.
I wonder if Apple had realized they fucked up and offered the 17" model with an optional matte display? If glossy displays are so great, how come this traditionally stubborn company made this concession?
I'm posting from a MacBook Pro with a matte display, bought last November.
I compared the glossy and the matte laptops side by side in an Apple store. (They were the same price I believe, but obviously if buying a MacBook Pro price isn't my biggest concern.) With the matte laptop, I saw a crisp screen with vibrant colors. With the glossy laptop, I saw my dad and the sales guy reflected in the glass.
As I said, I'm posting on a matte display version.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm just wondering where the "unacceptable" and "not acceptable" from the blurb came from. The article repeatedly says the Macbook's display is acceptable. I think 'timothy' needs to read articles before accepting stories.
If any of you are looking for laptops for serious color accurate work then you might be interested in this article:
http://www.markzware.com/blogs/top-5-laptops-for-displaying-color-gamut/2008/10/14/
As someone said before, it's a niche market. Color accurate work is usually done in a S-IPS / S-PVA panel based display which has been professionally calibrated using a hardware colormeter. If money is no concern, check it the top of the line products by Eizo or the HP Dreamcolor series. At the bottom end (but still quite decent) is the HP LP2475w. However, you'll have to add a hardware colormeter to your budget.
How can you be sure it's really you? you can't see your own reflection.
Right now I'm in a market for a 15" MBP to replace a PPC Powerbook but the glossy screen is preventing me from purchasing it.
Why don't you buy the Lenovo recommended in the story & install (a retail copy of) OS X on it? That way you'll have the best of both worlds. Decent hardware & a unixy OS that runs your workflow tools.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It's industry jargon.
Photographers use the term and understand it.
That would make it a real word, wouldn't it?
-- My Weblog.
Whenever anyone complains about the state of the art for either audio or photography applications, my eyes glaze over. I would ask Rob if he would like to return to his Beseler, dialing in filters, or even, sandwiching filters. But then, I doubt he is old enough to remember the bad old days of sheet filters, and the good old days of Beseler heads. On the other hand I honestly believe I miss Kodachrome. Put in the proper perspective, matte display, glossy display, 16 bit audio, 24 bit audio, get real. It's a tempest in a teapot.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Indoors, on a desktop panel, for graphics purposes, sure. You'd ideally like the panel to be consistently washed out even if it is slightly washed out. In terms of general usability of a laptop, and particularly for use outdoors, though, I couldn't disagree more. I've used Macs for many years, and recently got a MacBook. I tried both screens and concluded that the glossy screen worked much, much better for me than the matte display when used outdoors, so long as the sun is not directly behind me (at which point it is blinding, of course).
With matte displays, any significant source of light behind me resulted in poor contrast across the entire panel because of the diffuse reflection off the mate screen, to such a degree that I found the matte displays to be very difficult to use outdoors (without a sun hood) except on the darkest, cloudiest days. With the glossy display, by contrast, light and dark areas behind me remain in sharp focus, so I can more easily ignore them; I can always move around to see the portions of the screen I need to see if some part is obscured by a light source. WIth a matte screen, no amount f moving will make the glare go away. I still sometimes use a sun hood, but at least now it is about making me more comfortable rather than being a necessity to be able to make out anything at all. :-)
I'm not going to disagree with complaints about the color reproduction, though. I've never seen an LCD panel in my life from any manufacturer where certain gradients didn't look like absolute excrement, and that's almost bordering on cruelty to the excrement. I'm sure there are some panels that are good, but I certainly haven't seen them. At this point, I'm convinced that the panel manufacturers aren't even trying anymore. Color accuracy hasn't improved significantly in five or six years, and in most cases, has actually gotten worse over that time period.
I blame the panel manufacturers for focusing so heavily on the mass market by constantly trying to make screens brighter. Every time the screens get brighter and increase in contrast ratio, they seem to consistently do so at a cost to the accuracy of their color reproduction. Most consumers, however, seem to care more about brightness than accuracy, and outside of the graphics world, I can see how that would be more useful in many cases. That said, IMHO we've reached a point where the brightness of most modern panels is basically sufficient for most purposes, so I think it's time for the panel manufacturers to take a step back and start working to fix the color accuracy of modern panels.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The auto-focus on the Canon 1Ds Mk III was, indeed, "useless" for those that needed high speed multliple shots, such as sports photographers. People were up in arms about it and Canon eventually did something about it in firmware.
I can see how your $30 solution will be ideal for photographers out in the field or at a wedding. Photographers love adding to the things they have to carry around with them especially when they could have bought a laptop that didn't need a hood attachment.
You are "splitting" your understanding of who photographers are. A photographer at a sports venue may well send everything but a photographer doing a model shoot will almost certainly do a little bit of image manipulation before showing the images to the client. Model clients like to see the images immediately these days you know and laptops make that possible. In any case are you saying that only the needs of "the big boys" are relevant?
Rob Galbraith is pretty good at what he does.
Even if one wanted to use a CRT, it is very hard. You basically have to already own one. NEC, Sony, etc all have discontinued their high end CRT lines. To the extent you can buy a CRT anymore, it is a budget display. So the people using CRTs are those that haven't upgraded, not users buying new high end gear.
Also LCDs have progressed to the point they can offer better color than even high end CRTs. The sRGB color gamut, often called "72% NTSC) is specified as it is because it matches the best most CRTs could do. That's why it became the "normal" gamut. It was what most CRTs were capable of. There were a few exceptions, NEC did have a 94% NTSC screen in the early 2000s, but it was over $4000. Not so popular.
Well LCDs are easily exceeding that gamut these days. 92% NTSC LCDs are fairly common, and you can find higher than that.
Now of course in addition to gamut, there's accuracy to worry about. True, typical TN panels are pretty bad. Goes double since all (or at least very nearly all) only have 6-bits per color channel. That means they've got to use some kind of dithering to do some of the finer color transitions. However those are just the cheap panels. There are better technologies out there. IPS, or rather it's later variants like H-IPS, would be what you want. It gives extremely accurate color, and a good viewing angle so color doesn't shift based on angle.
So an LCD can easily do as good or better than even a high end CRT in terms of color. In terms of pretty much everything else, they blow it away. One big problem with CRTs was geometry. It took a lot of fiddling to get the display squared, and it would drift over time. So you ran in to problems of "Is this line that looks curved really straight?" Kind of a bitch for design work. No problems on LCDs. Even cheap ones have perfect geometry that needs no adjustment when you use DVI.
Thus even the design world is LCDs now. They just use better ones. If you are interested, check out NEC's MultiSync 90 series. They are high quality IPS displays used by professionals. I've got one for my computer, though I'm not a graphics pro, because I like the quality of image. Only downside is you have to pay more for them. Quality isn't cheap. However it was the same in the CRT says. $150 might buy you a cheap monitor for office work, but you'd easily spend over $600 for a good pro screen.
Same deal here. Acer will be pleased to sell you a 26" widescreen LCD for about $400. However, it'll be a cheap TN panel that doesn't have particularly good color. NEC wants more like $1100 for their 26" monitor, but it is a top notch image. Planar will actually sell you a monitor with a similar image (uses the same LCD panel, just different supporting hardware) for $800. Not quite as good as the NEC since it doesn't have as advanced hardware backing it up, but much better than the Acer.
As with most things, you get what you pay for. If you've never got a high quality LCD, you've probalby not been willing to pay enough.
That explains BOTH sights (on matte and glossy screen)
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
It figures that the rare time that I actually have mod points intersects with the need to say something. I am a graphics professional who just purchased the late-model MacBook Pro when it first came out, so I fit the theoretical profile pretty well. Although I do retouch as part of daily workflow and occasional freelance, I'm not a high-end retoucher; my meat-and-potatoes comes from InDesign/Illustrator/Office (shudder).
No graphic artist in their right mind who uses a screen all day long would get a glossy one voluntarily, and that plus the previously discussed Firewire rationing gave me some headaches in decision-making. I remember struggling with glossy CRTs very well (custom films and covers, anyone?) and knew exactly what I was getting. In some ways, the result has been exactly what you'd think it would be: tilting the damn thing forward and back, turning off lights, looking for seats in cafes at 90 degrees to windows, wiping off the more-obvious keyboard artifacts of my (apparently very oily) fingers with the provided rag, etc.
On the other hand, I love it. Once the concessions are made and it's set up in the right environment, it's the sharpest, brightest laptop screen I've ever used. (This is my third Mac laptop). I pulled two 12+ hour days over the weekend making the fussiest kind of pixel and point tweaking, with _no_ significant eye strain. Everything is razor-sharp compared to my previous Powerbook, which is a real boon to older eyes.
I understand Mr. Galbraith's concerns as a photographer, but as a "regular" graphics person, even though I find the screen somewhat annoying I am usually am working in environments where the glare can be minimized and its other qualities (brightness, sharpness) outweigh the problem. The model's other features (rigidity, magnetic clasp, trackpad scroll options and gestures) make it my favorite laptop ever (knock on... glass).
Everyone's entitled to their own personal opinion, and I understand people have different needs and wants.
But every time I read a post like yours, I just find myself at a loss.
I owned one of the first aluminum MB Pros (the 2.0Ghz Core Duo model, before they moved to Core 2). It had the matte screen and the "pre chicklet style" backlit keyboard, etc. etc.
I recently sold it and bought a new 2.8Ghz MBP to replace it, and I couldn't be happier with the decision.
The hard drive is finally swappable without tearing the whole machine apart to get to it. The battery life is FAR better than what I had before (and the LED power level indicator on the side is a nice touch too). The video performance is better, and I can put 4GB of RAM in it now, instead of the 2GB limit I had previously. I don't have any real issues with its glossy screen either. Sure, you get some reflections with it, but it's GLASS. That's normal. Especially being a PORTABLE computer, I have no problem picking it up and MOVING it a little bit, if there's some particularly bright and annoying light-source shining directly onto the screen from behind me.
Now granted, I'm not a "pro photographer" or anything ... but I think I'm like most notebook computer users. I do a lot of web surfing on mine, some web design, a little gaming and entertainment stuff (especially if I take it on a trip with me), and keep a collection of photos on it that I have incorporated or may incorporate onto said web sites I work with. I might want to watch an occasional movie on it too. It's been great for all of that.
To hear the people focused on ONE specific need scream that it's no longer a "compelling upgrade", and the whole design team must be "crazy" .... it really does a disservice to everyone else.