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To Nano new XDR, or not to Nano new XDR; that is the question.

Zubba

Zubba

macrumors regular
Original poster
Will be ordering the new XDR, but I'm super torn on getting the NT or not. I prefer the NT on my MBP, and IPP, but wasn't a big fan of how it was done on the original Studio display. I felt like it looked better on the Pro XDR (despite the fact it came out on the Pro XDR first), as the color/brightness shift from off angles was really off putting on the Studio Display (though I'm sure a lot of that was just the panel).

Most of my professional work involves working with a lot of text day in and day out, but photography is a hobby I'm passionate about, and invest a lot in (both time, and money).

The side of me that is primarily concerned with work/text is saying go glossy, the side of me that is thinking about photo editing is screaming Nano-texture, and I can't make up my mind.

Curious if there are many people in the same predicament, and what your rationale is for a choice.
 
I got the old Studio Display without nano. Now I am getting the XDR with nano (sitting next to a window). This time the nano is supposed to be different from the one in the first Studio Display. Hopefully the same as in the MacBook or iPads, which makes it easier to clean.
 
I’m in the same boat. In my opinion, nano texture on the original Studio Display made text somewhat fuzzier (almost like increased blooming) and suppressed/muted some color richness, so I was happy to save a few hundred dollars and purchase the glossy version. When the XDR opened for preorder last week, I immediately jumped on the glossy version.

The reviews for the XDR, however, rave about the nano texture implementation, so I’m starting to deliberate on my choice. My office at work is a windowless room where I can control the lighting, but I do have one light behind me that does get some light reflected off the monitor. At home, two windows are positioned behind my desk. Regardless of where I place this monitor, I do think I’d benefit from better reflection handling.

I’m still leaning towards the glossy version because of the overall cost of the display. If I’m paying a small fortune, I want it to be as color accurate and render as precisely as possible with the least amount of blooming. That said, my eyes aren’t quite what they used to be, so how much will I appreciate the reduced blooming and depth of black? Perhaps not as much as I did 4 years ago. And how much would I appreciate reduced screen glare? Perhaps more than I did 4 years ago.

This is a very long-winded way to say that I am excited to receive my glossy version tomorrow, but I will absolutely be heading to the Apple Store to view the nano texture version as soon as possible, because I could convince myself to return the glossy version and go with nano texture.
 
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I absolutely hated my nano texture ASD. The text was less sharp than my 100$ QHD Dell Monitor.

I will never buy a nano texture product ever again
 
I’m also stuck. I looked at the current Studio Display last week and it looked almost dirty which is a probably when working with grainy images, etc. but if the NT has changed that would be great.
 
I just came from the Apple Store. If you don't have well-controlled lighting, there is no good choice for the XDR.

My use is entirely productivity. I have a window in back of me, with no direct sunlight but plenty of scattered light. I have overhead lighting. This is a law office, and it is relatively bright.

I only looked at the Apple Studio Display XDR, because I want the 120 Hz refresh rate. I want the best possible screen for my eyes. As soon as I walked up to the XDR with glossy screen, the first thing I saw was reflections. It's a glare monster. The text is beautifully crisp. The contrast is great. White backgrounds have no speckling at all. But you have to fight through reflections to see them.

I love the nano glass on my iPad M4 Pro, but not on the Studio Display XDR. It's too much of a compromise. Yes, the lack of reflections is terrific, your eyes just relax, but the text is noticeably fuzzy, and white backgrounds have speckling.

I'm back in my office and using my 8-year-old Dell 4k 27" business monitor, and it is not that far away from the XDR with nano glass. The XDR nano has better contrast and it would be slightly easier to read. But I don't see spending $4k with tax for it.

If you're in an office or other non-light-controlled environment, and don't need the color calibration, the brightness, HDR, you're not professionally or seriously editing photos or video or looking at CT scans, etc., the XDR is not worth it, no matter how much you're willing to spend to get the most beautiful picture. The glossy version needs better anti-reflective coating, and the nano glass texture is not fine enough.

IF you're able to control your light environment, then I would recommend glossy over nano.

Caveat: the one thing I didn't try was to use the tilt function on the XDR glossy, which is super easy to do, to try to mitigate reflections. I will go back and try that, and post again if there is any notable difference.
 
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jr5x said:
I just came from the Apple Store. If you don't have well-controlled lighting, there is no good choice for the XDR.

My use is entirely productivity. I have a window in back of me, with no direct sunlight but plenty of scattered light. I have overhead lighting. This is a law office, and it is relatively bright.

I only looked at the Apple Studio Display XDR, because I want the 120 Hz refresh rate. I want the best possible screen for my eyes. As soon as I walked up to the XDR with glossy screen, the first thing I saw was reflections. It's a glare monster. The text is beautifully crisp. The contrast is great. White backgrounds have no speckling at all. But you have to fight through reflections to see them.

I love the nano glass on my iPad M4 Pro, but not on the Studio Display XDR. It's too much of a compromise. Yes, the lack of reflections is terrific, your eyes just relax, but the text is noticeably fuzzy, and white backgrounds have speckling.

I'm back in my office and using my 8-year-old 4K 27" Dell business monitor, and it is not that far away from the XDR with nano glass. The XDR has better contrast and it would be slightly easier to read. But I don't see spending $4k with tax for it.

If you're in an office or other non-light-controlled environment, and don't need the color calibration, the brightness, HDR, you're not professionally editing photos or video or looking at CT scans, etc., the XDR is not worth it, no matter how much you're willing to spend to get the most beautiful picture, because it doesn't deliver. The glossy version needs much better anti-reflective coating, and the nano glass texture is not fine enough.

IF you're able to control your light environment, then I would recommend glossy over nano.

Caveat: the one thing I didn't try was to use the tilt function on the XDR glossy, which is super easy to do, to try to mitigate reflections. I will go back and try that, and post again if there is any notable difference.
Click to expand...
Interesting take.

I'm headed over to the Apple store tomorrow to decide. I'm leaning NT.
 
Just got my Studio Display XDR with nano-texture. Upgraded from the original Studio Display without it.

I’m a bit torn. It eliminates all reflections, which is amazing. I have an office with a window to the right of me, and I now have no issues with reflections on the screen. This is, without question, the best-looking matte screen I’ve ever used.

On the other hand, the screen does have a certain grain to it. If you look closely, it has a fine texture that almost creates a tiny rainbow effect. When I look down at my iPhone, I’m a bit shocked by how clear that screen looks in comparison.

Overall, I’m very much second-guessing the nano-texture purchase.

It also seems like there’s a pretty even split in reactions. About half the people rave about the nano-texture and say they would never go back, while the other half feel it looks gritty or slightly muddy.

I suspect it’s more noticeable on the Studio Display because it’s such a high-resolution panel, and in my case I have it on a monitor arm and tend to pull it fairly close to my face. That makes the texture easier to see.

On the other hand, I also picked up the new 14" M5 Pro MBP, and I think the nano-texture is absolutely perfect for a laptop where you really can’t control the environment. I find the texture and clarity loss on the MBP to be much less noticeable. No regrets there.

At this point, I’m thinking I may need to order a standard glass Studio Display XDR and look at the two side by side before my return period is up.

I also wonder if it might have something to do with people’s vision. Maybe folks with less sharp eyesight don’t notice the loss of clarity as much and mainly notice the lack of reflections, so for them it feels like a pure upgrade with no real trade-off.
 
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I don't know if they attempted to improve it on the new models, but the original ASD nano and the 24" iMac nano both looked terrible when I tried them at the store. So grainy and a big hit to clarity. The MBP nano is pretty nice though. \

If you can control your lighting environment the choice is easy.
 
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Went to the store today to compare glossy vs nano. I do feel like it’s better than the old one but if you pull up a white website, it’s pretty obvious vs a normal matte screen. It does look really good it’s just this “layer” of static noise almost.
 
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Mattgfx said:
Went to the store today to compare glossy vs nano. I do feel like it’s better than the old one but if you pull up a white website, it’s pretty obvious vs a normal matte screen. It does look really good it’s just this “layer” of static noise almost.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I can't stand the Nanotexture.
It reminds me of the grainy look the antiglare coating always created on the Dell monitors
 
First, I have an iPad Pro with the nano-texture display, and I have clearly noticed that the quality of the white background depends on the lighting conditions. I think we shouldn’t draw conclusions about the nano-texture display in the Apple Store, as the lighting conditions there are not typical for everyday use. At home, the nano-texture display on my iPad Pro looks excellent.

Second, we should consider the PPI and the viewing distance. The Apple Studio Display has 218 PPI, whereas the iPad Pro has 264 PPI. The recommended viewing distance for the Studio Display is around 50 cm (about 1.6 feet). When you look at a nano-texture display very close, you may notice slightly softer text rendering. For me, that softer rendering looks gorgeous, almost like reading a newspaper. I love it. Nano-texture is not for pixel peepers.

Third, I think that the higher the PPI, the better the nano-texture rendering will be. Because of that, we should expect to see a difference between the Apple Studio Display and the iPad or MacBook Pro.
 
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I'm following this thread. I love my nano-texture 13" iPad Pro. I have zero concerns about text sharpness on it. I don't don't know if the same would scale to a display as large as the 27" XDR. I'll have to wait for more opinions. I do have three non-Nano original Studio Displays on my Mac Studio and fortunately don't have any significant issues with glare, at least not where they're currently situated. But strongly considering replacing one of them with the XDR model.
 
jr5x said:
...
Caveat: the one thing I didn't try was to use the tilt function on the XDR glossy, which is super easy to do, to try to mitigate reflections. I will go back and try that, and post again if there is any notable difference.
Click to expand...
I went to the Apple Store a second time. I couldn't angle the glossy Studio Display XDR to remove the bright-room reflections without tilting it awkwardly downwards. But while there's no question the glossy is sharper for text, the nano XDR is still good. It's better enough than my 4k Dell matte monitor that I'm going to buy the nano XDR.
 
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Had some free time today, so I went ahead and stopped by an Apple store to check out the displays in person. Staff were super accommodating of my odd requests to move displays around so I could see how they did at various angles (I rotated them a bunch to see how various lighting conditions would impact viewing). The display is gorgeous, and very clearly superior to the Pro XDR in almost every single way (outside of size of course).

I'm 99% set on getting the nano-texture. Side by side the standard display has sharper text, for sure, whites are crisper, and colors appear ever so slightly more vivid, but the NT display made the miniLED vignetting much less noticeable, and I very much appreciated just how good the NT was at making text readable when there was a lot of light directly reflecting towards the display face from open windows.

Blacks vs. the standard studio display are on an entirely different level... they are just about OLED level. One thing I noticed right away is that with those deeper blacks it almost looks like they make reflections MORE noticeable on the glossy XDR; there were a lot of angles where I annoyingly could not tilt it to get rid of my own reflection. On the flip side it looks like on those same largely black screens small, sharp light sources induce a little more blooming on the NT version, so there are obviously trade offs with either.

My office has a window behind, and to one side of my desk, and while I can cover it with some black out curtains I very much like to work in a well lit space, and with some sunlight/an open window.

I'm going to sleep on it a few nights and then put the order in for the NT.

Good luck to everyone else making their decisions!
 
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At home I don't have any issues with glare (don't see any reflections), even though I got a window next to me. So I will go for the standard. Cheaper and easier to clean..besides I got a great deal and saved 280€ 🙂
 
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I have a 1440p Dell, nothing flashy.

I do video calls ALL day everyday. So using continuity camera is a pain. My MBA is in clamshell mode.

ASD is my dream monitor although I know it’s nowhere near as good as the XDR. Just can’t warrant that expense.

I get bright sun in my room, so I think Nano would be best. Looking for more real life use cases if anyone can help judge how good these new ASD nano’s are.
 
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