I called applecare and set up to have a replacement iPad sent to me since the closest apple store is 3+ hours away from me.
Mailed in my iPad and Friday and yesterday received an e-mail saying basically they found nothing wrong with it and overnighted it back to me.
So here I am with my same iPad again. Still looks yellow to me and way yellow compared to my roomates iPad 3rd gen (his is verizon LTE, mine is just wifi)
oh well
Apple mentioned a wider gamut on this one compared to prior ipads. I have to wonder how wide they went and how they're setting the levels at the factory. Anyway.. there will always be some level of tolerance. As you migrate to tighter levels of tolerance, your costs go up exponentially. The comparison between devices doesn't really hold weight without something of a reference grade tolerance. Especially with the older cinema displays (the aluminum ones, I haven't done this with the newer ones), if you put three of them side by side, none would match.
Anyway it shouldn't look yellow to you on its own, so that suggests a problem as in your normal environment it's outside of the range where your brain tends to compensate. I guess you could try a colorimeter, but I never had good results with Datacolor. Are you outside of the return date?
Assuming it's a fairly uniform cast, the issue is unlikely to be one of panel manufacturing, as even the best panels are adjusted at a software level, and all displays naturally drift over time. I am guessing that at the Foxconn stage, they need a better system for testing and setting the levels. It's possible that their equipment isn't tuned or suitable for the wider gamuts, or that they require more warmup time. Obviously this is just speculation, but I would imagine that this will improve over time.
Apple's QC staff is finding this screen to be acceptable and with in tollerances. It is why they sent the OP's iPad back.
None of them are perfect and vary from one unit to another. Apple can not make everyone happy.
I agree with you here. In the past I've found that on displays, OEMs and manufacturers assign some interesting ideas to what can be considered within acceptable tolerance, so I sympathize with the OP somewhat. It's just that sometimes on such a product transition, testing methods lag behind somewhat. Wider gamuts can also be more difficult to control. You might note that Apple has stuck to an sRGB type gamut for their thunderbolt display. If only they hadn't gone to half baked trash LED
.
Edit: I should explain that. The LED thing has annoyed me for a long time as it messes with the color somewhat. Most people don't notice this because their eyes compensate to believe that it looks correct, but CCFL and a couple adjustments on available backlight brightness scale would have been superior for a lot of their customers.
