tl;dr: If you get one of these monitors, BetterDisplays Pro will let you set it to 12-bit color YCbCr mode, which removes a purple cast to blues, and for bonus use the OS basic calibrator to set it to 7500K, and it'll match a MBP screen quite well without any fancy calibration necessary. That app also lets you adjust a laptop and external HDR screen brightness in sync with the keyboard brightness keys.
Shaggy dog story version:
I use a M1 Max MBP 16" with second a 15"-ish portable monitor on a mini desk while working at home or remotely. Great setup, except for how sad the external looks compared to the gorgeous built-in MBP HDR display. I finally bit the bullet on an extremely-expensive 4K OLED ViewSonic VX1655-4K-OLED in hopes my eyes would no longer suffer.
The screen is gorgeous--the extreme contrast you'd expect from an OLED, sharpness you'd expect from a 16" screen with 4K resolution, and bright, rich OLED color. Plus it supports HDR so I get native software brightness control from macOS instead of having to fiddle with monitor controls to adjust brightness.
Except the color was wonky. Not terrible, but there was a very noticeable purple shift in blues compared to the factory-calibrated MBP, which to my eyes is extremely accurate. I tried a color pattern test, and that confirmed it: The internal screen's RGB looked very, very red, green, and blue, and the CMY looked cyan, magenta, and yellow; the ViewSonic's blue looked slightly purplish, and the cyan was quite washed out.
With the screen in HDR mode, there are almost no settings available--your sole color adjustment is "full range", "limited range", and "auto". Testing makes clear that "auto" always picks "limited range". Between those settings, manually selecting "full range" has pretty good dynamic range in the shadows, but the color looks washed out; limited range (or auto) looks richer and better, but dark grays are crushed. And in either case, the color shift didn't improve noticeably.
I don't own a hardware calibrator and don't really want to buy one since I don't do color critical work, so I tried:
Built-in calibrator: If I was aggressive with it it did improve the color somewhat, but the adjustment screwed up the edges (blown or weirdly tinted highlights or dark grays), and adjusting the brightness broke it completely, since it shifted everything from the point that it was calibrated.
TruHu: Did a pretty good job and did improve the color, but there was still a noticeable color shift in the blues, and the profiles it produced had weak contrast so it looked kind of dull.
BetterDisplay Pro: I initially tried this just to adjust brightness of both screens together with the keyboard keys (which it does, and well), but it turned out to have the solution: There's a "Color Mode" setting with the choice of 10-bit (HDR10, YCbCr, 4:2:2, Limited Range), 10-bit (HDR10, RGB, Full Range), and 12-bit (HDR10, YCbCr, 4:2:2, Limited Range). The colors here are what the app shows.
10-bit RGB is the default, and "green" options seem like they should be better than orange or red ones, plus RGB seems logically better for an RGB monitor, so I'd assumed that was what I wanted. In desperation I tried the 12-bit option (with the external set to Limited Range, which it was picking anyway), and suddenly the color matches the internal nearly perfectly with the default profile. It seemed to be slightly warmer, so I then ran the basic OS calibration and selected 7500K for the white point instead of native/6500K, and now it matches nearly perfectly.
Brightness now also matches nearly perfectly, while before it seemed to be offset somewhat. (Note: In BetterDisplay Pro you need to turn off the "Enable software XDR brightness upscaling" option; with that on, the internal is allowed to go above 100% brightness, which puts it on a different brightness slope per-keypress than the external, so it dims and brightness more quickly, breaking the keyboard adjustments. I don't want 110% brightness anyway, so this isn't an issue.)
What I'm not sure of is why this works; if it was just mismatched color range, then manually setting the monitor to Full Range should have fixed it and didn't, and normally the default settings would be fine. In any case, though, it does, and would be worth the $19 for the app even if I didn't want it for the brightness adjustment.
Maybe there's a free utility that does the same thing, I haven't bothered hunting.
Also: I learned that although the True Tone on/off switch only shows up for the internal screen, it actually adjusts the color on both, and well at that. This might require HDR, I don't think it did that on my old SDR LCD, although its color was so harsh maybe I just didn't notice.
Shaggy dog story version:
I use a M1 Max MBP 16" with second a 15"-ish portable monitor on a mini desk while working at home or remotely. Great setup, except for how sad the external looks compared to the gorgeous built-in MBP HDR display. I finally bit the bullet on an extremely-expensive 4K OLED ViewSonic VX1655-4K-OLED in hopes my eyes would no longer suffer.
The screen is gorgeous--the extreme contrast you'd expect from an OLED, sharpness you'd expect from a 16" screen with 4K resolution, and bright, rich OLED color. Plus it supports HDR so I get native software brightness control from macOS instead of having to fiddle with monitor controls to adjust brightness.
Except the color was wonky. Not terrible, but there was a very noticeable purple shift in blues compared to the factory-calibrated MBP, which to my eyes is extremely accurate. I tried a color pattern test, and that confirmed it: The internal screen's RGB looked very, very red, green, and blue, and the CMY looked cyan, magenta, and yellow; the ViewSonic's blue looked slightly purplish, and the cyan was quite washed out.
With the screen in HDR mode, there are almost no settings available--your sole color adjustment is "full range", "limited range", and "auto". Testing makes clear that "auto" always picks "limited range". Between those settings, manually selecting "full range" has pretty good dynamic range in the shadows, but the color looks washed out; limited range (or auto) looks richer and better, but dark grays are crushed. And in either case, the color shift didn't improve noticeably.
I don't own a hardware calibrator and don't really want to buy one since I don't do color critical work, so I tried:
- Various color profiles
- Every combination of setting I could think of
- Trusty old macOS built-in calibration in Advanced mode
- TruHu (which uses an app and your iPhone camera as a low-fi calibrator)
- BetterDisplay Pro (to synchronize brightness between the two screens when adjusting with the keyboard brightness keys)
Built-in calibrator: If I was aggressive with it it did improve the color somewhat, but the adjustment screwed up the edges (blown or weirdly tinted highlights or dark grays), and adjusting the brightness broke it completely, since it shifted everything from the point that it was calibrated.
TruHu: Did a pretty good job and did improve the color, but there was still a noticeable color shift in the blues, and the profiles it produced had weak contrast so it looked kind of dull.
BetterDisplay Pro: I initially tried this just to adjust brightness of both screens together with the keyboard keys (which it does, and well), but it turned out to have the solution: There's a "Color Mode" setting with the choice of 10-bit (HDR10, YCbCr, 4:2:2, Limited Range), 10-bit (HDR10, RGB, Full Range), and 12-bit (HDR10, YCbCr, 4:2:2, Limited Range). The colors here are what the app shows.
10-bit RGB is the default, and "green" options seem like they should be better than orange or red ones, plus RGB seems logically better for an RGB monitor, so I'd assumed that was what I wanted. In desperation I tried the 12-bit option (with the external set to Limited Range, which it was picking anyway), and suddenly the color matches the internal nearly perfectly with the default profile. It seemed to be slightly warmer, so I then ran the basic OS calibration and selected 7500K for the white point instead of native/6500K, and now it matches nearly perfectly.
Brightness now also matches nearly perfectly, while before it seemed to be offset somewhat. (Note: In BetterDisplay Pro you need to turn off the "Enable software XDR brightness upscaling" option; with that on, the internal is allowed to go above 100% brightness, which puts it on a different brightness slope per-keypress than the external, so it dims and brightness more quickly, breaking the keyboard adjustments. I don't want 110% brightness anyway, so this isn't an issue.)
What I'm not sure of is why this works; if it was just mismatched color range, then manually setting the monitor to Full Range should have fixed it and didn't, and normally the default settings would be fine. In any case, though, it does, and would be worth the $19 for the app even if I didn't want it for the brightness adjustment.
Maybe there's a free utility that does the same thing, I haven't bothered hunting.
Also: I learned that although the True Tone on/off switch only shows up for the internal screen, it actually adjusts the color on both, and well at that. This might require HDR, I don't think it did that on my old SDR LCD, although its color was so harsh maybe I just didn't notice.
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