Opinion: Apple should offer consumer-priced Retina external monitors.

[motrek]

...
I now see that you're talking about the regular text. But: You're looking at a screenshot of subpixel rendering on a display without subpixel rendering. You can't tell the difference from that. Instead, you need to use a photo (as shown above).

Err, what?

What do you think the difference is between looking at a screen shot of text that has been rendered with subpixel AA, and looking at the same text that is being rendered with subpixel AA?

The RGB values of all the pixels are the same. So why shouldn't I expect to see that the text with subpixel AA is sharper, if it's supposed to be sharper?

 

[theorist9]

Why would they, people are happy to cough up the money for ASDs.

I suspect the percentage of Apple customers that would like a 27" Retina external monitor, and actually paid for, or plan to pay for, an ASD is pretty small. Remember that Apple's most popular Mac is the MacBook Air, and that probably averages about $1400-$1500 in actual purchase price (less discounts). Do you think the typical consumer that pays $1500 for a computer is going to pay $1600 for a display to go with it?

 

[theorist9]

Err, what?

What do you think the difference is between looking at a screen shot of text that has been rendered with subpixel AA, and looking at the same text that is being rendered with subpixel AA?

The RGB values of all the pixels are the same. So why shouldn't I expect to see that the text with subpixel AA is sharper, if it's supposed to be sharper?

Err, do you see a difference in the fidelity with which the diagonal lines were rendered between the two actual photographs I just posted? Yes or no?

 

[motrek]

Err, do you see a difference in sharpness between the two actual photographs I just posted? Yes or no?

Yes, obviously, but how is that relevant to anything?

I can show you a picture of a bacteria magnified a million times and demand to know if you can see it ("yes or no?") but that doesn't mean you can see unmagnified bacteria.

 

[motrek]

Does the text at the top look that much sharper to you?

 

[theorist9]

Yes, obviously, but how is that relevant to anything?

I can show you a picture of a bacteria magnified a million times and demand to know if you can see it ("yes or no?") but that doesn't mean you can see unmagnified bacteria.

Let's reduce them in magnification until they display at the same size as the text you used for your comparison immediately above. Can you tell the difference betweent the two photos (left and middle)? I can:

["D" from your above photo shown on right to maintain about the same size.]

View attachment 2042434

Does the text at the top look that much sharper to you?

Hard to tell from this. How did you generate these? Based on how my brain processes images (giving myself the benefit of the doubt that I have one), the e and s look sharper on the top, while the u looks sharper on the bottom. I didn't need to blow these up to see this, I just blew them up to make the difference clearer.

 

[theorist9]

.

 

[Alex Cai]

A common configuration for consumer buyers of Mac laptops is to pair them with a large external monitor for home use. Through High Sierra, a consumer could get beautifully sharp text by spending ~$500 for a 4k 27" display (163 ppi). Beginning with Mojave, however, Apple eliminated something called subpixel text rendering*. Effectively, this means that getting optimally sharp text with MacOS now requires a Retina monitor. Some also dislike non-Retina screens because of the UI size.

The problem is that Apple doesn't offer a single consumer-priced Retina external display, i.e. something priced for the type of buyer who spends ~ $1000- $2000 for a laptop (which is probably the largest segment of Apple's Mac market). Thus any consumer who buys a Mac laptop and wants to able to use it with an external monitor and have an optimal MacOS experience, can't, unless they move up to prosumer pricing (the $1,600+ Studio Display).

In sum, given that Apple has changed MacOS to effectively require Retina displays for optimum performance, they should offer some Retina externals for their largest market, which is consumer-class buyers.

This would also help them attract Windows switchers: Right now a big plus of Windows is that a 27" that looks great with text is within much easier reach than it is with MacOS—$500 for a 27" 4k does it with Windows, while with MacOS you need a $1600 27" 5k. Those willing to switch of course would accept paying more for Apple products, but not >3x as much to get about the same effective text sharpness. [Windows still has subpixel text rendering, and also has vectorized scaling, which allows UI size to be adjusted to non-integer ratios without losing sharpness like MacOS does.]

So what should be the pricing of these displays? Honestly, I'm not exactly sure. But as a first effort:

The 2020 27" iMac's base price was $1800, so if half of that was for the display and half for the computer, I'd say $900 for the 27". Then, proportionally by area, we have:

24" = $700 (consistently, this is also half the $1300 starting price of the 24" iMac, rounded up to the nearest $100)
27" = $900
32" = $1,300

And make the stock stand height-adjustable.

I've included the 32" for higher-end consumers who need a larger screen and can't afford, and don't need, a $5,000+ Pro Display XDR. And display analyst Ross Young observed the market is moving towards larger (above 27") displays.

*Beginning with Mojave, Apple eliminated subpixel text rendering from MacOS. Subpixel rendering significantly increases the effective pixel density in the horizontal direction by using the vertical R/G/B subpixels to more finely render text. With subpixel rendering, MacOS could look really crisp with a $500 27" 4k monitor (163 ppi). By eliminating this with Mojave, Apple effectively changed MacOS to require a Retina monitor for optimum viewing. There are probably a couple of reasons Apple eliminated it: (1) It requires knowledge of the display's pixel substructure; and (2) With the way MacOS does scaling, it creates artifacts with anything other than integer scaling. Having said that, it did seem to work pretty much without issue through High Sierra.

not every consumer are professional artists, just make a display like the 24 inch iMac

 

[motrek]

...
Hard to tell from this. How did you generate these? ...

It's generous to say that I "generated" them. I just moved the subpixel-AA text from the top next to the text at the bottom, set my display to 2:1 scaling, displayed the image at 100%, took a picture with my iPhone, and cropped appropriately.

I agree that it's hard to say which one looks sharper. Seems like a wash to me. In which case, it seems like subpixel-AA isn't making much of a difference and Apple probably made a good decision re: dropping it.

 

[xraydoc]

I'm honestly not sure Apple even knows how to make an inexpensive product. I don't think it's in their ethos to do so. They over-engineer everything on purpose. And if you don't mind paying for it, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it sure makes things complicated if don't stick to a 100% Apple-only life. If you do, then everything does truly just work (most of the time).

However, I do think they could take the 4.5K 24" display out of the M1 iMac and make a very nice, reasonably priced ($799 in Apple language) display out of it if they kept it to a normal 1080p webcam and some basic speakers and didn't go overboard on sticking in an A13 processor for Center Stage, Hey Siri, auto rotation on portrait, etc. If they were so inclined.

And to digress -- I discovered that not only does the Apple Studio Display provide auto-rotation upon turning the monitor to portrait orientation, but the webcam on it also re-orients and provides a proper image.

 

[Fishrrman]

Not. Gonna. Happen.
(reason why: not enough $$$ in it for Apple...)

 

[kvic]

Agree with Fisherman's sentiment. For Apple, they have bigger fishes to fry, better profit to milk than big, heavy and low profit margin monitors for the average Mac users. A 2011 Apple Thunderbolt Display (2K) costs $1300 today (inflation adjusted) which isn't far below the base model of Apple Studio Display (5K).

However, personally I believe 2023 will be likely the year 27-inch 5K display is finally for the average Mac users. That's thanks to Apple, signalling to the market they're dedicated to 27-inch 5K by releasing Apple Studio Display. More importantly thanks to Chinese panel vendor BOE who is going to release a 27-inch 5K IPS panel in early 2023. Expect monitor vendors from China and Taiwan will launch less pricey 5K monitors in the 1H23!

 

[theorist9]

It's generous to say that I "generated" them. I just moved the subpixel-AA text from the top next to the text at the bottom, set my display to 2:1 scaling, displayed the image at 100%, took a picture with my iPhone, and cropped appropriately.

I agree that it's hard to say which one looks sharper. Seems like a wash to me. In which case, it seems like subpixel-AA isn't making much of a difference and Apple probably made a good decision re: dropping it.

No, it's hard to say from your photos as displayed on macrumors. Don't try to put words in my mouth. When I see text with and without subpixel rendering directly on my computer, the difference is pretty clear.

And this is not a placebo effect created by an expectation of reduced quality. In fact, it's quite the opposite: When I upgraded from HS to Mojave, I had no expectation of a change in text quality (I didn't see any change with earlier upgrades, and had no knowledge of subpixel rendering at the time). Yet, in spite of that, I had a strong and immediate negative reaction to how text was displayed when I upgraded from HS to Mojave. And it was only after investigating the reason why that I discovered subpixel text rendering.

And I'm not the only one that had this reaction: There's an entire thread about this on macrumors.

When I asked how you generated the subpixel text rendering, I was referring to this:

All my computers are running Monterey so I can't really do this experiment. I suppose I could try it with Ubuntu but their implementation of subpixel AA is pretty garbage so I don't know if that would be useful.

 

[motrek]

No, it's hard to say from your photos as displayed on macrumors. Don't try to put words in my mouth. When I see text with and without subpixel rendering directly on my computer, the difference is pretty clear.

And this is not a placebo effect created by an expectation of reduced quality. In fact, it's quite the opposite: When I upgraded from HS to Mojave, I had no expectation of a change in text quality (I didn't see any change with earlier upgrades, and had no knowledge of subpixel rendering at the time). Yet, in spite of that, I had a strong and immediate negative reaction to how text was displayed when I upgraded from HS to Mojave. And it was only after investigating the reason why that I discovered subpixel text rendering.

As a guess, I would say your negative reaction was due to the font smoothing setting. I didn't know this setting existed until you posted your screen shots yesterday. But it seems clear to me that a font smoothing setting of 3 is necessary for text to have the same perceived weight as it does with subpixel-AA. But the default font smoothing setting is 2. So, switching to Mojave probably reduced the perceived font weight of any rendered text. You reacted negatively to this change, researched, learned about subpixel-AA, and assumed that was the culprit.

When I asked how you generated the subpixel text rendering, I was referring to this:

Again, I used the screen shot you posted yesterday. (Well, the collage of three screen shots, to be perfectly accurate.)

It's not clear to me that you completely understand that the text in the top part of the screen shot has subpixel-AA whereas the text in the lower parts just has regular AA.

So if I display your screen shot at native resolution on my monitor, the text at the top will have subpixel-AA regardless of whether or not I have an operating system that does subpixel-AA.

The operating system doesn't know that a screen shot has subpixel-AA. It can't magically identify text with subpixel-AA in a screen shot and remove the antialiasing or switch it to a different kind of antialiasing.

 

[motrek]

... More importantly thanks to Chinese panel vendor BOE who is going to release a 27-inch 5K IPS panel in early 2023. Expect monitor vendors from China and Taiwan will launch less pricey 5K monitors in the 1H23!

This is terrific news, thank you! How do you even find out information like this?

Edit: I was able to find this page:

BOE Latest Panel Development Plans – July 2022 - TFTCentral

Share this contentWe have some updates from one of the smaller LCD panel manufacturers BOE about their panel development plans. This is BOE as a panel manufacturer, as opposed to....[click link for more]

tftcentral.co.uk

Looks like these displays should have brightness and color gamut comparable to Apple's 5K displays. There will be literally no reason, in terms of display quality, to buy the Apple display. What great news.

 

[theorist9]

As a guess, I would say your negative reaction was due to the font smoothing setting. I didn't know this setting existed until you posted your screen shots yesterday. But it seems clear to me that a font smoothing setting of 3 is necessary for text to have the same perceived weight as it does with subpixel-AA. But the default font smoothing setting is 2. So, switching to Mojave probably reduced the perceived font weight of any rendered text. You reacted negatively to this change, researched, learned about subpixel-AA, and assumed that was the culprit.

Nope. I first played with font smoothing, since I did know about that, and wasn't able to get satisfactory text on any smoothing setting. It's only after finding smoothing wasn't fixing things that I found the thread on MR about subpixel antialiasing.

You're getting pretty obnoxious here. Before you were willing to acknowledge that I (and everyone else who complains about this) is able to see the difference, even if you can't. Now you're trying to assert I can't see it. Should I be the same as you, and start insisting that you can't really see the color fringing you claim to see?

It's not clear to me that you completely understand that the text in the top part of the screen shot has subpixel-AA whereas the text in the lower parts just has regular AA.

I do understand that. But the articles I've read about subpixel rendering say you can't correctly assess it with screenshots, you need to examine photos. I don't understand enough about why to give you a complete technical explanation, but feel free to pursue it yourself if you'd like, and let me know what you find.

 

[motrek]

Nope. I first played with font smoothing, since I did know about that, and wasn't able to get satisfactory text on any smoothing setting. It's only after finding smoothing wasn't fixing things that I found the thread on MR about subpixel antialiasing.

You're getting pretty agressive here. Before you were willing to acknowledge that I (and everyone else who complains about this) is able to see the difference. Now you're trying to claim I can't. Should I be the same as you, and start insisting that you can't really see the color fringing you claim to see?

I dunno. The brain can play weird tricks on you. You're looking at the same macro photograph I am, and we both seem to be agreeing that we can't see a difference in sharpness between the text at the top and the text at the bottom. So what else do you want me to conclude?

To be clear, the situation is completely different at lower resolutions (or smaller font sizes). At high resolution, most of the pixels will be either black or white, and there will be a relatively small percentage of pixels with antialiasing. So different types of antialiasing can only make a small difference.

At lower resolutions (not HiDPI), the percentage of pixels that are purely black or white is pretty small and most of the pixels will have some antialiasing. So the effect of antialiasing (and different kinds of antialiasing) will be large.

So it's entirely consistent that 1) many people would notice the lack of subpixel-AA on "LowDPI" displays in Mojave and be upset about it, 2) that I would be able to notice colored fringing on text on low-DPI displays, 3) that neither one of us would be able to see colored fringing on text when running HiDPI rendering on a relatively high-DPI display, and 4) that neither one of us would be able to tell a difference in text sharpness between the two antialiasing methods when running HiDPI on a high-DPI display.

 

[tornado99]

For anyone reading in the UK such a monitor does exist. It's under $200 and provides 4k in 23.8 inches so 185 dpi.

electriQ 24" 4K UHD Gaming Monitor - Laptops Direct

Buy electriQ 24" 4K UHD Gaming Monitor from LaptopsDirect

www.laptopsdirect.co.uk

Thus proving that there is no economic barrier to Apple selling a 4K monitor at least.

 

[kvic]

I have no interest joining the sub pixel font rendering discussion...'cos it's such old tech, so well understood by many, not much of use in HiDPI displays. We shall just move on from here The digression on sub pixel font rendering is almost derailing this otherwise nice thread. @theorist9 I think you just need to sit down and think it through.

 

[theorist9]

A 2011 Apple Thunderbolt Display (2K) costs $1300 today (inflation adjusted) which isn't far below the base model of Apple Studio Display (5K).

You can't use inflation-adjusted prices of older Apple products to determine what's reasonable for pricing today. The starting price of the 2008 MacBook Air in 2022 dollars is $2475. Clearly that's not a resonable guideline to use in pricing the Air today.

Agree with Fisherman's sentiment. For Apple, they have bigger fishes to fry, better profit to milk than big, heavy and low profit margin monitors for the average Mac users.

Do you actually know that, say, a $900 27" 5k monitor, made on the same production line as the one they use for the 24" iMac, would have a low profit margin? Do you have any data to support this?

I don't claim to know whether it would or not, which is why I was careful to say I didn't know exactly what they should cost. But if you want to make the much stronger assertion that they are low profit, you ought to have some data to back it up.

However, personally I believe 2023 will be likely the year 27-inch 5K display is finally for the average Mac users. That's thanks to Apple, signalling to the market they're dedicated to 27-inch 5K by releasing Apple Studio Display. More importantly thanks to Chinese panel vendor BOE who is going to release a 27-inch 5K IPS panel in early 2023. Expect monitor vendors from China and Taiwan will launch less pricey 5K monitors in the 1H23!

Thanks for letting us know about the BOE plans. I found this link (https://tftcentral.co.uk/news/boe-latest-panel-development-plans-july-2022), which specifies the following panels. This will be great news if (a) they actually appear (others have promised high PPI panels that never materialized); and (b) their quality is as high as that of the basic Retina consumer panel in the 24" iMac (e.g., hopefully these are at least IPS and not TN);

Hopefully Apple will also expand their support to high resolutions other than 5k and 6k. Currently they don't support 8k, though the Ventura beta suggests they will; at least it suggests support for the Dell 8k).

High PPI and 8K Resolutions​

BOE are also focusing on increasing the resolution of their monitor panels in line with what we see happening in video recording, streaming services and mobile/tablet devices. There are plans for several new panels.

• 31.5″ panel with a 7680 x 4320 resolution (280 PPI), 350 cd/m2 brightness (400 cd/m2 peak) and a wide colour gamut covering 99% DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB. This should now be in production as of Q2 2022.
• 27″ panel with 5120 x 2880 resolution (210 PPI), 350 cd/m2 brightness, HDR 600 support (600 cd/m2peak), 98% DCI-P3 colour gamut. This is listed for Q4 2022 production.
• 31.5″ panel with 6034 x 3384 resolution (210 PPI), 350 cd/m2 brightness, HDR 600 support (600 cd/m2peak), 98% DCI-P3 colour gamut. This is listed for Q1 2023 production.
• The 34″ ultrawide panel discussed above as well, with 5120 x 2160 resolution (160 PPI), 400 cd/m2brightness, HDR 600 support (600 cd/m2 peak), 98% DCI-P3 colour gamut. This is listed for Q4 2022 productio

 

[theorist9]

For anyone reading in the UK such a monitor does exist. It's under $200 and provides 4k in 23.8 inches so 185 dpi.

electriQ 24" 4K UHD Gaming Monitor - Laptops Direct

Buy electriQ 24" 4K UHD Gaming Monitor from LaptopsDirect

www.laptopsdirect.co.uk

Thus proving that there is no economic barrier to Apple selling a 4K monitor at least.

I'm guessing at that price it's a cheap TN panel. For reasonable text quality you want an IPS panel, and I've not seen those for under $400. Still, I think Apple could sell a 4.5k 24" Retina for $700 and have a generous profit margin.

 

[motrek]

...
I do understand that. But the articles I've read about subpixel rendering say you can't correctly assess it with screenshots, you need to examine photos. I don't understand enough about why to give you a complete technical explanation, but feel free to pursue it yourself if you'd like, and let me know what you find.

I see you added this text after I wrote my reply.

Quick explanation:

Instead of using grey pixels to smooth out ("antialias") black-and-white text, subpixel-AA uses colored pixels. It deliberately adds blue and red pixels to the text so the brightness of the opposite subpixels is reduced. (A blue pixel is blue because its red and green subpixels are relatively dimmer, etc.)

If you take a screen shot of such text and display it on a different monitor, you're just taking a screen shot of colored pixels, so the text on the different monitor also has subpixel-AA, because it's displaying the same colored pixels. The same way you can take a screen shot of a stop sign and it will appear red on another computer.

So when I look at your screen shot at native resolution on my monitor, the text is being displayed with subpixel-AA, and it's legitimate for me to compare against other text. Likewise, it's legitimate for me to take a macro photograph with my iPhone and compare the text that way too.

 

[theorist9]

.

 

[Solomani]

Why would they, people are happy to cough up the money for ASDs.

True. But more affordable non-top-of-the-line Apple displays (and other accessories) would act as "gateway drugs" to their more expensive top of the line items. Long term strategy of course.

We shouldn't be surprised that when Steve Jobs released those dinky kitschy (but still affordable) "entry consumer" Bondi Blue iMacs in the late 1990s... it attracted legions upon legions of new Apple customers. And many of them, two decades later... had graduated and matured into rabid Apple "pro customers", buying up the best Apple has to offer without question.

 

[edanuff]

for points of comparison, this is what "looks like 2560x1440" on a 4K display looks like (edit: simulated by bilinear scaling in Photoshop so possibly not using the same scaling algorithm the Mac OS uses):

This is what it will looks like on either a 5K monitor or when you run your 4K monitor with "looks like 1920x1080":

For me, it's not just the fonts being blurry, the distortion on the line edges is unacceptable as well. It's like looking at the UX through a Zoom screencast. It's not how the OS designers, the app designers, or the web designers expected things to look like and appreciation of those details is big part of the reason why people use Macs.