Personal impressions of the LED Cinema Display
On Friday last I picked up an LED Cinema Display from the Apple Store at Bluewater in Kent, and have been using it over the weekend. For what it's worth here are my personal impressions.
The aesthetic design is impressive, and the functional design is a definite plus in my book. The single breakout cable is most convenient to connect with my new MacBook, which at my home office desk I use exclusively in closed-lid mode. I have very little need of the camera, more of which later.
The backlighting is absolutely superb, as one would expect of the LED technology used. The display is very bright, and at my desk I need to turn the brightness down to around a third of maximum.
The glossy screen? This is a potential problem, but I would urge those who have issues with this, but at the same time do not have personal experience of working with glossy displays, to reserve judgement until they have actually tried one for more than 30 seconds in an Apple Store. In my office I can arrange things so as to minimise the reflections from the screen. I do find them mildly distracting, but then I've been using matte displays for donkey's years. What I do not like is the shimmering graininess of the old Apple Cinema Displays.
What is more problematic for me is the image quality. By that I do not mean quality on the bad-to-good scale, but quality in the subjective sense. I do not like what I perceive to be a shallow hardness in the image. The only way to adjust the screen parameters are through the OS X System Preferences displays pane, and even with the "expert" mode turned on, and after a considerable time of trying, the result is not to my liking.
I bought the LED display as I thought it would make a better functional match to my MacBook than the Dell S2409W 16:9 display that I've been using for the past month or so. Some may sneer at this 250 TN panel unit, but I'm quite impressed with it. The out-of-the-box colour saturation is far too strong, but a reasonably good calibration can be achieved with a combination of the OS X and on-unit controls.
I ought to point out that I'm a journalist by trade. As a writer and editor I don't have the same display needs as a photographer or other graphics professional, but I do require a display that I can look at comfortably for an entire working day (with, of course, the usual health and safety recommended breaks!).
What else can I say about the new Apple display? Connectivity is not as smart as it could be in terms of camera and sound, and you sometimes get a few screen glitches when plugging in. For example, the desktop icons may appear in the middle of the screen, and this requires a Finder restart to remedy. Also, the USB hub causes a sleeping MacBook to wake when you connect it to the display, but without activating the external display. These are all software issues that I'm sure Apple could fix in OS X updates.
The speakers are like those on the iMac, though with a fixed EQ skewed towards higher frequencies. Overall, the result is weak, and I would much rather use my cheap Advent 2.1 PC speakers, even though this means more cabling and desk space used.
As for the camera, I have little need of this, but would still like to have a webcam that can be used with my MacBook in closed-lid mode. Any recommendations, preferably which don't require manually selecting the camera in the applications preferences? I'm asking if there a way of making the system detect automatically that the MacBook camera is non-functional as the lid is closed, and have it instead look for a camera attached via USB.
In summary, I've tried the new LED Cinema Display in my working environment, and come to the conclusion that it's not for me. I shall therefore be returning it to the Apple Store before the 14 day trial period is up. For me it's back to the Dell S2409W.
