OK, I dropped by the NYC flagship store tonight. The place was crowded as usual. I managed to look at three different displayed samples of the iPod Touch. These are all very early, first batch samples of course. All three samples looked exactly the same so Im going to talk as if I looked at just one.
Lets answer the most obvious question: is there a problem? The answer, judging from the three samples that I saw, is YES.
Before I go on to describe what I saw, I want to make sure anyone who wants to verify what Im able to say be able to do so.
When you go into an Apple store and look at the iPods, you most likely would find that the boat chase scene from the movie The Italian Job is loaded into just about all the displayed iPods on the premise. Play the boat chase video, at exactly the 15 second mark you would see, for just a fraction of a second (its an action sequence so the camera does not stay on any one character for long), the close up of a character dressed in black. You pause the video right there and look at the scene dead on. You would see what Im about to describe.
The first thing that I did when I picked up the Touch was to check on a grey scale chart that I made:
http://members.verizon.net/~vze2rc5x/GreyScale2.jpg
I just did not see any problem asides from the usual color getting dark, becoming washed out, changing hue, etc., when you tilt a LCD screen from side to side.
Next I played the Italian Job boat chase video. Since the characters were all dressed in black, I paused the video during a close up, and I immediately noticed the problem, most prominently at the 15 second mark.
The problem is that the screen, in combination with the video software, has problem displaying the deepest black. The best way I can think of to describe the visual phenomenon is this:
When you tilt a typical LCD screen and look at it from different angles, you would sooner or later arrive at an angle where the screen looks washed out with very low contrast and where the blacks look a few shades lighter, as if there is severe light leak over the entire face of the screen. Now use that as the starting point, when you slowly tilt the screen back to where you look at the screen dead on, all that low contrast washed out light black look should disappear.
Now imagine that they dont all disappear.
Imagine that you still get some of that light leak look at the deepest shades of black. That is what some people describe as inverted black because the black has too much light oozing out. And along with that the loss of contrast and the "washed out" look.
Finally I looked at the picture from this thread,
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/356695/
The picture looked normal to me. But since the picture itself looks sort of inverted already I had a tough time making a proper assessment. However, I did find that the viewing angle of the screen is rather narrow, meaning that the angle between looking at the screen dead on and the angle where you cannot distinguish the different shades of black on the picture is not quite as great as that of my iPhone. Note that I am not saying the viewing angle of the screen is rather narrow, but the viewing angle of the screen when used to view this very particular picture is rather narrow. This can indeed occur if there is a loss of contrast at the very darkest shades of black.
Afterward I looked at the Italian Job clip on the various iPhones on displayed and I did not see the same issue.
So this is what I found. One guy's objective observation.
Lets answer the most obvious question: is there a problem? The answer, judging from the three samples that I saw, is YES.
Before I go on to describe what I saw, I want to make sure anyone who wants to verify what Im able to say be able to do so.
When you go into an Apple store and look at the iPods, you most likely would find that the boat chase scene from the movie The Italian Job is loaded into just about all the displayed iPods on the premise. Play the boat chase video, at exactly the 15 second mark you would see, for just a fraction of a second (its an action sequence so the camera does not stay on any one character for long), the close up of a character dressed in black. You pause the video right there and look at the scene dead on. You would see what Im about to describe.
The first thing that I did when I picked up the Touch was to check on a grey scale chart that I made:
http://members.verizon.net/~vze2rc5x/GreyScale2.jpg
I just did not see any problem asides from the usual color getting dark, becoming washed out, changing hue, etc., when you tilt a LCD screen from side to side.
Next I played the Italian Job boat chase video. Since the characters were all dressed in black, I paused the video during a close up, and I immediately noticed the problem, most prominently at the 15 second mark.
The problem is that the screen, in combination with the video software, has problem displaying the deepest black. The best way I can think of to describe the visual phenomenon is this:
When you tilt a typical LCD screen and look at it from different angles, you would sooner or later arrive at an angle where the screen looks washed out with very low contrast and where the blacks look a few shades lighter, as if there is severe light leak over the entire face of the screen. Now use that as the starting point, when you slowly tilt the screen back to where you look at the screen dead on, all that low contrast washed out light black look should disappear.
Now imagine that they dont all disappear.
Imagine that you still get some of that light leak look at the deepest shades of black. That is what some people describe as inverted black because the black has too much light oozing out. And along with that the loss of contrast and the "washed out" look.
Finally I looked at the picture from this thread,
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/356695/
The picture looked normal to me. But since the picture itself looks sort of inverted already I had a tough time making a proper assessment. However, I did find that the viewing angle of the screen is rather narrow, meaning that the angle between looking at the screen dead on and the angle where you cannot distinguish the different shades of black on the picture is not quite as great as that of my iPhone. Note that I am not saying the viewing angle of the screen is rather narrow, but the viewing angle of the screen when used to view this very particular picture is rather narrow. This can indeed occur if there is a loss of contrast at the very darkest shades of black.
Afterward I looked at the Italian Job clip on the various iPhones on displayed and I did not see the same issue.
So this is what I found. One guy's objective observation.
