1) No glass panel.
2) More than just USB
3) DVI connections
4) full sized display port
5) matte option
6) Brighter (since the NEC 24" is brighter)
7) A four year warranty (which is included in the NEC)
8) More than 8 or 10 bits (30 bits would be nice
)
1) At first I thought I'd hate the glass panels on the mbp and the cinema display. But after having seen them the high quality glass is much better than any other type of plastic covering the panels in other manufactures that I've seen thus far, something about it reveals the picture quality with high quality and very pleasing to the eyes.
2) I think usb is all that they could do but fw wouldnt hurt, but usb 3.0 is coming so I thought apple made the right choice.
3) DVI is old technology now and I'm glad that they went with mini display ports and for all those whiners out there just wait a bit longer adapters will come 100% sure of that. I love the mini display port as it has a much bigger bandwidth than dvi and the port itself is very very small which is really convenient.
4) Once again adapters will take care of that, just wait.
5) Matte would be nice but glossy is just as good. I've seen an article (cant find it right now) that professional graphics designers/photographers say glossy displays when properly calibrated is even better than matte as the saturation of the colors look much closer to the real life final finished end product. That one engadget or forgot what website it was that wrote the new 24" has bad color accuracy is just biased.
6) I thought that the 330 cd/2 would be dimmer since even the 15" mbp's are rated higher at around 370 but I also hear that 24" ACD's brightness is under spec'd in the brightness area. I can clearly see that its much MUCH brighter than the 15" unibody mbp's. Either way, even professionals are turning down a few notches down from the highest brightness when they use the 24" led acd, so no need for anything brighter (as it clearly still blinds me with eye candiness).
7) Well with the NEC it better come with a 4 year warranty as NEC is not as respectful company as it used to be 6-8 years ago. Also for the price of almost $1500 it better come with 4 year warranty. You could easily buy apple care 3 year for the apple displays on ebay for around $49 bucks.
8) H-IPS panel which the 24" LED ACD does use an 8 bit panel which I think is more than enough for a computer monitor. I do admit though my 52" Sony Bravia XBR4 has a 10-bit panel with 10-bit processing and it is very very impressive (watching full 1080p movies look like the movie is in a totally new dimension!!) but for a computer monitor 8-bit is more than enough especially with led backlighting.
If the NEC comes out with an LED backlight display with a 10bit panel at around $800 (with student discount, I paid $865) then I'd probably be interested.
Also its not true that Apple has just put in an H-IPS panel in, their imacs had the H-IPS panels for a long time now.
One final thing to note is that I do love NEC as one of my earlier computers (before the switch to apple) was an nec tower and crt monitor and it was an awesome setup. My projector is from NEC and it is excellent and their current monitors are one of the best.
But for the price of the 24" LED ACD being $865 with LED backlight technology and the aesthetic looks that match the current unibody mbp perfectly, its just way too good to pass up. Even the people on Hardforums are drooling over the 24" LED ACD as well.
