Studio Display XDR Impressions

[archagon]

Also — likely the same problem manifesting in a different way — the SDXDR behaves strangely when attempting to display very dark grey patterns. Take the following pattern that's nearly invisible outside a pitch-black room. (I think it's something like #010101.) The OLED on the left shows how it's supposed to look. The SDXDR on the right completely messes it up. If you switch to the cloned profile, the image looks nearly identical to the OLED.

 

[Zubba]

While watching House of the Dragon (using QuickTime but reproducible in all players), I noticed that the XDR performs poorly if you're watching in a very dark room and the scenes are also very dim. The dimming zones become very obvious and constantly move around. It looks like a glitch:

View attachment 2637372

OLED on left, SDXDR on right. MacBook XDR looks a lot closer to OLED than SDXDR.

With that said, if you clone the default preset and change nothing else, the problem goes away almost completely. The cloned preset shows a dimmer image than the default preset, even with the same 2000 nit HDR peak, but lowering the brightness for the default preset does not actually make the blobbiness go away. So it's not just a case of "image darker, so dimming zones less visible."

I think this has something to do with the adjustable brightness feature, which is incompatible with custom presets. The same behavior and solution reproduces on the MacBook Pro 14" XDR display, though the blobbiness is much less visible there.

I also noticed that with the default preset at max brightness, an HDR clipping test image shows strange results:

View attachment 2637375

Some colors are visible almost up to 4000 nits, while others barely get up to 1000 nits.

Whereas with the cloned preset, everything goes to around 2000 nits, which is what you'd expect based on the display specs:

View attachment 2637376

Any thoughts on what's going on here? To me, it looks like the display thinks that very dark grays are darker than they actually appear when using the default preset and sends the wrong signals to the dimming zones.

Hoping it's a bug that will be fixed in time... switching profiles to watch movies is a bit annoying on a $3000 display.

Strange, I don't have this issue on mine with the standard preset. Is your running the latest firmware?

 

[archagon]

Yes. Here, look at this screenshot full-screen in a dark room. Switch between the default preset and a cloned version of that preset. Does the image look the same? On my SDXDR, the difference is stark. (No pun intended.)