Apple releases new 27″ LED Cinema Display – comes with a free Mac

http://blog.expandrive.com/2009/10/20/apples-releases-new-27-led-cinema-display-comes-with-a-free-mac/

by hemancuso • 17 years ago

130 89 17 years ago

blog.expandrive.com

dcurtis• 17 years ago

Amazingly, the new iMacs have s-IPS screens, too! So not only are you getting a free Mac, but you're getting a tremendously higher quality display as well. (Actually, I don't think any other LED-backlit IPS screens exist for sale.)

DenisM• 17 years ago

Dell has a much cheaper U2410 which is also IPS, although not LED.

quellhorst• 17 years ago

The dell is 24" and 1920x1200 vs the 27" iMac with 2560x1440

masklinn2• 17 years ago

Are you sure they aren't E-IPS?

(also, the 24" Cinema Display uses H-IPS — which is better than S-IPS and E-IPS — and is LED backlit)

pmjordan2• 17 years ago

Too bad it looks like they still use the glossy finish. Especially on a screen that size, it's got to be tricky to find a geometric configuration in which you get no reflections throughout the day.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

I have the 24" glossy iMac, and after putting blackout curtains on the windows of the room it's in, I've had no issues. I guess that's not an ideal solution...

mdemare• 17 years ago

That's a pretty compelling argument actually - especially since all monitors I can find with comparable resolutions (2560x1440) are over $1000.

borism• 17 years ago

What's so compelling?

So Apple got a good deal from LCD panel supplier. Wait a month or two and you'll get the same deal for a display without embedded Mac.

Unless you were planning to buy iMac anyway, I don't see what's so exciting about this "deal".

amichail5• 17 years ago

Anyone find it irritating when a company advertises the environmental benefits of a product (e.g., LED displays)?

It's sort of like putting words into your mouth, making assumptions about your worldview.

slyn• 17 years ago

The benefit of an LED display goes beyond just the environmental benefit. LED backlights don't have a warmup time like CFL backlights, and they provide a more uniform brightness level across the panel. The panel will also be cheaper to run over the lifetime of the device because of its energy savings (lower TCO, to borrow a term from the server community).

The fact that they are mercury free is just one of many reasons why LED backlights are considered a marketing point.

bingaman• 17 years ago

Well, e-waste IS a massive worldwide problem, so you should be considering how you're purchases will be disposed and what effect that will have on the environment. Is that a worldview? If you haven't seen Frontline's Digital Dumping Ground episode, it's worth watching: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/vid...

amichail5• 17 years ago

This is what I mean. These lectures are really irritating and would make me LESS likely to buy a product.

lupin_sansei4• 17 years ago

From the site: "They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine the health implications."

It's not obvious to me that these poor people would be better off not recycling the e-waste. I certainly wouldn't fancy doing it, but if the alternative was starvation for my family I might consider it.

I'm not at all sure that it would benefit the people of Ghana if there was no e-waste.

As for dumping toxic waste that's a problem enabled by government/courts that don't function properly.

Further it's not clear in the video how the e-waste gets there. There's the implication that the West simply dumps it there, but clearly the governments of the West don't do that, nor do companies like Apple. Probably what happens is that Ghanian companies import it from e-waste collection companies in the West.

azim• 17 years ago

Displays with an LED backlight are also capable of displaying a wider color gamut than those with a CCFL.

amichail5• 17 years ago

The sales pitch should only mention the performance benefits of a technology, leaving any environmental benefit to perhaps a subtle sticker on the product that one can easily remove.

blackguardx3• 17 years ago

Where is this documented? What are the CIE color points of apple's new display?

zokier5• 17 years ago

Wider (nonstandard) gamut is not always a good thing if applications are not aware of it. With no color correction, normal srgb images will look oversaturated and cartoonish. Even with proper application support, overly wide gamut isn't that useful because there just isn't a lot of wide gamut material to display on your fancy screen. And therefore you are just wasting precious bits to represent colors that will be rarely used in most desktop usage.

Image editing is one area where there is an actual use for wide gamut, but for all other uses, it creates more trouble than what it is worth.

ynniv• 17 years ago

Apple started wearing their environmental impact on their sleeve after Greenpeace screwed them over: [ http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/E83D58B3-10E0-4A9C-884... ]

ellyagg• 17 years ago

Haha, you're not likely to find anyone sympathetic to that perspective in this forum. Anyway, Apple has a fairly explicit leftist worldview itself, and it's never been a policy of SJ to be all things to all people.

amichail5• 17 years ago

BTW, I think the whole idea of liberal vs conservative is also offensive as it assumes that people fall into two groups each of which thinks alike on a whole host of issues -- as if their worldviews were a result of brainwashing.

hemancuso• 17 years ago

LED also provides a much more consistent brightness across the backplane. Combine that with no 10 minute warm-up time and better lifetime performance, it's hard to whine about them advertising it.

Unless you really hate Earth, I guess.

ptomato• 17 years ago

Anyone find it irritating when a company advertises the [insert niche technical spec here] of a product?

It's sort of like putting words into your mouth, making assumptions about your workflow.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

Yeah, something that caught my attention was the bragging about how much less power it uses. If I didn't already like Macs, I would certainly assume they were trying to make me feel better about buying a more expensive machine which will run perceptibly more slowly. Shutting down a processor core between keystrokes seems like one of those things that sounds great in theory, but in practice will produce the old familiar beachball more often, since sometimes my 24" iMac has trouble keeping up with my typing already.

But probably you can turn that off, just as I've had to do with the low energy settings on my iMacs and old Powerbook.

PStamatiou• 17 years ago

just as i was getting happy with the 1920x1200 on my 17-inch MBP (i'm huge fan of high pixel pitch)...

jac_no_k• 17 years ago

Now if only Apple would get around to putting in a non-glossy 1920x1200 panel in a 15 inch MBP, I would have even less reason to not move on from my aging Dell 8600.

weaksauce3• 17 years ago

http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MB986LL/A?mco=MTA4MTgyNj...

It's time to move to the other side....

They added the anti glare as an option in the refresh a while back.

mrshoe• 17 years ago

This is an interesting perspective, but a 30" display still has about 25% more screen area than a 27" display.

Not that absolute screen surface area is the most important metric.

marbletiles2• 17 years ago

It also has it where it counts: depth. Almost everything I work on is helped by better depth: writing, coding, browsing. After a while, even the 1600 pixels of the 30" seem shallow. The iMac sure is wide, but it only has 1440 pixels in depth.

I know why they're doing it -- 16:9 widescreen panels are cheaper because of the demand for TV panels (it's almost impossible to get 4:3 panels these days) -- but I think it's a pity.

zokier5• 17 years ago

I seriously doubt that 16:9 panels would be cheaper because of TVs. First of all, TVs are usually somewhat larger. Secondly TVs have a lot worse resolution. Because of these factors, I don't believe that manufacturing panels for TVs affects the manufacture of computer display panels directly.

On a unrelated note, most people refer the other dimension as height, not depth.

neovive• 17 years ago

Did they specify the dot pitch on the 27" screen? I recall testing the 17" MBP @ 1920X1200, but the text felt a bit small. Considering the old 24" was only 1920 pixels wide, packing 2560 pixels across into 27" seems tight.

blackguardx3• 17 years ago

Smaller dot pitch is better. If the text is too small, increase the font size.

there• 17 years ago

not a good idea for designers and people that need to ensure what they see on their screen is what everyone else sees.

zokier5• 17 years ago

You shouldn't need to increase font size. If there is 12pt text, it should be 12pt on screen, regardless of the resolution you are running.

Actually if you set larger font to compensate screen resolution, it could wreck the hinting/scaling system in fonts, as the designer assumes that the characters are certain size. The letters are usually differently shaped at different sizes, and with highres screen you actually want those small-size shapes because they are optimized for small sizes.

edit: just to say, yes I fully agree that higher pixel pitch is definitely a good thing. I feel like displays are one of the most slowly advancing part of computers. Yes, they are getting bigger and bigger, but we are stuck on the same <100 PPI pixel pitch for large part of desktop LCD monitor history. At the same time mobile devices are having 300 PPI displays, and even laptops have higher pitched screens than desktops. Its just not fair!

raquo2• 17 years ago

How to increase font size in OS X?

masklinn2• 17 years ago

It's as wide as the old 30" Cinema Display, FWIW.

riobard• 17 years ago

The DPI of the 27" iMac display is 108 vs 133 on the 17" MBP. It's closer to the 110 DPI on 15" MBP. I use a 13" with 113 DPI and feel the text size is not that bad.

codyrobbins5• 17 years ago

But when are they going to finally release actual new Cinema Displays, sans iMac? The Dell 3008WFP is such an ugly piece of plastic crap, in my opinion.

barredo• 17 years ago

It's not crap. It's expensive. But it's not crap.

zefhous• 17 years ago

I'm sure he's talking about the design and aesthetic, not the actual display quality.

dkasper• 17 years ago

The Mac Pro looks like a horrible deal now, hopefully that means more good upgrades are coming.

pwbailey• 17 years ago

I am waiting with baited breath for a 27-inch stand-alone LED display based on the new iMac's display. As my eyes age, I appreciate more and more large-format displays. I am using a Dell 2709WFP on a 13" Macbook Pro 2.53. The very beautiful (both aesthetically and technically) Apple 24" LED-backlit display is somehow too small after seeing a 27" with the same content. (How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?")

I am actually one of those liberal, Obama-voting hybrid Mac users who has used Macintoshes since the first Bloom-County classic Mac in 1984. I also have always had to use both platforms, because as much as I would like it to be otherwise, business runs on Windows, very probably because of the misguided belief that cheap hardware makes their IT solutions cost-effective. Every single day of my life I have had some unwelcomed anomaly happen on my Windows computer. This is great for those in IT who make a living chasing Windows bugs, but is false economy for business in general. Even to this day, Microsoft Word runs better under Windows that it does on OSX. Too bad.

Apple releases new 27″ LED Cinema Display – comes with a free Mac

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